Doug Schoen, who served as an adviser to Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, wrote the following on April 16th:

As the underdog, Clinton’s positive message will not work unless she is able to undermine Obama’s candidacy…

…Hillary Clinton took an important step Monday toward winning the Democratic nomination by launching an ad targeting Barack Obama’s recent comments about working-class voters clinging to “guns or religion.”

Today, his message is different.

Stated simply, if the Democrats conclude that they have a mandate to implement their agenda without real consultation with the Republicans, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island suggested in an interview with the New York Times last weekend, the country will be headed for trouble.

Real trouble.

All of you that thought I was being unreasonable in my vociferous opposition to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, take note. We’ve seen recent articles just like Schoen’s from Mark Penn and Bob Kerrey, and we will continue to read them from former members of Camp Clinton. The analysis isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. As Richard Reeves notes this morning, 2008 represents the fifth-pivot election in our nation’s history.

[Professor Akhil Reed] Amar believes that a significant inertia was produced after each of those pivot elections; the ideas that made presidents of Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan produced issues that kept their constituencies alive and well for years, even decades, after their own administrations.

And now 2008. The country is engaged in two unpopular and probably unwinnable wars, the economy is in dangerous decline, and civil liberties have been aggressively repressed by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terror.

Therein, historically, lies the strength of the candidacy of Barack Obama. Despite his obvious political talents, it is hard to imagine a young, black two-year senator rising toward the presidency if his Republican opponent could have preached the winning doctrine of peace, prosperity and low taxation.

But there is no peace. There is no prosperity. And, whether through taxes or borrowing, the voters are going to foot the bill for the misjudgments and mistakes of the last eight years. The next question, in Amar’s terms, is how solid a coalition and how many Democratic terms might follow an Obama victory — or, to be consistent, a Bush-Reagan defeat.

Pivot elections occur when one party reaches the stage of epic failure. That’s where we are now. FDR didn’t consult with Hooverites and Lincoln didn’t consult with secessionist Democrats. It’s our time, now, and the Doug Schoens of the world can decide whether they want to live in the 1990’s or the present.