Anyone interested in making the 2010 (and for that matter, 2012) elections revolve around a comparison of Democratic and Republican plans for dealing with the country’s big challenges should read Ezra Klein’s intereview with Rep. Paul Ryan, published in the Washington Post yesterday.
Ryan, as you may recall, is the principal author of the so-called “Republican Road-Map” document that is an extremely rare GOP outline of an agenda that would be implemented through the federal budget process. That agenda, of course, is focused on tax cuts and spending cuts.
But what makes the interview fascinating is Klein’s eventually successful effort to get Ryan to admit that nothing in his or other Republicans’ plans would involve much of anything designed to deal with the immediate jobs crisis and overall economic slump:

Where I come from, I think certainty and long-term solutions are better. Temporary stuff doesn’t work. These short-term stimulative things like rebates don’t work. They’ll pump up some money in the quarter where they occur. You go right back where you were. These short-term stimuli, which Bush and Obama did, don’t change aggregate demand. And that’s why I think we need more of an investment-led recovery. At this point, given the borrowing costs, stimulus is counterproductive.

Ryan’s ideas for an “investment-led recovery” focus on high-end tax cuts, of course, along with an extraordinary faith in the proposition that a shift to smaller-government policies would provide “certainty” to the private sector and “unlock” capital. If that faith turns out to be misplaced, or takes many years to play out, well, too bad; the really important thing is repealing ObamaCare and the just-enacted financial regulatory package.
Now it’s hardly news when a Republican thinks tax cuts are the answer to every conceivable economic question. But it’s the combination of that dogma with the suddenly-critical demand to reduce federal budget deficits that makes it very difficult for Ryan to pretend Americans can expect anything other than continued high unemployment and sluggish growth under GOP policies. When specifically asked by Klein about the recessionary impact of public-sector layoffs, which directly increase unemployment, Ryan retreated into an argument about the need for state and local governments to deal with “structural deficit” issues. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people need to thrown out of work in order to accomplish a long-range shrinkage of the public sector, which is an end in itself with no relationship to any economic recovery. Ryan also calls for an increase in interest rates, which would impose still more short-term pain.
Now this is especially noteworthy because Ryan is at least willing to essay an intellectually defensible position and connect it to a specific agenda. Many Republicans (including would-be House Speaker John Boehner) have backed away from Ryan’s “Road Map” because they understand it includes politically toxic proposals like another run at partial-privatization of Social Security, and a “voucherization” of Medicare. So your standard-brand conservative fulminating for tax cuts and an immediate balancing of the federal budget relies far more than Ryan on vague and magical thinking about the impact on the economy of Republican rule, and offers even less in the way of steps to deal with the economic problems Americans face right now.
So Ryan’s “thinking” is about as good as it gets in the GOP ranks. Democrats definitely need to make voters impatient for strong action on the jobs crisis abundantly aware that Republicans don’t intend to move a muscle, even as they rush to shower tax benefits on the few Americans who are feeling no pain.

In an interesting argument over at OpenLeft about the biggest mistake recently made by Democrats, Chris Bowers suggests that fighting Republican efforts to gut the right to filibuster back during the “nuclear option” debate of 2005 had truly fateful consequences:

[N]ot allowing Republicans to destroy the filibuster back in 2005 is the biggest mistake made by not only President Obama, but by the Democratic trifecta as a whole (and, I admit, my biggest mistake too). This would have resulted in a wide swatch of changes, including a larger stimulus, the Employee Free Choice Act, a better health bill (in all likelihood, one with a public option, and completed in December), an actual climate / energy bill, a second stimulus, and more. If Democrats had tacked on other changes to Senate rules that sped up the process, such as doing away with unanimous consent, ending debating time after cloture is achieved on nominations, eliminating the two days between filing for cloture and voting on cloture, and restricting quorum calls, then virtually every judicial and administration vacancy would already be filled, as well.

I agree with the general argument that Democrats who got all nostalgic about Senate traditions in 2005 when Republicans were threatening to eliminate filibusters against judicial nominations were not thinking strategically. In particular, those who cheered the Schoolhouse Rock-inspired “Phil A. Buster” ads run by the progressive Alliance for Justice would now probably cringe at the memory.
But for the record, it’s important to remember what was actually going on in 2005, in the Republican effort to force Senate floor votes on Bush judicial nominations. The GOP argument was not against filibusters tout court, but against judicial filibusters. And their argument was that such filibusters were unconstitutional on grounds that they violated the provisions requiring Senate advice and consent for judicial nominations. Indeed, the “nuclear option” they threatened was simply a ruling by the vice president, as presiding officer of the Senate, that Rule XXII governing the terms for ending debate was unconstitutional with respect to judicial nominations. Ending filibusters altogether was never on the table, barring some see-you-and-raise-you Democratic tactic of offering Bush his judges in exchange for a more radical step towards majority rule in the Senate, which was never seriously contemplated.
Sure, Republicans have had some fun over the last couple of years quoting Democrats who made pro-filibuster comments in 2005, and it’s true that some Democrats didn’t try very hard back then to make the specific case for judicial filibusters (a case that could have been made on grounds that lifetime appointments to the federal bench require greater Senate scrutiny than the routine legislation that Republicans now routinely block, creating a virtual 60-vote requirement for Senate action). But Democrats need not spend too much time regretting the failure to take advantage of an opportunity that never really existed in 2005.

Greg Sargent’s ‘Plum Line’ post, “GOP blocks small business bill. Who will get the blame?” at the WaPo should be required reading for all Dem elected officials, their staffers and campaign workers. Here’s what Sargent has to say about how important legislative votes are too often reported and received:

…No matter how many times Dems scream about GOP obstructionism, the jury is out on whether Republicans will take any of the blame for its consequences. Dems run the place, and the public may tune out any argument over Senate procedure as so much Beltway white noise.
The latest: In the Senate today, Republicans blocked a bill to create a $30 billion fund to enable community banks to boost lending to small businesses. Republicans decried the move as another bailout, and it’s now unlikely that it will pass before Congress goes home for vacation in August, with little in the way of jobs bills under its belt.
So how will this story play?…

I won’t quote the graph from the AP story Sargent provides as exhibit “A.” You’ve seen it before in many previous incarnations. The general gist is that ‘gee wiz, those ineffectual Democrats failed to pass something again,’ giving the Republicans a largely free ride. The rest of the AP story Sargent didn’t quote prattles on in similar vein, at one point attempting to make Mitch McConnell sound like the voice of reason and humanitarian concern. Yet another classic example of lazy, gullible or GOP-biased reportage. As Sargent asks,

…Is this how the story will be understood by the American people? Very possible…Republicans claimed Dems blocked votes on the amendments they wanted. Dems countered that they agreed to votes on the GOP amendments, only to have the GOP demand more votes. Get what’s happening here? The larger story is all getting subsumed in a bunch of Beltway white noise.

Call it the ‘White Noise Strategy.” The GOP has been deploying it with impressive results for decades. Sargent quotes a statement from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the usual complaint about the Republicans playing politics and how the President will not be distracted — all well and good.
But what’s really needed here is a day of Democratic outrage, making the Republicans eat their numerous statements about small business being ‘the engine of job-creation.’ It should be a day when all Democratic elected officials, from city council members to Obama, get loud on one single message and refuse to talk about anything else. And that message should be fiercely-stated outrage, including displays of raw anger in press conferences, interviews, talk shows and statements, at denying small businesses the help they need to start hiring again. That would be a day that resonates with millions of small business women and men, as well as the unemployed and everyone who has the brains to understand that this is the kind of stimulus that makes sense. Then when October rolls around, remind them again and again about the day of outrage in political ads and a YouTube email campaign.
Small business job-creation is a hugely-important priority for economic recovery. The Republicans have squashed it for now. But there is a choice: Let the white noise prevail again — or get fierce.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galson is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In a recent post, Jonathan Chait rightly calls our attention to the Pew survey released July 16 that showed how voters rate political parties’ ideologies. While I agree with Chait’s interpretation of the data he cites, I want to underscore the significance of some other information in the survey–namely, where voters identify themselves in relation to the parties.
On the whole, 58 percent of voters see Democrats as liberal or very liberal, while 56 percent see Republicans as conservative or very conservative; no surprise there. But voters now place themselves much closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party on this left-right continuum. Indeed, the ideological gap between the Democratic Party and the mean voter is about three times as large as the separation between that voter and the Republican Party. And, startlingly, the electorate places itself a bit closer to the Tea Party movement (which is well to the right of the Republican Party) than to the Democratic Party. All this represents a major shift from five years ago, when mean voters placed themselves exactly halfway between their ideological perceptions of the Democratic and Republican parties.
The Pew survey also shows that Democrats are far more ideologically diverse than Republicans. Twenty-four percent of Democrats describe themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 5 percent of Republicans call themselves liberal or very liberal. Conversely, 65 percent of Republicans think of themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 42 percent of Democrats self-identify as liberal or very liberal. This helps explain why 83 percent of Republicans see the Democratic Party as more liberal than they themselves are–while only 60 percent of Democrats place the Republican Party to the right of where they place themselves.
Shifts among Independents are especially notable. A Pew survey in June 2005 found that Independents considered the Republican Party to be twice as distant from them ideologically as the Democratic Party. Today, Independents see the Democratic Party as three times farther away than the Republican Party. In 2005, 51 percent of Independents thought that the Republican Party was more conservative than they themselves were, versus only 36 percent who thought that the Democratic Party was more liberal. Today, 56 percent of Independents see the Democratic Party as more liberal than they themselves are, compared to only 39 percent who see the Republican Party as more conservative.
In May 2009, after Obama had taken office and the broad political debate had shifted away from social issues and national security toward the economy and federal regulation, Pew found that Independents had begun to move toward the Republican Party. This month’s survey suggests a continuation of this trend in Obama’s second year.
Three politically relevant conclusions follow from these data. First, Democrats’ greater diversity means that party leaders are bound to have more trouble managing their coalition than the Republicans will theirs. Second, the Independents who helped Democrats score a notable success in the 2006 midterm elections may well do the same for Republicans in 2010.
The third conclusion to be drawn from the poll is that, whether Democrats lose control of the Congress or remain in power with much narrower majorities, Obama’s challenge will resemble the one Bill Clinton faced after 1994–namely, reestablishing his standing among those voters outside of the Democratic base whose support spells the difference between retaining and losing a national majority. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Obama should do that the way Clinton did, by championing small-bore issues–such as school uniforms–designed to send reassuring messages to the electorate. But I am suggesting that he should bring comparable focus and clarity to the task of broadening his appeal beyond his core supporters… and organize his White House to maximize the chances that he can accomplish that task.

At CQ today, Roll Call columnist and election handicapper Stu Rothenberg has a piece today complaining about Democrats who are arguing that it was inevitable all along that they’d have a bad midterm outcome, regardless of the economy or other objective developments.
I’m not sure which “Democrats” Rothenberg’s talking about, since the only person he cites who believes the economy is irrelevant to the midterms is Joe Scarborough.
But while I don’t personally know anyone who thinks the economy isn’t going to be a drag on Democratic performance, in burning down this straw man, Rothenberg goes too far in dismissing structural factors that were going to make 2010 far more difficult for Democrats than 2008 no matter what Barack Obama did or didn’t do.
Since Rothenberg’s entire argument is framed in terms of House seats Democrats are likely to lose, the obvious structural factor to keep in mind is the historic tendency of the party controlling the White House to lose House seats in midterms. Stu acknowledges that, but points out that the level of losses varies (of course it does) and also points to 1998 and 2002 as years the ancient rule of midterm losses didn’t apply. That’s fine, though anyone citing those two years as relevant should probably note that the former year came in the midst of the first impeachment of a president since 1867, while the latter year came after the first attack on the continental United States since 1814. At any rate, while most Democrats early in the Obama presidency hoped the party would overcome the heavy weight of history, few predicted it as likely.
But the second structural factor is one that Rothenberg does not mention at all: the very different demographic composition of midterm versus presidential electorates, which is especially important this year given the high correlation of the 2008 vote with age (at least among white voters), and the heavy shift towards older voters in midterms. As I like to say, this means that Democrats were in trouble for the midterms the very day after the 2008 elections. That doesn’t mean everything that happened since doesn’t matter, by any means, but it does suggest pessimism about 2010 and a corresponding optimism about 2012, when the 2008 turnout patterns are likely to reemerge or even intensify.
Finally, in this kind of discussion of House “gains” and “losses,” it’s important to remember that the entire U.S. House of Representatives is up for reelection every two years. So the position of the two parties nationally is reflected by the absolute results, not which party “gains” or “loses” seats from the prior election. If Democrats hang onto control of the House, it’s a Democratic victory (albeit a much smaller one than in 2008) because they will have won a majority of seats (and presumably a majority of votes for the House nationally), and it’s not a Republican victory but instead a smaller defeat. House gains or losses are relevant to trends, of course, but shouldn’t dictate characterization of specific election results.
In other words, Rothenberg’s effort to anticipate and preempt Democratic spin about the November elections is all well and good, but there a lot of questionable assumptions about this election that need to be examined–most definitely the idea that any significant Republican gains mean the country has fundamentally changed its mind since 2008. That’s a “spin” that Republicans are already avidly promoting every day.

It’s hardly news that state and local governments around the country are laying off workers and reducing services in the current economic and fiscal climate. But putting aside services for a moment, the sheer impact of public-sector job layoffs is becoming pretty alarming:

Cash-strapped cities and counties have been cutting jobs to cope with massive budget shortfalls — and that tally could edge up to nearly 500,000 if Congress doesn’t step up to help.
Local governments are looking to eliminate 8.6% of their total full-time equivalent positions by 2012, according to a new survey released Tuesday by the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and United States Conference of Mayors.
“Local governments across the country are now facing the combined impact of decreased tax revenues, a falloff in state and federal aid and increased demand for social services,” the report said. “In this current climate of fiscal distress, local governments are forced to eliminate both jobs and services.”

That’s just local governments, mind you, not the states who are themselves facing major layoffs.
Now many conservatives would celebrate this news on grounds that eliminating some of the parasites who work for government will somehow, someway, free up resources for the private sector. I’ve never understood exactly how that’s supposed to work, but as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s a really bad time to experiment with efforts to counter-act a recession by increasing unemployment:

Conservatives have largely convinced themselves that public servants are such vile and overpaid monsters that anything that forces layoffs is a good thing and the moderates in Congress seem scared of their own shadows so nothing will be done. But economically speaking, the time for local governments to try to trim the fat is when unemployment is low and your laid-off librarian, ambulance driver, or guy who keeps the park clean can get a new job where his or her skills will plausibly be more optimally allocated. But guess what produces less social welfare than driving a bus? Sitting at home being unemployed. And so it goes down the line. Dumping people into a depressed labor market all-but-guarantees an increase in idleness along with a drop in revenue for local retailers that will lead to more idleness and waste.

Higher unemployment is simply bad. Deliberately promoting it is worse.