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The Thumpin' by Naftali Bendavid
- Abstract
Party Animal
The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution
by Naftali Bendavid
Doubleday. 272 pp. $23.95
When George W. Bush delivered his sweeping second inaugural address on January 20, 2005, the Republican party seemed to be on top of the world. The President had won reelection by a slim but solid margin and, in what some commentators were calling a “rolling realignment,” the party had expanded its majorities in both houses of Congress.
In making these gains, the GOP was said to have been buttressed by a number of advantages: that it was well organized and ideologically united; that its candidates enjoyed the electoral advantages of incumbency; that redistricting had given it more safe seats; and that the distribution of voters—with Democrats concentrated in urban areas and Republicans dispersed more evenly across the country—intrinsically favored Republicans.
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