Storebought
YaBB God
Posts: 4,326
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« on: January 16, 2005, 05:37:59 PM » |
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« edited: January 16, 2005, 05:40:46 PM by Storebought »
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This is more or less the same story as Nassau County, NY. A corrupt patronage machine that used tired 1960s Agnewism to maintain control over suburban voters.
The way the self-important "moderates" ran the Illinois GOP (and the NJ- and NY-GOP) is telling as well. In fact, I'd say that their control was the problem:
GOP moderates, then, and to a lesser extent still now, viewed the GOP as an exclusive country club. Sure, they more or less shared the tax-and-spend (oops, I mean, "fiscally conservative") social liberalism of the Democrats, but they just couldn't bear to associate with "those kinds of people" who made up the Democrat Party base. Because of their social elitism, they long sneered at those rude hicks who voted GOP out of conservative instinct. In fact, they still do.
Great example from an interview with self-described Kansas GOP moderate on a PBS documentary about Nancy L Kassebaum's son: "The people to the left of me just need a little work; the people to the right of me are nuts." Indeed.
The social moderates' place in the GOP was unnatural; hence, the outright bribery and leasing of public office to cronies to maintain the moderates' position in government.
Not that a conservative GOP rule in Illinois would have been unbroken, either. Whenever the GOP suffers from a conservative rigor-mortis, they lose at the polls, as the GOP should. But the same sort of contempt for their voter base, Jacksonian-style spoils system, and, yes, immoral conception of politics would never have afflicted a right-leaning IL GOP as badly as it had.
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