... By most reckonings, the Grand Old Party has been in the throes of a yearlong hangover. Since routing the Democrats in November 2004 — tightening their hold on both houses of Congress and re-electing the president without benefit of Supreme Court intervention — Republicans have stumbled badly, rocked by criminal indictments, corruption scandals, accusations of cronyism, domestic-spying revelations, and widespread disapproval of their handling of Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, already facing trial on conspiracy and money-laundering charges, resigned this month as House majority leader after his ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff made headlines. Even Karl Rove, George W. Bush's closest adviser, operates in the shadow of the ongoing CIA-leak investigation.
All of which, by most reckonings, is good news not just for Democrats, but for everyone who fears the GOP bandwagon is taking the country in the wrong direction. One prominent Berkeley political scientist, however, warns that outbreaks of schadenfreude are premature. Republicans, says Paul Pierson, "have defied the normal laws of political gravity in the United States," and it's far from clear that physics will kick in anytime soon.
In fact, Pierson contends, the leadership of the Republican Party is more entrenched, more extreme, and less accountable to the electorate than ever before. "America's great democratic experiment is under assault," he argues in a new book, writing that Republican-brand democracy bears less resemblance to a competitive marketplace than "the sort of market that gave us the Enron scandal, in which corporate bigwigs with privileged information got rich at the expense of ordinary shareholders, workers, and consumers" ...
We're not trying to make a prediction about who's going to win the <2006> elections," says Pierson, a lanky, youthful Oregon native who arrived at Berkeley in 2004 from Harvard, where he had taught government and political economy since earning his Ph.D. from Yale in 1989. "What you can say, and what we try to say, is that Republicans have protected themselves against big storms by developing this system we call 'backlash insurance'" — defined in Off Center as "an assortment of strategies and procedures that party leaders use to keep quavering moderates in line and shield party loyalists against political retaliation by moderate voters" ...
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2006/01/26_Pierson.shtml
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