When it comes to the last days of, well, anything, the big old machines of media begin churning up reams of paper in an attempt to come to grips – or at least present the illusion of thinking about – what is about to happen. And these days, the big idea filling all those papers is The New Liberal Era In America, alternately phrased as The Conservative Crackup, The End of the Reagan Era, The Return of Big Government, ad nauseum.

Newsweek, never contrarian, has offered up not one but two visions of the direction an (apparently) impending Obama Presidency will go, and the consensus is “leftward, except when it doesn’t.” That this generally gibes with the tone of their historical analysis makes it no more interesting or compelling. Indeed, it mostly serves to illustrate the dangers of forecasting from the eye of the storm, of conflating correlation and causation, of overgeneralization, and of the general tendency to Wrap It All Up. In moving forward, the less sexy contention, that we’re not really sure where we are at this moment, has not been made.

Dueling their way across the top ten political stories on the Newsweek website are Jon Meachem’s
 “We’re a Conservative Country” and Jonathan Alter’s
 “The Country Is Heading Leftward” – neither of which appreciably differentiate themselves from the other. They both agree that the country has had, in recent years, a decided rightward tilt. Both agree that Obama is personally more liberal than, say, Ronald Reagan and that the country is less happy with Republicans than they were in, say, 1984. Neither of these contentions are particularly groundbreaking, given that they seem to appear in nearly every public poll over the past couple of years.

Forecasting the future, then, they seem to say (nearly in unison) that Obama will be able to spend some money and probably raise some taxes without being called a socialist. Of course, they note that Reagan did basically the same thing. So all things moving in Obama’s direction, he’ll be able to be at least as “liberal” as Ronald Reagan, unless people get angry at him for it, in which case he’ll only last for one term.

Whether or not an Obama Administration would be capable of being, to use Colin Powell’s recent phrase, “transformative” is less a matter of individual policy and more a matter of strategy. Whether George Bush’s tax rates are allowed to expire or not is one thing, but whether Obama continues the kind of White House communications strategy (birthed during the Clinton years) of careful media management substituting for reasoned debate on policy is probably going to determine if the next four (or eight) years have a different tone than the last sixteen. Obama’s co-sponsorship of a bill to establish an online, searchable, public database of lobbyists is a (tiny) display of the kind of action toward transparency that would be necessary. Those things are, of course, much harder in the White House.

So while the articles may tend toward a great summary of an era, there’s little evidence to suggest that the battles will look, sound, or be different. The outcome might be slightly different than the past 30 years, but that’s hardly a fundamental shift. If one of those is coming, we won’t know it until a while after the fact. The predictions of a new era will keep coming. Conservatives will argue for the center-right nation, liberals for the leftward movement. We won’t know until the current round of crises is past, and not for a long time afterwards. And by that point, we’ll probably be on the cusp of a New Revolution of some kind or another. Won’t that be fun.