Camouflage Conservatives

[pinto]

There are a trio of Book Reviews (Middlemarch, Eyal Press, The Nation, 01/02/06) in the latest issue of The Nation that take a look at the Republican's political adroitness at saying one thing and doing another.

IMHO, the first piece spears the clear disconnect between the Republican spin and their actual votes in the House and the Senate. And, more to the point, politically, the difference in their national spin and the line they give the folks back home - the ones who voted for an (R) House and Senate. It was their winning gambit, the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.

The other two reviews spare neither party in their assessment of perception as politics.

<snip>

Eyall Press, reviewing Hacker and Pierson's "Off Center":

In their new book, Off Center, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that the answer, at least to the last of these questions

(Why is it all too easy to imagine the GOP riding out its recent troubles and holding on to power in the midterm elestions nest year?)...

rests in the emergence of a Republican political machine that has managed to undermine and subvert the mechanisms of accountability in our democracy.

<snip>

Again and again in recent years, Hacker and Pierson show, the GOP has enacted policies - assaults on workplace health and safety regulations; tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich; the rollback of environmental laws - whose thrust is unabashedly radical. Despite commanding razor-thin majorities, Republicans have pursued an agenda that caters to their increasingly right-wing base without paying a political price. They have gotten away with this not because America has grown rabidly Conservative - in fact, as Hacker and Pierson demonstrate through polling data, a majority of citizens oppose the GOP's agenda on everything from the environment to Social Security to the minimum wage - but because the bonds between ordinary voters and elected officials have grown increasingly frayed.

<much more>

http://www.thenation.com


The piece is a very good read.

[tx_dem41]

1. Thanks for posting this, pinto.

I appreciate it.

[pinto]

2. ...

:dem: