Ben Wattenberg died 10 years ago this month, but his legacy still looms large. Wattenberg, a pundit, demographer, and political operative, reshaped Washington and America through his farsighted thinking and writing. He constantly told his once beloved Democrats to stop drifting further and further to the left. They just as steadfastly refused to listen, with the ramifications still being felt today.
Wattenberg’s career was built on the mastery of data. Long before Google, he immersed himself in facts and figures, poring over government reports and academic journals to understand the latest statistics on policy matters. He knew crime rates, birth rates, and welfare trends in an age when there was no internet to provide an answer via a few keyboard strokes. He then used that data to explain, inform, predict, and entertain.
Wattenberg was born in the Bronx in 1933. After graduating from Hobart College and serving in the Air Force, he was working in publishing when he came up with the idea of describing America using data as the narrative device. The resulting book, This USA, written with former head of the Census Bureau Richard Scammon, led to Wattenberg’s appointment as a White House speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. Wattenberg then became an important player in Democratic politics, working for the presidential campaigns of Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, his personal favorite, in 1972 and 1976. He also wrote many important books, including The Real Majority, which used census data to show that, despite the media emphasis on civil strife of the 1960s, the real majority in America was “middle-class, middle-aged, middle-minded, unyoung, unpoor, and unblack.” According to Wattenberg, the median voter was not a protesting radical but a middle-aged housewife from Dayton, Ohio. This insight reportedly inspired President Richard Nixon’s notion of the “Silent Majority” and has remained an important element in American politics to this day. Wattenberg continued to influence presidents, earning the moniker of “Ronald Reagan’s favorite Democrat” in the 1980s and receiving a much-discussed, almost hourlong phone call from President Bill Clinton in reaction to Wattenberg’s 1996 book, Values Matter Most.
Numbers guided Wattenberg’s insights throughout his career. In The Birth Dearth, he argued that contrary to conventional wisdom, underpopulation rather than overpopulation threatened the prosperity and political influence of Western nations. This belief made him an unabashed supporter of legal immigration. In The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, Wattenberg marshaled statistics to make the case for optimism, a corrective that would still be helpful today. He also used his numbers to inform his long-standing syndicated newspaper column and his TV appearances — in particular his show Think Tank, in which 17 seasons of informed panel discussions benefited from the smart rule, “No journalists, no politicians, no kidding.”
Wattenberg called his approach to punditry “data journalism.” To master the numbers, he developed relationships with experts in shops all over town. Years before one could download Excel spreadsheets via websites, Wattenberg learned who had access to the key statistics and who could teach him so that he could explain them in ways the average reader could understand. His Rolodex — yes, he had one — was filled with names like Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, and Dallas Salisbury of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. These nonfamous but data-deep experts would walk him through their latest reports and help him identify vital trends and revealing developments.
Wattenberg’s immersion in the numbers strengthened his inveterate optimism, patriotism, and deep concerns with the trajectory of the Democratic Party. He used data to bring home America’s bright future — and consistently advised that the more optimistic presidential candidate would win elections. It remains good guidance for those seeking political office.
Wattenberg’s writing had real zest to it. He had a plainspoken way of expressing himself that led his friend and colleague Jeane Kirkpatrick to observe, “Ben writes in ‘American.’” To Wattenberg, this was an enormous compliment, as a love of America infused his writings. In 1991’s The First Universal Nation, he wrote, “For five hundred years, America has been the biggest story in the world, page one above the fold.” Wattenberg believed American economic, political, and cultural influence would continue, adding, “That story isn’t over.”
Wattenberg’s indefatigable belief in America contributed to his sense of foreboding about the Democrats’ leftward drift. He started his career in Washington as an LBJ speechwriter, recalling that Johnson would assign him campaign speeches because, Wattenberg wrote, Johnson knew “I really hated Republicans.” But his hatred of the Republicans softened during decades of laments that the party of his youth had left him behind. Wattenberg had clear and what he saw as obvious advice for the Democrats. In his mind, the Democratic Party should abolish racial quotas rather than establish them, stand up for free speech rather than stifle it, and promote employment rather than push welfare dependency. He praised the union movement for its anti-communist efforts but was frustrated when the movement was captured by government workers whose leadership dragged the Democratic Party even further to the left.
Wattenberg’s decades-old observations on the Democrats’ leftward drift read like they could be written today. In 1981, during Reagan’s first year in office, Wattenberg wrote that “the Democrats must face the music. They are not in trouble because they have no money, organization or unity. Exactly the opposite: They have no money, organization or unity because they are in trouble.” In 1984, shortly after Reagan crushed Walter Mondale to win reelection, Wattenberg was dismissive of the excuses liberal Democrats would use to explain their defeat: “Accidents, tricks, personal popularity. Everything but substance.”
Wattenberg did not just complain. He tried to offer the Democrats a way out: Democrats “will serve their country and their party better if they acknowledge that their real problem — which is the issues they have come to represent — than they will by trumpeting a phony one, that television did them in. A wrong diagnosis yields a wrong remedy.” He also warned Democrats to avoid what he called “the Reagan trap”: “Reagan said, several million times, that government is not the solution — it’s the problem. Many Democrats took the bait. If Reagan said government was so very bad, and Reagan was such a silly fellow, then Democrats must therefore say government is so very good. Trap snaps! Republicans win the White House.” This dynamic sure sounds a lot like how Democrats deal with our current president — and Wattenberg would have liked the alliterative sound of “the Trump trap.”
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Wattenberg’s imprint on our politics extends beyond his writings. Among his many skills, Wattenberg had a keen eye for talent. He mentored people who reflect his approach today, including the pundit Jonah Goldberg, polling expert Karlyn Bowman, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti, and former White House domestic policy adviser and author Karl Zinsmeister.
Wattenberg’s talent-spotting was not unlike his trend-spotting: He had an ability to look at a sea of ordinary people, or numbers, and spot the extraordinary within them. For all who knew him personally, he is still missed — and for frustrated Democrats, he remains a voice who foresaw why Democrats are out of power in Washington today.
Washington Examiner contributing writer Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. He was a research assistant to Ben Wattenberg from 1990 to 1992.