By all accounts, the presidential inauguration celebration of Gen. Andrew Jackson was a wild affair. When Gen. Jackson of Tennessee defeated John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts in the election of 1828, the modern Democratic Party was born. That election, which has been described as the first triumph of the common man in American politics, pitted the moneyed interests of the Northeast against the rural interests of farmers and laborers from the South and West. But somewhere in the last century and a half, the whiskey-slamming, farm-working, back-slapping Democrats of old have been replaced by green-tea-sippin', modern-art-buying, NPR-listening, progressive liberals. Massachusetts...