Surge behind: an ill-timed but illuminating romp through the golden age of grassroots Democratic enthusiasm--a whole twenty-four months ago.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter
• Position: Book review

Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics

by Ari Berman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 302 pp

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These days it is hard to conjure up the marzipan dreams and sugarplum fantasies that wafted through the liberal firmament (and the publishing world) in the weeks following Barack Obama's election. Middle-aged adults not prone to gush were describing the election night rally in Grant Park as the best night of their lives--a statement that was, of course, a depressing indictment of their romantic history. Obama operatives like David Plouffe and David Axelrod were hailed as the greatest strategists since Sun Tzu dined alone. And a president elect who had been in the Illinois state senate just four years earlier was routinely being compared to Abraham Lincoln (remember the Team of Rivals obsession?).

Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, Ari Berman's paean to the Democratic Party's grassroots activists, reads as if it were commissioned or at least shaped during this heady hope-y change-y period of liberal wish fulfillment. But now--on the eve of another long winter of Democratic discontent, the just-published book inspires a sense of temporal displacement. It seems off-key and out-of-step with what we know, akin to a Dick Cheney biography that ends with him serving as a triumphant secretary of defense during the Gulf War.

Berman, a youthful writer for the Nation, knows his politics, and it shows. He gets extra credit from me, an aging and creaky boy on the bus, for somehow gleaning that Richard Nixon in 1960 ran the last fifty-state presidential campaign. His account of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, built around interviews with the right people, is smart and nuanced. Berman has also admirably gotten out of Washington and therefore understands--in a way that most TV talking heads do not--how Obama managed, for example, to carry Indiana, a state that last went Democratic for president in the 1964 LBJ landslide. (The Hoosier explanation: Obama won the state by putting organizers into suburban Republican bastions like Hamilton County and thereby picking up more than 20,000 votes simply by sharply cutting the GOP's 2004 margin.)

But--and this is the problem with maladroit political timing--Herding Donkeys has been corralled by fate. At a time when the troubadours and troublemakers of the Tea Party movement are transforming the Republican...