The Economy as an Issue is Now 90% Republican-Owned

Last night, Robert Reich made a decent point. Writing about the debt limit deal and yesterday's market sell-off, Reich wonders if Republicans are ready to take ownership of the problem.

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got "90 percent of what we wanted" from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today's mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I'm being a bit facetious -- but only a bit. It's always dangerous to read too much into one day's move in the stock market.

Of course, there are a lot of factors that figure into the ongoing dive -- economic uncertainty in Europe, for example -- that have nothing to do with the US. But jitters about jobs and the threat of a double-dip recession are driving a lot of it. If Republicans got 90% of what they wanted from the debt limit deal, then Republicans now own 90% of responsibility for the economy.

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Wisconsin Recall Update

We have a few hard numbers now on the Wisconsin recall races and, while the news is good, it's not anything we didn't already know. Jmartin4s at DailyKos got hold of some polling from Insider Michigan Politics which finds that Democrats are clear leaders in three races that they're widely expected to win. What's telling here is just how large those leads are:

State Senate District 12-Incumbent Jim Holperin (D)
46.3% Simac (R) 53.7% Holperin (D)
State Senate District 18-Incumbent Randy Hopper (R)
45.3% Hopper (R) 54.7% King (D)
State Senate District 32-Incumbent Dan Kapanke (R)
43.0% Kapanke (R) 57.0% Shilling (D)

Two strong wins and one landslide. One Republican incumbent who was expected to win finds herself in a much tighter race than anyone had expected. Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling recently told constituents she couldn't guarantee she'd be reelected. Asked at a Q & A if she was sure she'd win, Darling answered, "I'm not sure. It's going to be about turnout."

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You Can't Win a Fight by Avoiding It

Last week, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that made the rounds of lefty blogs. Titled Why Voters Tune Out Democrats, Greenberg made the case that Democrats need to make a push to transform both Americans' perception of government and to eliminate campaign finance laws that favor Republicans.

Those are, of course, the broad strokes; his actual suggestions are more detailed. But the core argument -- or, at least, what I took as the core argument -- was this (emphasis mine):

In analyzing these polls in the United States, I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government -- and that they associate Democrats with government. If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters' feelings about government. They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.

Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don't trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.

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The "Unbiased" Media Strikes Again

When I woke up this morning, I cracked open my paper and came across this simpleminded and asinine opinion piece, courtesy of the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board. Yay for the debt limit deal, they argue, because it proves that Washington still works, despite the best efforts of some imaginary, bipartisan obstruction patrol.

The ideologically-driven progressives on the far left and the rigid tea party crowd on the far right seem equally entrenched against building consensus around workable solutions.

But at some point, the relentless finger-pointing and blaming of "the other side" needs to stop so America's very real and complicated problems can be addressed in meaningful ways.

The first thing that popped into my mind was a quote from Paul Krugman. "The 'both sides are at fault' people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it's out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray," he wrote recently. "It's a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price."

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The Lousy Deal

We've got a debt deal and it's just the best thing ever! Check out how super-excited the White House is about the whole thing. If we go to the White House website, we learn that it's a "Win for the Economy and Budget Discipline," that the deal "Removes Cloud of Uncertainty," and that the whole thing's a trip through Bipartisan Happy-Land, where gumdrops grow on sugarplum trees and everything is made wonderful by the magical power of Centrism. Yay!

Of course, if we talk to Mean Old Mister Knows-What-the-Hell-He's-Talking-About, then the magic seems to evaporate.

Crooks and Liars:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warned Sunday that proposed spending cuts in a deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling would end up hurting the economy.

"From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn't even be talking about spending cuts at all now," Krugman told ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "We have nine percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment... If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate -- which is what this is going to do -- that's actually going to reduce future revenues."

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