Why Liberals Make Great Golfers

For those of you not familiar with the game of golf it is more than just the game of ugly pants. When you head out to the course for a round of golf you need to bring a supply of clubs, balls and most important excuses. It is one thing to play bad, but you need to be able to explain them away. It's too hot/cold, windy/still, noisy/quiet. Play is too rushed/slow--my knee/shoulder/wrist/back/ankle injury is acting up--I just /painted my house/put a new deck/ battled a ninja when I left the house--new clubs/old clubs, and so on. Without excuses there is no game.

The Democratic Party is a lot like golfers, for years they have been making excuses about how the country is going to hell in a handbasket because they just missed getting in power. Well they are now in power, I wonder what excuses they will come up wiht now?

No Excuses' for Liberals By BRET STEPHENS "I make no excuses, I only wear them." Remember that? It was the pitch made by Donna Rice for a pair of tight-fitting stonewashed jeans some 20 years ago. Too bad the brand is long gone, since we're at yet another No Excuses moment in American politics. CorbisRFK

Specifically: a liberal No Excuses moment. With the election of Barack Obama and huge Democratic majorities in Congress, liberals must now practice something other than the politics of nostalgia and what-if.

This is a politics that has been in the making since at least 1968, though its real origins probably go back to 1944 and the first great liberal what-if: What if an ailing FDR had died nine months earlier, and been succeeded by the great progressive icon and polymath (and original moonbeam), then Vice President Henry Wallace?

In that case, perhaps, desegregation would have happened sooner, universal health care would be with us today, and the "century of fear" that Wallace predicted as the outcome of the Truman Doctrine would have been avoided by means of a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union.

From that moment on, the liberal what-ifs multiply in dizzying profusion. What if John F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in Dallas and lived to get the U.S. out of Vietnam before it fully got into it? What if Robert F. Kennedy had dodged the bullet in L.A. five years later? What if Jimmy Carter hadn't been so earnest, truthful and unlucky? What if Ronald Reagan hadn't proved such an adept political mythmaker? What if Donna Rice hadn't been pictured on Gary Hart's lap? What if Willie Horton hadn't been given a furlough? What if Bill Clinton hadn't squandered his political gifts with cheap trysts? What if Bush v. Gore had gone 5-4 the other way? What if 9/11 hadn't intervened to give the Bush administration its mandate for another bout of the politics of fear? What if John Kerry hadn't been sandbagged by Osama bin Laden's last-minute video intervention?

This liberal narrative of its own near-misses, bad luck and tragic interventions of fate is supplemented by a parallel liberal tale of unbridled conservative malevolence. Republicans may be the stupid party, but they've been fortunate in their evil political geniuses -- Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove -- all of whom have succeeded in bamboozling the public into voting against its own economic interests.

As for conservative electoral successes, these are explained almost entirely as a function of political dirty tricks (cf. "October Surprise") jingoism (Star Wars, Grenada et al.) and racism ("Southern strategy"). "The legacy of slavery, America's original sin, is the reason we're the only advanced economy that doesn't guarantee health care to our citizens," writes Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in "The Conscience of a Liberal." Who knew that a straight line connects the ideas of Jefferson Davis and Milton Friedman?

(Only lately has this history been turned on its head, so that liberal pundits now bemoan the passing of those great conservative ideas men who presumably are crying tears in heaven over the GOP's capture by the likes of Sarah Palin.)

In today's Opinion Journal

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

• Iraq 'Fails' Upward
• Russia Out of Rehab
• The Public Payroll Always Rises

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

• Global View: 'No Excuses' for Liberals
  – Bret Stephens
• Main Street: Mr. Obama, Give That Man a Medal – William McGurn

COMMENTARY

• Our Spendthrift States Don't Need a Bailout
  – Steve Malanga
• How to Help People Whose Home Values Are Underwater
  – Martin Feldstein
• Don't Negotiate With the Taliban
  – Ann Marlowe
• There's a Better Way to Prevent 'Bear Raids'
  – Robert C. Pozen and Yaneer Bar-Yam

The upshot of all this has been an amazing lack of introspection among the frequently wronged, but never wrong, liberal American hard core. Politically, this hasn't yielded such great results: The number of Americans who self-identify as liberals continues to fall, to 21% in 2008 from 22% in 2004, according to CNN. (The number of self-identified conservatives held steady at 34%.) Then again, without that hard core Mr. Obama's primary triumphs would never have been possible.

Now the long wait is over, and the liberal ship has come in. In Mr. Obama, liberals have a president who seems to have stepped out of the last episodes of the West Wing. He has the Congress in his left pocket, the news media in his right pocket (or is it the other way around?), and he floats on a tide of unprecedented international enthusiasm. The Republican Party has no obvious standard-bearer, as it did in Ronald Reagan after Gerald Ford's defeat in 1976. It could well spend the next four years, or eight, tearing itself to pieces.

Instead, the only things that stand in Mr. Obama's path are what Marxists like to call "objective factors": the financial crisis, the mess in Detroit, the disposing of Guantanamo detainees, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian hostility, Chinese assertiveness, maybe the disintegration of Pakistan.

Mr. Obama will get, and deserves, a period of political grace. Let's say a year. After that, it will become increasingly difficult to attribute whatever mistakes he makes to the legacy of his predecessor. American liberalism, such as it is, is finally being put to the test that fate has denied it these last many decades. Succeed or fail, this time there can be no excuses.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com