Reply #3: I loved the salon piece! - my favorite paragraphs are below [View All]

[papau]

"I couldn't stand to support this dynasty of deceit"
Kevin Phillips talks about his big Bush book, all the rumors surrounding George W. (some of them true), and how the Democrats can stop sabotaging themselves.
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by Joan Walsh
Salon.com


There's some truth to that, because he carried about 84 percent of the fundamentalist/evangelical folks. That was extraordinary. But you know, you've also got a generation gap in Republican politics. Most of the people involved in the Nixon or early Reagan years, they're older than I am, they're in their 60s and 70s, and this crowd is not particularly high on the Bushes. But you've got most of Congress on the Republican side that's in their 40s and 50s, and they've come up in a Bush-friendly era. They're used to the Bushes. I went off the reservation at the time of the first Bush. But an awful lot of Republicans my age and older -- in the Northeast, in the Pacific Northwest, in the Great Lakes -- they're very unhappy ...

I don't think that the Democrats could have done anything, really. But what happened was that they misfired on three crucial issues: They misfired on the way they handled the war issue, they misfired on socioeconomic issues, they misfired on the cultural issues. You can't misfire on all three fronts. But you know, right now, the conservatives are coming close to misfiring in the same way. They're botching the economy, they're botching Iraq, they may have botched 9/11, and they've got the religious right running loose, so they're going to botch culture. And when you get to that point, the motion of your elites -- the forward motion of your interest groups inside the Republican Party -- gets very hard to turn around.

Kerry's bought himself some respect, Edwards likewise. You could say, hey, there's the ticket. Edwards could be good on the domestic, populist side of things and Kerry on the military side. But it's important for them that they'll be inoculated from cockiness by Clark coming in. Plus, I have no use for Lieberman, but he'll be a factor in New Hampshire.
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Read this at: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2004/01/27/phillips_qa/index.html

"the voter-roll cleansing story " at: http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/