America's Upbeat Mood

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"We know Americans are more confident about things, that we're headed in the right direction, more than any time since 1972. We know that exists." Thus, he explains, "what we're trying to say is 'Elect us because we can conquer the challenges ahead.' This is not a negative message. It's saying, 'Here's what we can do.' "

But with his natural reserve and sometimes phlegmatic manner, Mondale seems ill equipped to drive the inspirational message home Democratic Strategist Robert Strauss says that his man's empathy is not transmitted well on TV. "When you get past the show-biz part of it and talk about family values and American values," Strauss says, "Mondale doesn't have to take a back seat to anyone. But he doesn't handle the tear in the eye anywhere near as well. It's like everything else. It depends on how you do it." New York Governor Mario Cuomo showed in his keynote speech to the convention that the Democrats can convey an uplifting vision of America: his notion is nation as family, in contrast to every-man-for-himself G.O.P. individualism.

Not only has Mondale been unable to posit a specifically Democratic optimism, but the electorate, given its current mood, seems willing to forgive Reagan's past policy failures. "People forget what transpired during the first two years of his Administration," says Georgia Democratic Chairman Bert Lance. "People went through great economic trauma. But it's like an earache: when it's hurting, that's all you've got on your mind, getting rid of it, but when you get relief you start to think about other things."

"Patriotism," said Dr. Johnson just as the American Revolution was beginning, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." At about the same time, Dr. Pangloss was giving optimism a bad name too. "In this best of all possible worlds," said the Voltaire character, "all is for the best." But those impulses, patriotism and optimism, are prominent and connected in the American psyche. The idea of manifest destiny carried both to a bellicose extreme; Franklin Roosevelt, when he insisted that the nation had nothing to fear but fear itself, expressed the linkage beautifully. Patriotic trappings took on particular importance in a vast, heterogeneous nation with hardly any history to bind its citizens, and the pioneeer spirit is necessarily hopeful.

Outpourings of nationalist cheer have occurred before. Many historians, from Henry Adams to Arthur Schlesinger, have postulated that the U.S. undergoes regular historical cycles 20 to 30 years long, periods of great social combustion alternating with quiescence, change followed by consolidation. After the War of 1812 and its embargoes, the frontier opened up, the economy took off, American fractiousness subsided, and the extraordinary era of good feelings commenced, lasting for more than a decade. The 1920s coincided with a less constructive but perhaps giddier national mood that found expression in the election of two laissez-faire Presidents. On the eve of the 1920 election, H.L. Mencken came out in favor of Warren Harding, "an honest reactionary" who pledged a return to normalcy. Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, won in 1924 on a platform of tax and budget cutting. Coolidge's "chief feat