The Party Is Over

June 11, 2012
Lofgren expands his much-read article, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult” (originally published on the site Truthout) into a book-length scrupulously bipartisan diagnosis of the sick state of American politics and governance. The former congressional staffer saves the greater part of his bile for his former party, which he sees as having become inflexibly ideological and devoted to its richest contributors’ interests. Lofgren makes sure, however, to blast President Obama and his fellow Democrats for the same bad habits, primarily belligerence, disregard for privacy, and compliance with lobbyists. The general points are familiar, but Lofgren offers ideas drawn from a career in government dating back to the early 1980s. Nostalgic memories of now-striking examples of bipartisan cooperation join damning moments, like a Republican policymaker’s admission that the party aimed to obstruct the Senate for political gain. Lofgren offsets occasional cheap shots, such as against “Gucci-shod” lobbyists, by devoting close attention to budget issues rarely accorded so much detail in garden-variety op-ed warfare. Sustaining his original thesis well beyond Internet-browsing attention spans, Lofgren has crafted an angry but clear-sighted argument that may not sit well at family reunions or dinner parties, but deserves attention. Agent: Bridget Wagner Matzie, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency.

July 15, 2012
Lofgren draws on 28 years as a professional staff member in Congress to expose deep, disturbing trends in Washington. "Creative and constructive work is always harder than demagoguery or fear-mongering," writes the author. "We have had too little of the former and too much of the latter during recent decades." Lofgren tears into Congress' "high measure of low cunning," especially among Republicans, whose use of "political terrorism" illustrates the party's principal objectives: delay and gridlock, obstruction and disruption. They consistently play to their base but with no positive workable agenda, and the cries for a reduction of the debt are often followed by the desperate need to increase defense spending. Lofgren astutely points out that defense spending is the personification of inefficient spending, and it creates no jobs. As "chicken hawks" play to the crowd and their fears of illegal aliens, drug wars and terrorists, talk-show personalities stir up the more radical elements until rational thought can no longer be found. The author distinctly lays the blame for the current situation at the feet of the Bush/Cheney administration, which nearly perfected the propaganda with the War on Terror, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. Lofgren certainly doesn't excuse Democrats, who often fail to offer a good alternative; plus, they lack the fanatics that drive the far right. President Obama must also assume responsibility for continuing some of the more heinous practices of the Bush administration, though the author neglects to mention the fact that the obstructionist Congress has thwarted him at every turn. A well-argued call for more sanity in American politics.

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April 1, 2012

Lofgren, a Republican who worked as a Congressional staffer for 28 years, made news in September 2011 when he angrily quit over the debt ceiling crisis. He's critical of Democrats but saves his real bashing for Republicans, whom he called lunatics in a Truthout piece that got so many hits so fast that the site crashed.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
Expect demand for this inside view of Washington, D.C., by a staffer for, first, former Ohio representative John Kasich and, then, former New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, who spent a quarter-century on Capitol Hill before publishing a screed on America's broken political system at Truthout. Lofgren criticizes Democrats, particularly Wall Street Democrats like Baucus, Schumer, Dodd, and Corzine (of MF Global), and the extent to which Obama has carried out the Bush foreign policy more aggressively than Bush. But Lofgren's long service to GOP officeholders inevitably makes his critique of that party more detailed and fascinating. Lofgren lays out how Republicans went crazy in chapters on taxes (Republicans act as bellhops for corporate America and the superrich), the Pentagon (the GOP's . . . libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries), the media (the danger to our country of a credulous and uncritical press), the religious Right (which, he argues, rationalizes . . . the GOP's main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war), and anti-intellectualism (combining the religious Right's antiscientific views with fratboy conservatism). A pungent, penetrating insider polemic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)