Enemy Combatant
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Excellent article on how our Squanderer-in-Chief, the Job Houdini, is increasingly being perceived out in the Red States:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0349/perlstein.php
{snip}
. . . Intriguing cracks are opening in the Republican firmament. Take the factory owners I meet in the Rock River Valley's population center, the city of Rockford, who are ready to burn George Bush in effigy.
"I'm very conservative," Eric Anderberg of Dial Machine says, in the boardroom of the machine-parts factory his family built in 1966. "Always voted Republican. But I'm extremely concerned with what I hear from this current administration." Eric is 32, fiercely political, and articulate. He's called over two of his older industrial-park neighbors, Don Metz of Metz Tool and Judy Pike of Acme Grinding. Family manufacturers like these were the foundation of the modern conservative movement, reacting against the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower in the '50s. Now they are a wedge in the Republican coalition. I ask if they could imagine supporting, for president, a Democrat. Don Metz, who in his golf shirt looks like he just came back from a midday round, doesn't hesitate: "No problem. Somebody steps forward and says we're going to make manufacturing a priority in this country." They would even donate the legal maximum of $2,000.
The reason is economic near-devastation. Unemployment around here has increased by half in the last three years. . . .
{snip}
I think those inside the rightwing echo-chamber that now calls itself the American news media are completely unprepared for the political tsunami that's coming next November . . .
