The Pendulum Gets Shoved

Back in June of 2009, I post­ed about the “death” of the Repub­li­can Par­ty and who would save it. Today, as pre­dict­ed, the Repub­li­can Par­ty is resur­gent and I read sto­ries of how the repub­li­cans are going to threat­en demo­c­ra­t­ic con­trol of the sen­ate and the pres­i­den­cy. Who will save the Democrats??

The Repub­li­cans!!! With the last elec­tion results being dri­ven most­ly by the econ­o­my, unem­ploy­ment specif­i­cal­ly, the repub­li­can con­trolled House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has not yet done a thing to address that issue.

With the nation­al debt stand­ing as one of the impor­tant issues of our time, the Repub­li­cans are con­tent with address­ing it by slash­ing domes­tic non-secu­ri­ty dis­cre­tionary spend­ing, i.e., spend­ing they do not like. In oth­er words, they do not care about the deficit (there is not enough mon­ey in domes­tic non-secu­ri­ty dis­cre­tionary spend­ing to do much for the deficit), they are just hap­py to use the cri­sis as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cut spend­ing they do not like. (Remem­ber how unhap­py they were when Oba­ma talked about crises pre­sent­ing opportunity?)

Of course, Amer­i­cans like the spend­ing and are still unhap­py with the unem­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion. If this keeps up, I expect the Democ­rats to win big.