Hi, I'm a lurker and a PhD student in History at ___.... You should check out [Eric Foner]'s "Who owns history?" (Hill and Wang, I think). There's an essay about Hofstadter in there that analyzes why it's unfair to lump him with the other major consensus historians like Commager, Nevins, etc. Unlike those guys, Hofstadter's stuff isn't celebratory at all.
A lot of what's been said on the list about him is pretty inaccurate, and I can go into more detail if you want (It's 3 am). American Political Tradition still gets assigned a LOT, and many of the pieces in there are classics and starting points for a lot of conversation. (I think he was one of the first historians to pick up on the anti-capitalist thrust of pro-slavery ideology, which later people like Genovese, of course, framed entire books around.)
Also, political history is not dead at all, though it was nowhere near as dominant as it used to be. Sean Wilentz's new book is in some ways an implicit attack against the post-60s shift to social and cultural history. See Gordon Wood's review of the book in the NYTimes, which discusses this aspect of it. Michael Katz does a lot of public policy history, which is making a big comeback now (see Jennifer Klein's excellent book "For All These Rights," which is about the growth of the strange private-public combo welfare state in the US and Colin Gordon's recent "Dead on Arrival," which identifies the myriad of reasons why we have no national health insurance in this country -- and why we probably aren't gonna any time soon....)
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You might also be interested in a recent anthology edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, which studies elites, and like the Wilentz volume, has an implicit historiographical argument -- namely, too much social and cultural history, not enough on the "bad guys" with economic and political power.
Fraser and Gerstle also have an interesting essay in the Chroncile of Higher Education in which they criticized some of the post-60s historiographic trends and urged more historians to study elites:
<http://lists.paleopsych.org/pipermail/paleopsych/2005-March/002235.html>
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I always say these days to the cultural historians that "Great Man History" need no longer reflect well on the Great Men.
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Sorry to write so much -- the Hofstadter bashing by some of the younger historians drives me up the wall, since I think there is way too much social, cultural, "out group" history these days, not enough on elites, policy, the law. A lot of that literature also tries so hard to be sub-altern studies that it romanticizes its subjects on very thin evidence, which I find obnoxious.