CENTERED.

CENTERED. Kevin Drum takes a light knock at Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker's hefty post-midterms revision of the thesis of their own book Off Center, which had implied if not quite guaranteed that the GOP's mastery of various tricks and structural advantages would assure continued, "off-center" right-wing rule. (They were more explicitly bearish on the prospect of a Democratic congressional takeover in the '06 midterms in this New York Times Magazine article last year.) As they write now in a new TNR piece, "the 2006 election shows that the GOP's institutional advantages aren't enough to guarantee victory" after all. To indulge in some self-quoting here, I'd say that the first serious challenge to Off Center's vision of the GOP having fundamentally rejiggered the normal rules of democratic politics and policymaking through institutional and procedural manipulations came not with last month's midterms but with the spectacular failure of the president's Social Security privatization plan in '05. As I wrote last year:

All the political-institutional trends and GOP tactics the authors identify would lead a reader to naturally predict that the president's push for Social Security privatization last spring would succeed. That campaign offered a perfect test case for Hacker and Pierson's thesis that Republicans have gamed the system in such a way to allow them to enact radical and unpopular policies and get away with it.

Indeed, the oddest thing about this was that the scholar who most carefully and persuasively laid out (just a few years ago) the reasons for the durability of the welfare state and the difficulty of retrenchment even in eras of conservative rule was ... Paul Pierson. At any rate, leaving pot-shots against the stronger claims of Off Center aside, Hacker and Pierson as always have plenty of very smart things to say in the new TNR piece, and it's worth a read.

--Sam Rosenfeld