My late grandmother voted in every presidential election between 1920, when women were granted the vote, and 1976, missing only one, around the time her husband died (1928? Al Smith probably couldn't have been helped, anyway.) She always voted Democratic. The Democrats are my ancestral affiliation. I grew up worshiping at the shrine of JFK and RFK. I now disagree profoundly with the party on positions that its leadership and most vocal and influential constituencies have come to decree -- since 1972, anyway -- as litmus tests. It remains saddening to me to contemplate the party -- or what was left of the once-great party of FDR and Truman and John and Robert Kennedy and Scoop Jackson and Gov. Robert Casey -- may now be irrevocably lost for the next generation or more.

The Last Pro-Life Democrat? Robert Novak writes on the defeat of Robert Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania. Crisis Magazine reports on Casey’s Heirs: The Plight of the Pro-Life Democrat Visit Democrats for Life.

"We will not take care. We do not give a damn." -- Then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan to a Soviet delegate who had urged Moynihan to take care lest his rhetoric offend other nations, 1976. This space hasn't agreed with every position taken by Pat Moynihan, but has always respected and quite enjoyed the illustrious statesman from New York, whose loss to the Senate is rendered all the more grievous by the choice voters made on his successor. Read profiles on Moynihan in the Boston Globe and New York Times.