Americans were unhappy about many issues as 2012 began. In one area, though, contentment reigned. By a margin of 50 to 45 percent, a Gallup Poll reported, the public felt "satisfied" with the nation's policies on crime.
It was a well-founded sentiment. In 2010, Americans were less than a third as likely to be victimized by violent crime as they had been in 1994; the murder rate had declined by roughly half. Today we are approaching the low murder rates of the 1950s.
For the Republican Party, this is a triumph — and a disaster, as the 2012 election results proved.
It is a GOP triumph, because the enormous decline in crime over the past two decades coincided with the widespread adoption of such conservative ideas as "broken windows" policing and mandatory minimum sentences.
Whether such policies actually caused the crime decline is a separate, and much-debated, question. The important thing is that many people believe that they did.
Hence the 2012 disaster for the GOP. Beginning with Richard M. Nixon's "law and order" campaign for president in 1968, Republicans pretty much owned the issue. Fear of street crime converted many a white working-class Democrat into a Republican.
When Gallup asked voters in January 1995 to name their top priority, 78 percent responded "reducing crime." Given the murder rate at the time — 9.0 per 100,000 population — this was understandable. Sixty-six percent named "reforming the welfare system."
President Bill Clinton got the message. In 1996, he signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a main purpose of which was to limit death-row appeals. And, of course, he signed a historic welfare reform measure.
As the first Democratic president since Clinton, and the first African-American one ever, Barack Obama has done essentially nothing to reverse Clinton's crime and welfare policies. He signed a bill reducing the disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine possession under federal law, a modest reform that enjoyed Republican support. His administration suggested waivers of the work requirement for some welfare recipients, an issue Mitt Romney failed to gain traction on.
Indeed, Obama's assimilation of conservative doctrine extended even to the war on terrorism, an area with which 72 percent of the public pronounced itself satisfied in last January's Gallup Poll. Closing Guantanamo is out; drone strikes on al-Qaida suspects are in. After four years of the Obama war on terror, you could almost summarize the two parties' policies this way: Republicans waterboard, Democrats kill.
It's true, as many commentators have noted since Nov. 6, that liberals seem to have the upper hand in the culture wars. The 2012 electorate favored liberal positions on abortion, gay rights and the role of women in society.
We'll never know whether 2012 would have played out the same way if crime had staged a comeback during the recession, as many expected. Certainly in the past, crime was as important to the Republican brand as abortion and gay rights, if not more important.
Safer streets, though, have blunted what was once a sharp wedge issue, and, perhaps, freed voters to consider social and moral issues in a different light.
In the crime-ravaged '70s and '80s, Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callahan acted out Middle America's fantasy of a no-holds-barred war on crime.
By the time an elderly Eastwood appeared at the 2012 GOP convention, though, violent crime was a fading specter. And when he led the crowd in a chorus of "Go ahead, make my day," it was history repeating itself as farce.
He should have said "We need a new issue."
Charles Lane writes for the Washington Post.