The GOP sucked up to the middle class -- but will it deliver?

The GOP sucked up to the middle class -- but will it deliver?

by Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-the-gop-sucked-up-20141105-column.html#page=1

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Will Saletan at Slate puts his finger on a fascinating development in the 2014 election: A slew of Republican Senate and House candidates ran on Democratic themes. These included poverty relief, black unemployment, equal pay for women, dismal middle-class economics, income inequality and the protection of Social Security and Medicare. .

Saletan's right about that. These themes cropped up in GOP campaigns in the Deep South, the Midwest and on both coasts.

Yet it's easy to make too much of this, as Saletan does. The campaign rhetoric of a handful of GOP candidates doesn't certify that they, much less party members in general, are "embracing ideas and standards that came from the left," or that they've internalized the issue of "economic equality." More likely, they're displaying that familiar quality of the politician: hypocrisy.

The most one can say for sure is that these candidates found a set of talking points that resonated with the 2014 electorate. What makes it hard to claim that they'll stand up for the victims they've identified is that Republican orthodoxy, and Republican action, points exactly the other way. And that's when the GOP candidates made their points accurately or honestly, which wasn't always the case.


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