David Sirota: When The Old Tricks Stop Working

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



When The Old Tricks Stop Working
Submitted by David Sirota on December 30, 2007 - 2:44am.



This NY Times story is very telling about just how tied to Big Money the Republican Party Establishment really is - and how worried that Establishment is about its old tricks being exposed for the fraud they really are:

"Mr. Huckabee has struck a distinctly populist chord when it comes to economics. He has criticized executive pay, sympathized with labor unions, denounced 'plutocracy,' and mocked the antitax group the Club for Growth as 'the Club for Greed'...

'I see Huckabee as more of a Prairie populist than what I would consider a traditional conservative,' said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania...He acknowledged that in some ways Mr. Huckabee’s combination of social conservatism and sympathy for the working class also touched a fault line that ran further through the Republican Party, including in his home state of Pennsylvania. 'He would do very, very well in southwestern Pennsylvania, Reagan Democrat country,' where many socially conservative working-class voters 'have a heart for the poor and, unfortunately, think of government as the answer,' Mr. Santorum said.

So basically, Republican Party leaders are acknowledging that they have been relying on tricking working class voters into not voting on economic issues. These leaders are chafing under the realization that Huckabee is implicitly undermining their old tricks in that he is gaining ground by applying his religious/altruistic rhetoric not just to social issues, but to economic issues as well.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the panic that has broken out in Republican Washington is the comment from Grover Norquist buried at the end of the article:

"'My fantasy out of this race is that Huckabee will create another Christian Coalition,' said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, recalling the group that grew out of Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign and became a political force for much of the next decade. 'If you could have the equivalent of the Christian Coalition, it would be a bulwark for the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.'"

That is it, right there. Norquist is saying his "fantasy" is for Huckabee to lose the race and then obediently assume the role of trickster, helping create a religious-themed front group whose goal is to keep working class social conservatives ignoring their more populist economic agenda and instead dutifully voting for the so-called "Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party" - a euphemism for the economic royalists on the Republican Party cocktail circuit in Washington. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/when_old_tricks_stop_working?tx=3

[Richard Steele]

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