With "friends" like these ...

Thomas Edsall is the co-author with his wife Mary Edsall of Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991).  I always thought of that book as the "Yugoslavia analysis of American politics".  Basically, the thesis of the book relied on the 1988 Presidential campaign as a template and argued essentially that whichever of the two parties was perceived as the more anti-black would consistently win elections.

That's anti-black as in "racist".

It was one of those strange pitches that is presented as a liberal handwringing argument about the sad state of the American electorate.  But when I read it at the time, I thought it read more like a Republican polemic.  The contortions through which they had to put their analysis of recent American history to get to that conclusion were imaginative but glaringly deficient.  The seemed to have started and ended with the basic assumption that racial hostility was the only truly decisive issue in American politics.

Bill Clinton's 1992 victory threw a monkey-wrench into their argument.  I recall seeing an article by Tom Edsall in the New York Review of Books after Clinton's election trying desperately to salvage the argument.  I lost track of him the last few years.  He was a Washington Post reporter for a long time.  I remember that he dug up some of the white-supremacist background of Gingrich Republican Bob Barr.

Now, he's baa-aack.   He has a new book coming out in a couple of weeks called Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive For Permanent Power (2006).  And, if this report is any measure, it's going to be more of the same:  New Republic baselessly asserted Dem "problem": "[L]iberal elites are disproportionately powerful in primaries ... have nominated a succession of losers" Media Matters 08/15/06.

The author of the New Republic article in question being good old Tom Edsall.  It sure sounds like the same old Republican line recycled with a slight twist to make it a sort of I-want-to-help-the-Democrats-with-this-advice kind of sound.  The basic argument is that those wicked Liberals are a bunch of stuck-up elitists who justdon't understand the common folks the way economic royalists like the Bush dynasty or Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton do.  The same argument as we hear endlessly on FOX News and OxyContin radio, in other words.

Yeah, Deadeye Dick and Shrub and Rummy, real champions of the workers, housekeepers and soldiers, those guys are.  If the Democrats could be, you know, just exactly like the Republicans only maybe a little more militaristic and racist - like maybe the Dems should call dark-skinned people "Sambo" instead of "Macaca" - they would win every election!

At least that's what our "friends" like Tom Edsall seem to think.