One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century - Hardcover

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Tom Hamburger is an investigative reporter covering the White House and the executive branch for the Los Angeles Times.

Peter Wallsten covers the White House for the Los Angeles Times. Both authors have been interviewed about the Bush administration on CNN, FOX News, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR.

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"One Party Country proves once and for all that Republicans are simply better than Democrats at the basic blocking and tackling of politics. Anyone who wants to know why the GOP will win more than lose for the foreseeable future needs to read this book."
Jonathan Alter, Senior Editor at Newsweek and author of The Defining Moment

The Democrats have an easy road to victory, right? Not quite. This book pulls the curtain back on the Republicans' astonishingly effective efforts to keep that from happening. Despite poor polling for the Republicans, they are closer to making America a one-party country than most people imagine. One Party Country exposes the way Republicans have nearly completed their plan to:

• Make the most of redistricting, so that most congressional seats aren't really up for grabs
• Create software and databases the Democrats can only dream of a huge advantage in turning out their base
• Make modern polling useless, since even the best polls can't measure the turnout advantage
• Turn big business into an arm of the party, from K Street to corporate boardrooms and sometimes onto the factory floor
• Stir up the religious right with one hand, while actually forwarding the competing agenda of their big donors with the other
• Create policies like Iraq, Social Security privatization, and faith-based programs that use the government's resources to tilt the electorate to the right and undermine the Democrats
• Neutralize the Democrats' traditional advantage with Hispanics, women, and African Americans
• Fill the courts with conservative judges ready to turn away challenges to this new order

This plan is not only audacious it's working. Are there any flaws in Karl Rove's strategy? Are Democrats fighting back? Do they even have a clue what's going on? Read this dramatic and provocative exposé and find out.

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"Hamburger and Wallsten pull back the curtain and reveal the Republican battle plan to take over American politics. With compelling detail and scrupulous fairness, the two uncover many of the machinations that have been below the radar screen?until now."
?Roger Simon, author of Divided We Stand

Is the United States becoming a one-party country? Republicans control every branch of government in Washington and most governorships. Even in the face of public despair over Iraq, the downfall of GOP powerbrokers like Tom DeLay, and the Bush administration's inept response to Hurricane Katrina, Republicans remain firmly planted in the driver's seat of national politics.

One Party Country shows that Republicans own a clear advantage in the fundamentals of campaigning: money, organization, and message. And even as many pundits ponder potential Democratic success in upcoming elections, this book's rigorous examination of the GOP machine suggests that a Democratic resurgence faces steep barriers? barriers erected by conservatives who have worked to build their dominant position since the days of Barry Goldwater.

Los Angeles Times political reporters Hamburger and Wallsten unravel Karl Rove's vast and complex plan, both to consolidate the right's own power base and to continue chipping away at the Democrats' constituency, the New Deal coalition of labor and minorities that buttressed Democratic dominance for decades. The strategists fighting to build a long-lasting Republican majority have deployed a vast arsenal to that end?funneling taxpayer dollars to gain entrée in black churches, harnessing cable broadcasts and the Internet, forging alliances with conservative Jews and Christians, politicizing policy decisions to a greater extent than at any other time in history, and revolutionizing the way campaigns are run. And they have mastered the very art of grassroots political organizing that once was the trademark of Democratic campaigns.

Some of the tactics are stunning in their audacity and ambition, like ordering federal bureaucrats to make decisions based on the reelection chances of Republican lawmakers. Not to mention using the Voting Rights Act to pack liberal black voters into single congressional districts to assure the elections of white conservatives in neighboring ones. One of the most striking creations was a White House faith-based initiative that has directed millions of dollars to African American churches in the hope that their pastors will feel indebted to a Republican president and become willing to campaign for his party.

Some developments have led to trouble. The aggressive Republicanization of Washington lobbying shops spawned GOP embarrassments like Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist at the center of one of the capital's biggest corruption scandals. But while Democrats hope to benefit politically from what they call a "culture of corruption" in Republican-led Washington, they show few signs of grasping how dramatically the GOP machine has transformed American politics?and how hard it will be for the Democrats to catch up.

The twenty-first century GOP is the New York Yankees of national politics. And like a dominant sports franchise, the Republicans have put in place the advantages they need to ensure an automatic edge in every foreseeable cycle. One Party Country describes brick-by-brick how this one-party foundation was built?and foreshadows whether it has been built to last.