This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on March 28, 2016 Nicholas Confessore’s terrific, front-page piece in Monday’s New York Times dovetailed nicely with a March 11 rant by veteran Republican strategist Steve Schmidt on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Both were essentially messages to Republican politicians and strategists, but their Democratic counterparts would be well-advised to think about them as well. Referring to a wealthy 18-year old, Fort Worth-area boy convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter in a drunk-driving case after his lawyer claimed an “affluenza” defense, Schmidt claimed that the “Republican establishment in Washington has a case of affluenza. You have six of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country surround D.C. You have a real-estate market that took a narrow downturn but rebounded very quickly. You have a city that’s insulated from economic distress; it’s recession-proof to some degree. So this Republican establishment, the consulting class in Washington, these are not living-wage jobs. And at the end of the day, I think they totally miss the psychic impact, the economic impact of the Great Recession, of the economic
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