Thomas Frank blasts "the experts", and takes the democratic party to task as well. You really need to read his article; it touches on so much that is wrong in the Beltway.
Frank's excellent piece in Salon also helps explain why doofuses like McCain are constantly on teevee. This issue came up in a diary last week.
The powerful in Powertown love to take refuge in bewildering professional jargon. They routinely ignore or suppress challenging ideas, just as academics often ignore ideas that come from outside their professional in-group. Worst of all, Washingtonians seem to know nothing about the lives of people who aren’t part of the professional-managerial class.
How well-known is this problem? It is extremely well known. One of the greatest books of them all on American political dysfunction, David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), is the story of how a handful of poli-sci geniuses got us into the Vietnam War. How political science conquered Hanoi, you might say, except that it didn’t exactly work out like that.
Regarding Nate Cohn's recent piece in the NT Times
Why Democrats Can't Win the House-- where he asks why Democrats can't re-take the House in spite of all of the bad GOP behavior the past few years. Cohn doesn't say much about partisan gerrymandering, instead focuses on lack of democrat voters outside of a "few congressional districts", which allows the GOP to dominate remaining House seats.
Frank's response:
Even so, these House Republicans are really, truly awful. Isn’t there a way for Democrats to beat them regardless of the geographic hurdles? According to Cohn, not really. Either Democrats have to appeal to lost voters (like “the conservative Democrats of the South and Appalachia”) by moving rightward, or they will have to “wait for demographic and generational change” to win the seats for them. And maybe that makes sense, given the assumptions of the lame school of political science that D.C. types always gravitate to—the kind in which there are but two poles in political life and politicians of the left party can only win if they move rightward.
He goes on to point out the lack of original thinking may be why the Democratic Party may be "headed for another disaster this fall".
One could argue Democrats are winning on cultural issues like women's rights and gay rights, but Frank points out the culture war hasn't worked all that well for Democrats, and waiting decades for demographic shifts in order to win House seats isn't much of a political strategy.
BINGO!
http://www.salon.com/...