IS SEX NECESSARY?
What's going on here? How come Republicans are planning on pocketing all the small-government issues that people like-that includes the radical small-government issues that overlap with values issues, like quadrupling the per-child tax deduction-and putting all their chips on sex again? My own convoluted explanation: The winners in the new information economy are coming to constitute an upper class of sorts. You know the type: Joe Intellectual Property Lawyer and his wife Janet Ontologist. They make $550,000 a year between them and live in Scarsdale with their one kid. And such people are all over the place.
Not nearly as rich as Joe and Janet, most of them, but this class of New Richies is huge. Probably 20 percent of the country can now afford a second house or frequent European travel or Ivy League educations for all their kids.
They may have to choose among these goodies, but the fact is that what 20 years ago was the lifestyle of a minuscule elite is now within range of 50 or 60 million Americans.
In a reversal that would stun anyone who followed politics closely in the Reagan era, it begins to look like the Democrats are picking up these people. They deserve to. For one thing, they're addressing them specifically: Last week the PPI, think tank of the same DLC that produced Bill Clinton, started a new outreach program to high-tech entrepreneurs. For another, they've got a whole bundle of issues designed to appeal specifically to this very lifestyle-oriented class, like daycare and environmentalism and education.
In 1996, Democrats, won 13 of the richest 17 congressional districts in the country, and that dominance spread even further down the social pyramid in the last election. The normal electoral strategy to follow when the other party becomes closely identified with the very pinnacle of society is to stoke envy by railing at their economic privilege. That's what Roosevelt did when he railed at the "economic royalists" (his word for small businessmen; the real royalists were in his back pocket, but that's another story) who opposed the New Deal. But that would imply raising these people's taxes, which is anathema to the GOP. So instead, Republicans take aim at the new class' lifestyle privileges. Unfortunately, almost every aspect of their lifestyle is built on money, and thus invulnerable to GOP attack.
Except sex. Relying on an understanding of elite lifestyles that comes straight off of Ally McBeal, Republicans are hoping to sell the middle-class on the idea that they ought to vote against the Democratic elites because those bastards are getting laid all the time.
Duddnit jess burn ya up?