My old Atlantic Council colleague Jim Townsend, who went on to spend all eight years of the Obama administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy, reminds us of a better political age:
I was 14 when Reagan beat Carter, my preferred outcome in the first election I cared about, and barely 15 when Mondale dutifully and graciously carried out his duties. If I saw it at the time, I would surely not have appreciated the profound decency of the man, much less what it said about our democracy.
We’re in many important ways a better, more decent society than we were four decades ago. But, sadly, in some ways less so.
