Tomorrow

It's election day. It scares me. The Dem's are probably going to take one heck of a hit.

To which I say 'BIG FAT BUMMER.' Somehow, Obama continues to be painted as a left leaning liberal, when he's a (total) centrist. I'm a left leaning (pinko) liberal/progressive. I make our Pres look entirely mainstream. (Because he is).

Here's a thought provoking essay:

Unfortunately, this is not a Halloween spook.


October 28, 2010
Divided We Fail
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one
house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans
controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the
period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people
remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and
responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians
will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for
America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and
economic weakness.

Start with the politics.

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together
on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing
can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he
sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an
“appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time
building consensus.” Good luck with that.

After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after
Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the
federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give
in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically,
and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will
deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But
the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that
they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational
enough.

Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch
McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention
thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing
we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that,
in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda
and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some
degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we
would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way
to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this
time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr.
Obama.

True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr.
Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a
“Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support
among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually
hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.

We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves
considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan
manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at
the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of
being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart
observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next
spring.

Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now
is the state of the economy.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had
strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today.
Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new
opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that
were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.

In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter
of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from
overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the
Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without
any help from Congress.

Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by
the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire
straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And
it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this
danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the
federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In
fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds:
They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be
worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run
deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced
won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be
afraid. Be very afraid.
_________

In short, we are so hosed.