They came by the hundreds last week, creating limo-lock on Georgetown's elegant N Street. They gossiped under the Renoir and the Van Gogh in Pamela Harriman's salon. They sipped their Chablis in tribute to one of this age's truly great Democrats, Clark Clifford, and his new book, Counsel to the President, the story of a half-century of political grandeur. But one prominent Democrat, looking beyond the evening's scheduled gaiety, said, "We are witnessing the greatest eclipse of a political party in this country in our history."
How did it happen that these old Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter warriors, who rose out of anger and...