Sam Tanenhaus believes the election of President Barack Obama was facilitated by a decline in the vitality of American conservatism. He offers a pithy overview of the American conservative movement over the past 50 years in his book “The Death of Conservatism.”

Tanenhaus fears that “Classical conservatives have all either deserted the Right or been evicted from it.” What is the matter here? He explains: “Some see this as a triumph. The Right has been proved wrong, and that can only be good. But America needs a serious, rigorous opposition. Skeptics and outsiders perform a vital function in a democracy. It is they who ask the most uncomfortable questions, who gaze most critically at the existing arrangements of our politics and culture.”

Even so, the author sees this as a moment of great opportunity for revitalizing the conservative movement because “the nation has entered a conservative phase, perhaps the most conservative since the Eisenhower years.” So how does he think the conservative movement got off track?

Tanenhaus asserts that “it was disappointment with (Ronald) Reagan and anger at the presumed betrayals of his successor, George H. W. Bush — chosen by Reagan himself — that fed the bitterness of the 1990s, when conservatism entered its most decadent phase.”

How the mighty have fallen. The once powerful congressman Tom DeLay is appearing in televised dance contests. The author opines that DeLay “tried to delegitimize a popular president, Bill Clinton, and assembled a shadow government of lobbyists” — these actions typified the sort of rot that had set into the conservative movement.

Conservatives once accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of creating a “socialist” government. The author points out that “conservative opponents of Barack Obama have applied the epithet ‘socialism’ to his ambitious plans to exert greater federal control over health care and energy policy, even though the Bush administration, the most conservative in modern history, itself orchestrated a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.”

This “socialist” slur is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower was the moderate who wrested the Republican presidential nomination away from the conservative candidate, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft. According to the book, one disgruntled Taft supporter “grimly declared, ‘This means eight more years of socialism’.” He was referring to Eisenhower.

“The Death of Conservatism” makes some bold statements. In regard to Richard Nixon: “No modern president surpassed him in sheer ability — intellectual or political.”

And when looking at our current charged political atmosphere, the author states: “attempts to depict Barack Obama as a radical or socialist dissolve under the most rudimentary examination of the facts.”