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The bluest state : how democrats created the Massachusetts blueprint for American political disaster

Title

The bluest state : how democrats created the Massachusetts blueprint for American political disaster / Jon Keller.

Author

Keller, Jon (Jon Peter)

Publication

New York : St Martin's Press, 2007.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	F71 .K45 2007	Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 258 pages; 22 cm

Summary

"At one time Americans thought of Massachusetts with pride. It was the place where the charge against British oppression was incubated and the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought. It was the intellectual center of the United States, the home of the country's first university - Harvard - and the birthplace of some of our most famous writers - Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, to name just a few. What do Americans picture when they think of Massachusetts today? They think of taxes on everything that moves and a burning desire to tax what doesn't. They think of unctuous, doomed presidential candidates from Michael Dukakis to John Kerry. And, most of all, they think of "Kennedy Country" - not the moderate politics of John F. Kennedy, who backed supply-side tax cuts and a saber-rattling foreign policy, but a place influenced by the ideology of his little brother Ted, a punch line for bad political jokes and the relic of a dream gone bad." "Over the past thirty years, Massachusetts has been the test kitchen for the baby boomers' political impulses and instincts, with devastating results: urban deterioration, failing public schools, and a vanishing job base. Unfortunately, the story of Massachusetts's decline has national implications. Other states share its problems, and the cautionary tale of the mishandling of the problems in Massachusetts speaks to a broader issue: What's gone wrong with the Democratic Party?" "Jon Keller shows how the collapse of the Massachusetts Miracle into the Massachusetts Miasma mirrors chronic failures within the Democratic Party and American liberalism. After an election in which Democrats elsewhere regained power in Washington by moving toward the political center, the story of how failed boomer politics ruined one of America's great liberal citadels is a timely warning to the party for the election ahead."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

Note

Includes index.

ISBN

9780312368319
0312368313

LCCN

2007019468

OCLC

ocn141386245
141386245
SCSB-5362185

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries