The rise of the presidential wing of the Republican party over the past generation has been driven by overlapping issues of race and taxes. The Republicans have capitalized on these two issues, capturing the White House in five of the last six elections. In a steady evolutionary process, race and taxes came to interact with such domestic issues as welfare policy and minority quota hiring. The author suggests that, although Clinton managed to win in 1992, he leads a Democratic Party that is weakened, fragmented and unsure of itself.
Thomas Byrne Edsall is an online columnist for the New York Times and a correspondent for The New Republic. He holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at Columbia University. He joined the full-time faculty at Columbia in 2006 after a twenty-five year career at The Washington Post. During that time, he covered all aspects of national politics, including presidential elections, the House and Senate, lobbying, tax policy, demographic trends, social welfare, and the politics of race and ethnicity.
Edsall served in 2006 as a guest columnist for the print edition of the New York Times. Before he came to the Washington Post he reported for The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has covered politics for The National Journal, and has contributed TV and radio commentary to CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, FOX, and NPR.
Edsall is the author of five books: The Age of Austerity (2012); Building Red America (2006); Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (2005); Power and Money: Writing About Politics (1988); and The New Politics of Inequality (1984).
He is also the editor of or contributor to a number of other books: Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics, contributor (2006); Varieties of Progressivism in America, contributor, 2004; Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election (2001); Present Discontents, contributor (1997); The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980, contributor, (1989); The Reagan Legacy, (co-editor and contributor) (1988).
Edsall has written extensively for magazines, with articles appearing in American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, Civilization, Dissent, Harper's, The Nation, The National Journal, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, the Washington Monthly.
Edsall's 1992 book Chain Reaction was a Pulitzer finalist in general non-fiction. His awards include the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association, the Bill Pryor Award and the Front Page Award of the Newspaper Guild, a yearlong fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and several Media Fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Edsall attended Brown University and received a B.A. from Boston University.
