Building Red America

[question everything]

Is a book by Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall, and he singled out a memo written six years ago by Matthew Dowd, the chief pollster and strategist for Bush. In it, he argued that Republicans would do much better if they focused their efforts on mobilizing their base rather than trying to persuade fence-sitters to come their way. Swing voters, Dowd claimed, weren't worth the effort.

"Sex, race, power, religion, and the interests of the business class have been harnessed in recent decades by the Republican Party to pull together and steer American politics to the right."

This strategy obviously worked, and I wonder whether this is the way we need to go, realizing how much this will farther polarize us, how, even if we take control of the House, difficult it will be to accomplish anything.

I've always supported a centrist policy, more or less, without sacrificing our principles, the way Clinton did with the "Welfare Reform" of 1996.

I've always held that we are better than the freepers that manipulated these issues of sex and race and ignoring the ones that are really important. But sometimes I feel like a sucker.