Why are the Republicans not using their elected offices to advance policies that serve their own supporters?Fair question. But exactly what constituency does he have in mind?
The [Republicans'] main voting constituency is middle class (or higher) white families in the suburbs, particularly the husbands and fathers in that constituency.Let's check the data here. By George, he's right: the backbone of the Republican party is the wise and kindly paterfamilias who lunches with the Kiwanis on Wednesday and takes the nippers fishing on Saturday morning, as seen in Ozzie & Harriet or Life with Father (or at a pinch, The Simpsons, where kindly, familial Homer is able to maintain three kids and a non-working wife in a home with lawn and full garage). Oh, wait, this is the data for 1955, the year when all us lefties waited for Adlai Stevenson to cream Dwight Eisenhower in his campaign for a second term.
But it didn't happen: perhaps you noticed. Somehow Samwick, who is no dummy, has neglected to evaluate the experience of the last 50 years during which the termites have chewed the fiber out of the life he describes. I suspect a more precise definition might might include those who wish they were kindly paterfamiliae but haven't had a really steady job with good pay since sometime in the second Reagan administration. Moreover insofar as there are still people like the ones Samwick described, I suspect that a good many of them are working for the government, or a university, or perhaps a Washington think tank. And they, of course, are the tranche of white males most likely to vote Democratic in any event.
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