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The Bluest State: How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster | 
| Author: Jon Keller
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 112252
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312384904
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780312384906
ASIN: 0312384904
Publication Date: August 19, 2008
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Product Description
What’s Happened to Massachusetts? At one time, Americans thought of Massachusetts with pride. It was the place where the charge against British oppression was incubated and first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought. What do Americans picture when they think of Massachusetts today? They think of taxes on everything that moves. 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, Jr., 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 boom's political impulses and instincts, with devastating results that have national implications. Unfortunately, the story of Massachusetts' decline has national implications. Other states share its problems. And the cautionary tale of their mishandling in Massachusetts speaks to a broader issue. What’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party? Jon Keller, a veteran political commentator, shows how the collapse of the Massachusetts Miracle into the Massachusetts Miasma mirrors chronic failures within the Democratic Party and American liberalism in a timely warning to the party for the election ahead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Well written, well thought out and very enjoyable December 31, 2007
States its case very effectively with examples, footnotes and the like. The style of writing is more like having a conservation with someone over a beer, which is a good way to go through this kind of book. And it certainly takes an interesting approach to liberalism especially in the modern Democrat party that I had not thought about. Very good book all around.
 "The Bluest State How the Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster" by Jon Keller October 22, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
"I was in Dorchester not long ago," Mitt Romney said in his closing statement in the fall of 1994 debate for Senator against incumbent Ted Kennedy, "Someone said, `This is Kennedy country,' . . . . "And I looked around and I saw boarded-up buildings, and I saw jobs leaving, and I said, `It looks like it.'"
To Jon Keller in his recent book entitled "The Bluest State How the Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster," this was an epochal moment in modern Massachusetts politics.
"Mitt Romney had entered the den of American liberalism and urinated on the shag carpet by singling out the defining symbol of an entire political culture's self-esteem and pronouncing it a failure," writes Keller.
So what is the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster?
Keller begins his book noting the national influence of the thirteenth largest state: "four of the last seven presidential elections have had a Massachusetts horse in the race. Only Texas has produced more candidates during that time."
According to the author, the Massachusetts Blueprint has at its center "its most important vow - of a government in touch with and devoted to the working classes and the poor, delivering on its commitment to improve their lives and enhance their opportunities." The problem is that it "has turned out to be a broken promise." As Keller observes, "more than a decade after Mitt Romney gave his caustic take on the Kennedy legacy, the North Dorchester neighborhood where he was heckled by Kennedy partisans is still plagued by abandoned buildings and joblessness. Drug abuse and its criminal side effects are rampant. . . . violent street crime is once again soaring in North Dorchester and other poor city neighborhoods. . . . The Democrats . . . who've had nearly total control of the state for three decades talk a big game about their vision of a better deal for the masses. But their abysmal track record tells a different tale, one made especially relevant to the future of the Democratic Party nationally by the political circumstances of the Massachusetts debate."
Keller's tome is replete with examples of the blueprint for disaster. The altruistic impulse of politics, if there is such a thing, in Massachusetts "has long since dissolved into an orgy of spoils taking. The state's Democratic establishment (often with the eager collaboration of Republican governors) turned supposedly independent authorities overseeing Logan Airport and the Big Dig into vast patronage buffets, where otherwise unemployable relatives of the politically connected found safe harbor, and former state legislators could pad their pensions in over paid make-work jobs with perks that rival those of the most rapacious corporations." According to Keller, "these feeding frenzies cost the taxpayers more than money," as he links, them with the screening lapses at Logan Airport security checkpoints on September 11, 2001 that allowed "Mohamed Atta and his colleagues" to breeze through. And to the "hack-o-rama at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority" that led to indifference to quality control on the Big Dig tunnel so that "loose bolts gave way in 2006, killing a woman in a car below," the tragic tip of the iceberg of thousands of defects in construction that have subsequently been discovered.
The mantra of the sixties left "The personal is political" underpins the rise of identity politics in the state. In other words "personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time." And Keller observes "what could be more personal - and a higher priority - than boomer's self aggrandizement?" What makes the Democrats kill imitative petitions they find politically incorrect in the backrooms of Beacon Hill? Fear! In foreign policy, Keller notes "the Democrats' efforts to shed [the Blame America First] caricature in the post 9/11 environment," has failed for "the impulse still thrives in Massachusetts." But Keller notes a yellow light of caution for the political elites in that "while a recent Harris poll showed 51 percent of boomers see themselves as `open to new ideas', only 12 percent of non-boomers see them as that way." Keller thinks this generational myopia may be a "key element" in the 2008 presidential race by pointing out that Hillary Clinton's political philosophy espoused in her 1969 Wellesley College graduation speech could have been pointing to what has become "modern day Massachusetts."
The author opines that in Massachusetts "political correctness is the signature cultural statement of the ruling elites, undermining their moral authority and driving a wedge between them and the working classes more effectively than any right-wing demagogue could hope for." Observing the Duval Patrick campaign for Governor, Keller says "Light skinned with well-tailored suits and an Ivy League syntax, Patrick quickly became the darling of the aging boomer activists and donors who occupied the liberal wing of the state Democratic party. His platform shied away from any serious, specific reforms . . . His stump speech was a feel-good spectacular right out of the Kennedy era. . ." Keller was finishing the book as Patrick was about to take office and the author observes: "there was little evidence of any emphasis on crime in the governor elect's portfolio." The author quotes Gene Rivers who works with Boston inner-city African American youth. Rivers asks "how is it their left-liberal ideology permits or tolerates such intolerable conditions? How does that happen in Kennedy country?"
From the above, one might have the impression that the author is a Republican or perhaps conservative Democrat. Far from it - the author grew up riding his bicycle on Brattle Street in Cambridge, and is, in spite of his book and its title, a self avowed liberal. . . . I guess I'd be considered a card-carrying liberal. I'm a boomer too, a product of the liberal idealism of my late 1960's-early 1970s adolescence." A hint to his cognitive dissonance lies in his next sentence, "But I'm also a liberal who's been mugged."
How was he mugged? He tells you: "The Massachusetts model has grossly failed to deliver on boomer liberalism's promises and fulfill its expectations. Democrats have limped through a generation of tenuous grasp on national political power in part because they've been infected with the Massachusetts viruses I've described: addiction to tax revenues, phony identity politics . . . reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism."
Important for those in the other 49 states to read October 21, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Be forewarned, a far-left website (BlueMassGroup)has suggested that their bloggers go to Amazon and trash this book WITHOUT HAVING READ IT. This pretty much validates what Keller has written, that MA leftists often can't seem to take the same criticism they dish out. For MA residents who actually keep up with news, there's not much new here. However, and this is important, MA politicians seem to have an effect on the rest of the country way out of proportion to their numbers. In the same way pop culture starts in CA and moves East, politics seems to do the reverse. If the rest of the country can look forward to the death of critical thinking, political correctness run amok and an inability to have a civil political discussion without cursing, America is in big trouble.
Long overdue! October 19, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having been born and lived for most of my life in Massachusetts, it's refreshing to read the other side of the Boston Globe. Too bad that the "boomers" won't get the message.
Idiots in Massachusetts October 17, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Why do we keep electing these idiots in Massachusetts? Jon Keller does a fine job of pointing this out.
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