BEN WATTENBERG, RIP: The veteran author, LBJ speechwriter, host of Think Tank for PBS and American Enterprise Institute scholar was 81. As Jonah Goldberg (who cut his teeth as Wattenberg’s producer and research assistant in the 1990s writes, “Ben was hard to classify intellectually or ideologically:”

Though it was not always as difficult as it is today because the tribe he represented — variously described as Scoop Jackson Democrat, Democratic neoconservative, Reagan Democrat, New Democrat, democratic triumphalist etc — no longer much exists. Obviously, the key word there is “Democrat.” But while his devotion to the partisan label with a capital-D waned over the years (without ever vanishing), his devotion to democracy itself was undying and infectious.

At the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last notes that in the early 1970s, Wattenberg was one of the few to push back against the Malthusian doomsday rantings of Paul Ehrlich and others. “It takes an uncommon mind to challenge the assumptions of the age in search of the truth. But the fortitude it takes to stand amidst the mob insisting on the truth once you have found it is ever more rare. What a man.”

At Commentary, John Podhoretz adds that Wattenberg “was one of the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s who committed himself to fighting those who wanted to divert his party into anti-American tributaries through the founding of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group that had little success but did prove prophetic in insisting that only a move to the center, a la Bill Clinton, would save the party from itself. His most notable later book, Values Matter Most, became a hot topic of discussion when Clinton called Wattenberg and discussed it and his own failings in 1995.”

Shortly before his 2008 career retrospective Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism was published, I interviewed Wattenberg for an early segment of PJM’s old Sirius-XM show to discuss Fighting Words. The audio from that interview is still online here.