There seemed to be no recognition that the majority party runs the Congress or that by voting for liberal Republicans like Cohen and Snowe, Maine voters are voting for the polices of Southern conservatives.

This is one of those things that probably needs to change.  While the majority is definitely important, majoritarianism is not synonymous with democracy.  We could change the way Congress works in order to ensure democratic inclusivity within Congressional processes.  

It is another way of conceiving what is wrong with the Senate:  The Senate's representation is countermajoritarian, but it's operational processes are entirely majoritarian.  Thus, you get states with small populations controlling the body.  If the Senate rules were changed in order to include the minority party in some ways, it would cease to be a source of problems in our government.

To Mr. Hacker and Mr. Pierson:

I question part of your thesis--or at least what I perceive to be part of it:  Accepting that the Republican Party is more centralized and unified than any other party in our history, how does that implicate structural problems within our Constitution and statutes?  That doesn't seem particularly interesting or dispositive to me.  

Might we just require all political parties to be democratically organized?

The loss of Congress would mean that the ability to control the agenda and add the earmarks that keep the campaign cash flowing would be lessened.  An end to the conference committees that rewrite bills and give the body 1 day to vote on complex bills.  Most of all, the investigation power would pass to the Dems.   That would be crucial, because it would provide a way to shed light on the White House.  Conversely, look at the mischief the GOP Congress made for Clinton.  I think the focus on Bush is press habit and laziness, plus it gives a focus to the fight.

This makes it imperative to take at least one House of Congress next year.  The existence of all these vote rigging and suppressing, gerrymandering, campaign funding extortion schemes etc shows that the GOP knows in its core that it can not win with a level playing field.  Everyone who cares about the continuance of our democracy has to get involved in the fight to retake Congress.

fixation on bush and the wh is merely fixation on the tip of the iceberg, understandable because of its visibility... it took nearly 30 years for that tip to become visible and, now that it is, one can get some idea of the sizeable mass below the water...

Fixation on Bush goes much deeper than that.  Even Nixon wasn't hated like Bush is hated.  It started with the 2000 election, but then the Iraq War, which a major segment of this party simply cannot let go of for love, money, or votes, sealed the deal.  And on top of that, Bush, with his smarmy smirk, his stupidity, his pandering to the right wing, his lying, his unsuitability for the job of president, is very easy to hate.  All that being said, I suspect by 2008 the left will have moved beyond Bush hatred.  Besides, there's Hillary to hate, and the same people who wallow in Bush hatred hate Hillary nearly as much.      

Didn't the Democratic rank and file radicalize long before the Republican leadership?  If one thinks about the Democratic Party circa 1968 there were separate but related fights within the Party.

The first was between integrated groups, the pro-civil rights Democrats, and the traditional all White Southern Democrats.  Some folled George Wallace into independent opposition and many ultimately became Republicans.

The other fight was between reformers associated with Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and other anti-war Democrats and urban Democratic machines represented by Mayor Daily of Chicago but which were mirrored in many cities across the country.  These machines were most white but unlike the Southerns ethnic and Catholic.  The future Reagan Democrats.

This made the Democratic Party dependent on organized labor, ironically a supporter of the War in Vietnam, and increasing on feminist groups, Black groups, Gay groups and the like.  Lee Attwater and his successor Karl Rove have been great in exploiting this cultural divide and the Demorcatic Party's dependence on group leaders that may be even more radical than them memberships.

It is a fact that Hillary is behind the curve on Iraq, that she has chosen a politically conservative and popular position re Iraq, which is eroding very rapidly. For that I am very disappointed in her.    

A)What makes her position on Iraq "conservative"?

B) The thing about "politically popular" annoys me.  The plain implication is that she took her position for political reasons, rather than policy reasons.  I'm not a politician, but I agree with her.  Did I take my position because it's "politically popular"?  

9-11 gave Bush and the Republicans a blank check to do what they wanted. Until 9-11 happened, Bush was well on his way to becoming a lame duck in his first term. He would have been a 1 term President like his father.

But, what did Bush really want? It turns out he wanted to invade Iraq and that has sunk everything else. Bush could have succeeded in destroying social security, if he hadn't invaded Iraq. He could have made all the tax cuts permanent, but Iraq is getting in the way, etc. The only permanent impact he's going to have is on the Supreme Court, and even that is becoming in jeopardy now as he sinks ever further in the polls.

Frankly, Bush had two chances to become another Dwight Eisenhower, a centrist Republican who was well beloved by the American people (except people like me who are proud to have been part of the 9% who still hated Bush right after 9-11) and who would now be a 60%-70%+ President, cementing an anti-New Deal coalition that could dominate politics in this country for another generation. But he had another agenda.

The first chance was blown when he reneged on his promise to be a "uniter not a divider", immediately ramming through tax cuts for the rich that were NOT being demanded by the public and signalled that he intended to be an intensely partisan Republican president, not reaching out to moderates.

The second was after 9-11 when the nation turned to him, and he immediately started planning to invade Iraq.

The Presidency dominates politics in this country, not because Congress isn't important, but because the President leads the nation. The President controls the political agenda, he controls the immense federal bureaucracy, he controls foreign policy, he controls the treasury and has a big impact on the economy.

As Congress proved during the Gingrich-Clinton wars of the 90's is that Congress can obstruct, but it cannot lead the country against the President, no matter how focused and united the majority.

When you think about how popular Bush could have become and how permanently irrelevant the Whigs  er, Democrats could have become had Bush chosen another course, it's easy to see that things could have been a LOT worse! All the Republican dreams of permanent dominance are coming unglued and Iraq is the 600 ton albatross around all their necks, dragging them into the abyss.

H/P's book is a brilliant, synthetic account of the GOP's radical right turn, and our DC book group--of which the estimable Henry Farrell is a member--roundly praised it in our last session.  Yet I think the author's have become too tied to a disciplinary bias toward structural/institutional analysis and against what they glibly label "the dramatic appeal...only a single individual can provide"

Off Center paradoxically underscores the point its authors seem determine to deny in the posting above, i.e. "....for domestic politics, it is control of Congress that matters most."  All of the book examples, whether legislative, administrative, or methodological are utterly dependent upon the implacable exercise of Bush's executive power. While P/C make the unexceptional point that GOP radicalism predates the Bush era, the positive power exercised by GOP radicalism, i.e. not merely the ability to stop Democratic initiatives, does not.

With the very same Delay led Congress, massive tax cuts not even introduced, and if somehow passed, despite a democratic president's opposition, they are vetoed.  The administrative changes, including the gutting of ergonomic standards noted by P/C, were, again, aided and abetted by Bush, and signed into law by him--any congressional initiative on this issue would again have been quashed by even a Lieberman like Democratic president. Similarly,  the executive branch planned the neutering, indeed the corruption of agencies like OSHA and EPA.  And the conceptually ingenious "backlash insurance" has no deep pocketed company standing behind it with payoffs, unless there is a president happily encouraging the chicanery of Hastert and Delay, and ready to sign into law every regressive bill they strong arm into law. 

In short, nothing P/C writes about happens without a Republican president--and not just any Republican president, but an ideologically driven, hyper-partisan, intellectually dogmatic Republican president, all of this encouraged by his brilliant, ruthless and equally partisan top assistants,  Rove and Cheney. 

Thus the incrementalism held to be central to American politics byconventional political science (and much American historiography, too)--despite the author's attempts to bury it--is the repressed argument that returns to haunt this important book:  You cannot remake American politics without control of both the congressional and executive branches of government--and the skilled promulgation of that control.  Off Center does a superb job of analyzing and describing the skill the GOP brought to controlling the congressional wing, but its dismissal of the Bush phenomena--except for the casual lumping in of Karl Rove with  Delay and Norquist as just another top tier power broker (as if!)--does not do justice to either the Republican's success or the necessary ingredients for that success (or, therefore, to the decline we are now witnessing of their hoped for permanent government, which is, of course, inextricably tied to Bush's own failing fortunes). Republicans have proved every point, I believe, in my preceding sentence. 

Gettysburg,

George Bush ran an almost 100% negative campaign and won didn't he? When you say we should not go negative I am reminded of the Bob Shrum approach.

Well one of the things the dems have to do is fix what the Republicans have broken. They took a balanced budget and made hte biggest defiicits in history.  Fixing that is going to require pointing out what the Republicans have done and will continue to do. So we are for fiscal responsibility, the yar eagainst it. That seems clear.  

Most democrats are for cleaning up the mess the GOP has made in Iraq.  The first step is to stop making it worse. That probably involves getting out or at least pulling back to the sidelines. Pointing out that the GOP got us in this mess would certainly be smart.  

On social security, the dems had to unite against Bush's plan because it was a really bad plan.  Teh second they started offering plans, the press all would have been about the problems in the dems plan.  In the end Bush looked like a fool and hte dems were strengthened by the SS debate. If and when the dems regain power they will present a plan.  I personally favor raising the retirement age by 1 month per year. That would solve it and hit no group unfairly.

I think the Dems should come out for national health care.  No Hillary care that preserves the insurance companies and their enormous profits.  its easy to understand.  Most dems are too spinless to do this but it is an easy plan to understand.  The republicans have done nothing on this issue and I would clearly point that out.




 

In your book you rightly cite the effects of primaries in pushing Republicans ever further to the right.  However, have you ever considered targeting the entire plurality based voting system as a means to counteract this.  Under plurality voting, any voter who votes for a third party candidate forfeits his right to choose between the major parties' candidates.  This  has two consequences: political duopoly and both parties represented by a single candidate in the general election.  It is the combination of these two factors that makes the primaries relevant enough to be a tool to push a party to the extreme.

As an alternative, majority rule voting would enable multiple candidates to participate in the general election without harming the chances of other candidates with similar ideologies.  Under majority rule, often referred to as Condorcet, voters rank as many candidates as desired, one candidate would defeat another if more voters rank that candidate higher and a candidate would win the election if he defeats each other candidate in a head-to-head matchup.

Now consider how this would have affected the Roukema-Garrett matchup.  With a majority rule based general election, Garrett would have still been able to capitalize on a rightward shift in the Republican electorate and Roukema's exhaustion of her funds from campaigning.  However, after Garrett's victory in the primary, Roukema would have been able to enter the general election with impunity.  There, Democrats could join with a minority of Republicans to rank Roukema above Garrett (Democrats voting Dem-Roukema-Garrett, Republicans voting Roukema-Garrett-Dem or Roukema-Dem-Garrett) allowing the district to remain moderate.

On the other hand, even with their electoral victories, conservatives still don't always get their way [from "The liberal legacy (and the myth of conservative primacy)," by Mitchell Rofsky, president of Better World Club ("an eco-friendly auto and travel club"), Boston Globe, Ideas Section, 2/22/2004]:

"It must be frustrating being a conservative ideologue at a time when Republicans win elections and yet see little change in the government's direction....Furthermore, Bush is pursuing what was once considered the definition of liberalism, a Keynesian economic policy that maintains aggregate demand by cutting taxes without cutting government spending. (True, Bush's economic policy is excessively slanted toward the rich and may be reckless in the long term, but it is Keynesian nonetheless.) [...]

"And in foreign policy, in the absence of Iraqi WMDs, Bush has taken to defending the war by appealing to the same traditionally liberal positions he campaigned against in 2000: nation-building, and the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad. [...]

"Meanwhile, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court finds that homosexual relations are protected by the constitutional right to privacy, upholds affirmative action, and approves the constitutionality of limits on campaign contributions -- more evidence of the triumph of liberalism."

So what makes it easy for you to confidently claim that people who take positions different from yours do so because of political considerations instead of conviction?

Hillary is a very smart person, fully capable of seeing thru the transparent ruses the administration