Ben Wattenberg, Democrat – A Liberal Student of America who Didn’t Evolve as his Party Did.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ben-wattenberg-democrat-1435614300
Inside the career of Ben Wattenberg, who died Sunday at age 81, you could write a history of the modern Democratic Party. To a great extent Wattenberg wrote it himself.
Wattenberg was a Bronx-born Jew whose early jobs in politics included writing speeches and providing advice to the quintessential Southern Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson. He then worked on the 1970 Senate race of the man whose name was a synonym for Democratic liberals, Hubert Humphrey.
In the 1970s, Wattenberg worked tirelessly on behalf of the presidential ambitions of his friend, Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, whose own name is associated with what have come to be known as “national security Democrats.”
In the years that followed, Democratic pundits would say Wattenberg was a Democrat with “conservative leanings,” and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Wattenberg was too pro-defense, too pro-market for the party’s evolving tastes. As the party’s establishment drifted leftward, Ben Wattenberg remained fixed across a remarkable career as a small “d” democrat.
Wattenberg not only had an abiding belief in the ability to discover a nation’s ideas about itself from its elections but that the trajectory of that process pointed inevitably upward. Or at least this was true in Wattenberg’s great love—the United States.
In 1970 Wattenberg wrote, with Richard Scammon, what remains his most famous book, “The Real Majority,” a data-filled analysis of the group that sits at the center of the 2016 presidential election—the American middle class.
Wattenberg believed middle-class voters were “centrist,” and that political success turned on aligning with the middle class’s centrist values. He revered middle-class values and spent a career describing and even protecting them, notably in the book and PBS series, “Values Matter Most.”
While Wattenberg, true to his liberal Democratic roots, believed that government should be an engine of social good, he argued relentlessly on behalf of the free market and the importance of maintaining a robust U.S. national-security capability, both to defend open markets and promote American values.
He was an ardent supporter of the new wave of immigration into the U.S., calling it “one big reason America is, and will be, the omni-power.” Ben Wattenberg, who often wrote for these pages, was an American democratic optimist. There are never enough of them, and of those, he was among the best.
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