Reflecting on the election that returned President Bush to power and strengthened Republican control of both houses of Congress, we have found ourselves wishing that Robert Bartley could have been here to share this season. He was the long-time editor of the Wall Street Journal who, at a deeper level than most men of his time, foresaw the bitterness that would overtake the election that went into high gear in the months after he died, which was a year ago today.

Bartley sensed – and wrote about, in two columns issued in September 2003 – that the anger of the Democrats “must have deeper, subconscious roots.” He speculated that the party’s “most ardent adherents are angry because they feel they’ve lost their birthright.” By which he meant that “base Democrats think of themselves as the best people: the most intelligent and informed, the most public spirited, the most morally pure.”

Bartley noted that the Democrats’ self-image had become “more than a little shopworn over the years” and that George Bush’s conservative Republicans were threatening to strip it away. He felt that the anger among Democrats was “inevitable,” which was a typically prescient observation for the great editor, coming as it did a half a year before the melt-down of Governor Dean and the emergence of Senator Kerry’s army.

In a column published in the Wall Street Journal on September 22, 2003, Bartley wrote: “…the Democratic Party has descended into a collection of interest groups not bound together by any ideals. So we see scions of inherited wealth berating the ‘rich,’ meaning those successful at earning their own money. We see supposed champions of civil rights standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent vouchers that might give a break to black children in the District of Columbia.

“We see a highly qualified potential judge filibustered into withdrawal precisely because he’s Hispanic, and therefore a threat in ethnic politics. We see that once a martyred president urged us to ‘share any burden,’ his brother now belittles the war that toppled Saddam Hussein throwing around reckless and irresponsible charges of ‘bribing’ foreign leaders – his own personal past, by the way, having produced remarkably little reticence.”

Months before Senator Kerry emerged as the likely candidate, Bartley wrote: “Yes, above all the war; the self-identity of the Democratic base is still wrapped up in Vietnam. In fact Vietnam started as a liberal, Democratic war, so turning against it had to be justified by assertions of a higher morality, especially among those with student deferments from the draft. The notion that military force was immoral, even that American power was immoral, was deeply imbedded in the psyche of Democratic activists everywhere.

“Now comes George Bush asserting that American power will be used preemptively to avert terrorist attacks on America, to establish American values as universal values. This so profoundly challenges the activists’ self-image that they can only lash out in anger. Not many of them actively hope the U.S. fails in Iraq, of course, but they are in a constant state of denial that it might succeed.

“What’s more, this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas.”

It was typical of Bartley that he ended his column, one of the last things he wrote, on a note of humility, predicting, “Current Democratic anger will likely in the fullness of time prove to be the rantings of an establishment in the process of being displaced. Come to think of it, they sound like nothing so much as the onetime ire of staid Republicans at Franklin D. Roosevelt as ‘a traitor to his class.'” No doubt Bob Bartley would have savored the endorsement of his ideas delivered by voters in November, but also he would have cheerfully tried to teach the Democrats that things can be learned in the wilderness in which he himself found wisdom.