As viewers of the Daily Show’s occasional “Thank you, South Carolina!” features know, the Palmetto State has continued to burnish its reputation for exceptionally wacky politics this year.
But after writing up a preview of today’s Tennessee primary for FiveThirtyEight yesterday, I’d have to say the Volunteer State is making its own bid for dubious fame:

[Tennessee features] the nation’s most expensive House primary (GOP TN-8), a primary where the Club for Growth accidentally directed readers of a mailer to a phone sex line (GOP TN-3), a primary where a white Jewish incumbent has earned the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus in a campaign against the African-American former mayor of Memphis (Dem TN-9), and a primary where Sarah Palin delved into a crowded GOP field in a staunch Democratic district to endorse her latest “Mama Grizzly” (GOP TN-5). And all that fun doesn’t even include America’s latest viral video sensation, Republican gubernatorial candidate Basil Marceaux.

And that’s just scratching the surface, since Tennessee’s primary field also includes one major Republican gubernatorial candidate (a resident, BTW, of the famous C Street complex run by the secretive theocratic group The Family) who’s been threatening secession, and another who wondered out loud if Islam was not an actual religion but a “cult.” There’s one House candidate under attack because the radio station he owns plays hip-hop music, and another who is battling to protect the citizens of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from the awful specter of Sharia law.
The sheer nastiness of the Tennessee primaries led one congressional candidate to put out a press release observing: “We’re not picking someone to represent us at the next World Wrestling Federation SummerSlam.”
That’s debatable, I guess. But aficionados of the absurd (and for that matter, Democrats, since most of the fireworks are in GOP primaries) can only regret that Tennessee is the rare southern state without a majority-vote requirement, which means we won’t have the spectacle of runoffs to continue the craziness for another few weeks.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So let’s say you’re a Republican politician who’s been working the far right side of the political highway for years, getting little national attention other than the occasional shout-out in Human Events. Or let’s say you’re a sketchy business buccaneer with a few million smackers burning a hole in your pocket, and you’ve decided that you’d like to live in the governor’s mansion for a while, but you can’t get the local GOP to see you as anything more than a walking checkbook who funds other people’s dreams.
What do you do? That’s easy: Get yourself in front of the loudest parade in town by becoming a Tea Party Activist!
There has been incessant discussion over the last year about the size, character, and intentions of the Tea Party rank-and-file. But, by and large, the political discussion has passed over another defining phenomenon: The beatific capacity of Tea Party membership, which enables virtually anyone with ambition to whitewash his hackishness–and transform from a has-been or huckster into an idealist on a crusade.
After all, to become a “Tea Party favorite” or a “Tea Party loyalist,” all a politician has to do is say that he or she is one–and maybe grab an endorsement from one of many hundreds of local groups around the country. It’s even possible to become indentified as the “Tea Party” candidate simply by entering a primary against a Republican who voted for TARP, the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, or No Child Left Behind. It’s not like there’s much upside to distancing oneself from the movement. Most Republican pols are as friendly as can be to the Tea Party; and it’s a rare, self-destructive elephant who would emulate Lindsey Graham’s dismissal of it all as a passing fad (in public at least).
Here, we’ll take a look at two specific types of politicians who have been especially eager to embrace the Tea Party movement: the fringier of conservative ideologues, for one, and also the self-funded ego freaks who can easily pose as “outsiders,” because no “insiders” would take them seriously. Let’s call these, respectively, the windbags and the moneybags.
By “fringier” conservative ideologues, I mean those who have argued, year in and year out, sometimes for decades, that even the conservative Republican Party simply is not conservative enough. Many of these politicians would be considered washed-up and isolated, or at least eccentric, in an era when “Party Wrecking” was still treated as a cardinal GOP sin. But now it’s as if they’ve been granted a license to kill. One classic example of this type is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who was considered such a crank in the Senate that he was often stuck eating lunch alone as recently as 2008. His views, for example that Social Security and public schools are symbols of the seduction of Americans by socialism, were not long ago considered far outside the GOP mainstream. Now, in no small part because of his identification with the Tea Party Movement, DeMint has become an avenging angel roaming across the country to smite RINOs in Republican primaries, his imprimatur sought by candidates far from the Palmetto State.
Then there’s the new House Tea Party Caucus, chaired by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, best known for suggesting that House Democrats be investigated for treason. Its members include a rich assortment of long-time conservative cranks, including Steve (“Racial profiling is an important part of law enforcement”) King, Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson, Paul (“We’ve elected a Marxist to be President of the United States”) Broun, Dan (Vince Foster Was Murdered!) Burton, and Phil (National Journal’s Most Conservative House Member in 2007) Gingrey. The key here is that these are not freshly minted “outsiders”: Burton has been in Congress for 28 years, Wilson for ten, King and Gingrey for eight. The oldest member of the House, Ralph Hall of Texas, who has been around for 30 years, is also a member of the caucus.
Even some of the younger Tea Party firebrands didn’t exactly emerge from their living rooms on April 15, 2009, to battle the stimulus legislation and Obamacare. Marco Rubio of Florida, after all, was first elected to the state legislature ten years ago and served as House Speaker under the protective wing of his political godfather, Jeb Bush. Sharron Angle first ran for office 20 years ago, and was elected to the Nevada legislature twelve years back. And of course the Pauls, father and son, are hardly political neophytes–they have just begun to look relevant again because the Tea Party movement has shifted the GOP in their direction
And, in addition to the hard-right pols who’ve emerged into the sunshine of GOP respectability, the “outsider” meme surrounding the Tea Party movement has also created running room for well-funded opportunists–the “moneybags.”

Read more…

Yesterday’s primaries in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri didn’t get a whole lot of national attention, but they produced some interesting results.
As I mentioned yesterday, MI gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder ran a campaign very much at odds with the CW that the only way to win a GOP primary is to loudly and repeatedly proclaim one’s fidelity to conservative principles and policy positions. The self-proclaimed “nerd” won handily, with 36% of the vote as compared to 27% for congressman Pete Hoekstra and a very disappointing 23% for Attorney General Mike Cox.
Since Snyder explicitly appealed for crossover votes, political detectives (myself included) will try to figure out if that was a big factor in his victory. It was rather interesting that turnout tilted 2-1 Republican in a state that hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential contest since 1988. Certainly the idea that Democrats got involved in a Republican primary will be a source of consolation to conservatives who are none too happy with the results.
Meanwhile, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate known for “centrism,” House Speaker Andy Dillon, didn’t do so well, losing to labor-backed Lansing mayor Virg Bernero by a 59-41 margin. Bernero edged Dillon in his Detroit-area base and then waxed him in heavily unionized areas elsewhere.
The other big Democratic news from Michigan was the defeat of Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick by state senator Hansen Clarke, a development generally attributed to the disastrous decline and fall of her son, former Detroit mayor and current prison inmate Kwame Kilpatrick.
Elsewhere Republicans made the most news and the CW pretty much held. In KS, in a contest dominated by conflicting claims of superior conservatism, Rep. Jerry Moran defeated Rep. Todd Tiahrt by a 50-45 margin, mainly by running up a bigger vote in his own House district. In terms of national endorsements, it was a win for Jim DeMint and a loss for Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo.
In House races, the big winner on the night was probably the Club for Growth, which backed winning candidates in three crowded GOP primaries (MI-3, KS-1 and KS-4). In MI-1, Bart Stupak’s district, where a competitive race is expected in November, add another data point to the Every Vote Counts argument, as exactly one vote separated the two leading Republican candidates (a recount is pending).
And offsetting their bad news from the Michigan governor’s race, conservatives today are crowing about the results of a referendum in Missouri over a proposed state law aimed at blocking implementation of federal health reform legislation. Proposition C, which essentially challenges the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by outlawing mandated health insurance, won by a 71-29 margin, which is very impressive until you realize that primary turnout in Missouri was 2-1 Republican. In any event, the referendum will have no practical effect, but that won’t keep conservatives from bragging about it.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I don’t agree with Paul Krugman about everything. But I do agree with him about this: It’s economically stupid and morally wrong to tolerate high unemployment for an extended period if there’s anything we could responsibly do to avoid it.
Current prospects are gloomy. Long-term unemployment is at a post-Depression high, and recovery will be painfully slow. It took a little more than two years to regain the jobs lost during the 1981-82 recession, about two and a half years after the 1990-1991 recession, and more than three and a half years after the 2001 recession. The job loss is much worse this time: six percent from the 2007 peak, versus three percent in 1981-82 and two percent in both 1990-91 and 2001. Even if job creation were to double its current pace, it would take until 2014 to regain the job total of late 2007, and longer still to attain what passes for full employment. In the interim, the economic waste and human misery will be staggering.
So what is to be done?
Setting aside the obvious political obstacles, further Keynesian stimulus would probably prove unequal to the task. Among other problems, a substantial portion of increased demand will leak out of the U.S. economy through higher imports, as it has already begun to do, and households would use some of the rest to pay down debt and increase savings.
Nor would returning to the New Deal–ie. direct job creation and hiring by the federal government–work as well as it did 75 years ago. The cost per job would be much higher, and the vastly more complex structure of regulations at every level of the federal system would bind a 21st century Harry Hopkins with myriad Lilliputian threads.
Fortunately, there is an alternative staring us in the face. Over the past generation, we have systematically underinvested in the foundation of an efficient economy and society–namely, infrastructure. Anyone who has travelled in recent years knows that our systems of transportation and information are no longer world-class. In the Washington DC area alone, the once magnificent Metro is staggering under the weight of deferred maintenance and outdated safety systems. Inadequate roads and highways yield some of the worse commutes in the nation, with negative consequences for worker productivity and economic efficiency as well as family life.
The traditional response is to use the federal government’s taxing authority to raise infrastructure funds, and appropriations to fund specific projects. This model has hit a wall: not only will it be very difficult to raise taxes in current or foreseeable circumstances, but there’s also the problem of how local and special interests influence, even determine, project selection for reasons that have nothing to do with economic efficiency.
We need a new model. Today, we have trillions of dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines earning almost no return, and millions of long-term unemployed workers who would be thrilled to receive a steady paycheck again. The task is to bring these two factors of production together around projects that make sense.
Setting aside details, the new model has three key structural features.
1.To attract private capital, projects must earn a reasonable return, which means increased reliance on user fees (tolls or levies per unit consumed) rather than general taxation.
2.Because most infrastructure projects generate public goods (such as economic growth in the areas it opens up) as well as private goods (such as easier commutes), user fees cannot capture their total worth. The market, then, will undersupply these goods unless public subsidies fill the gap. The new model requires a shift from traditional appropriations to subsidies based on the economics of individual projects.
3.To promote economic efficiency and growth, projects must be chosen on economic rather than political grounds. The new model requires a shift away from congressional dominance of the selection process toward an empowered board substantially insulated from day-to-day political pressures.
An infrastructure bank–versions of which have already been introduced in Congress–is one way of meeting these three criteria. No doubt there are other institutional designs that would as well.
The bottom line is this: Projects selected and funded in the manner I’ve sketched would help build the economy for the long-term at minimum cost to taxpayers while creating large numbers of new jobs that can only be performed here in the United States. Win-win-win, one would think. Isn’t this new model something that elected officials should be able to agree on, regardless of party and ideology? If they can’t, it will be yet more evidence of ideology trumping common sense … and of a handful of veteran appropriators more interested in preserving their own power than in promoting the public good.

Today voters (20-25% of them, anyway) will trudge to the polls in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri to choose candidates for the November ballot. I’ve done a comprehensive preview over at FiveThirtyEight, and another at Progressive Fix will go up later today, but have a few additional thoughts here.
First of all, in terms of Republican primaries, it’s interesting that the main ideological contention in most races isn’t supposed affiliation with the Tea Party movement, but more traditional conservative preoccupations like abortion. This seems to be a midwestern thing to some extent (though the fine gradations of anti-abortion politics are also a big deal in the Republican gubernatorial runoff in Georgia), but it shows that the “uprising” associated with the Tea Party movement has meshed with the traditional agenda of the conservative movement, regardless of what we read about the laser-like focus of the Tea Folk on fiscal issues.
In at least one case, the Kansas Republican Senate primary, both candidates (Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran) have pretty much checked each other on association with the Tea Party movement, both having become charter members of Michele Bachmann’s House Tea Party Caucus, and both enjoying endorsements from Tea Folk heroes (Tiahrt’s been endorsed by Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, while Moran’s gotten the nod from Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn). So as a fascinating post from National Review’s Kathryn Lopez indicates, those looking for the “true conservative” in the race are getting really down in the weeds of discerning relative levels of commitment to the anti-abortion cause.
Second of all, today’s GOP primaries have an assortment of congressional contests with extremely crowded fields, in states that do not have a 50% requirement. So it’s possible we are going to see some really eccentric nominees who win with relatively small percentages of the vote.
And third of all, as noted in a separate FiveThirtyEight post, we are witnessing a very rare phenomenon in the Michigan governor’s race: a Republican candidate, Rick Snyder, who doesn’t seem to be competing for the True Conservative mantle, and in fact, has pursued endorsements from the state’s two most infamous RINOs, former Gov. Bill Milliken (who in turn endorsed John Kerry and Barack Obama for president), and former congressman Joe Schwarz, who’s set up an operation for Snyder aimed at attracting Democratic and independent crossover votes.
If Snyder wins–and he actually ran first in a recent EPIC-MRA poll of likely Republican primary voters–we could either see emulators of this strategy emerge elsewhere, or, more likely, some seriously angry talk among conservatives about how to make sure it doesn’t.
In any event, the results today will be interesting, and not just to the citizens of the three states directly involved.

Conservatives have succeeded in hustling many pundits with the meme that America is a center-right country. As a result, the “move right and win,” strategy has prevailed in GOP circles. But Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy, sees it a little differently. Not one to shoot from the lip without statistical corroboration, Abramowitz a TDS advisory Board member, explains it this way in his post “Will Republicans Blow It? Tacking right doesn’t always guarantee victory on Election Day” in The American Prospect:

One way of addressing this question is to look at the relationship between the ideologies of congressional incumbents and their electoral performance. The advantage of focusing on incumbents is that their voting records can be used to gauge their overall liberalism or conservatism. For example, in the current Senate, based on a widely used scale called DW-NOMINATE, Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, and Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, have the most liberal voting records, while Republicans Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma have the most conservative.
In order to evaluate the impact of ideology on electoral performance, I conducted a statistical analysis of all contested Senate races involving incumbents between 1992 and 2008. I controlled for other factors that influence election results, such as the strength of the parties in the incumbent’s state, the strength of the challenger, and the political climate at the time of the election.
The results showed that for Republican incumbents, conservatism had a significant negative influence on electoral support. A 10 percent increase in conservatism was associated with a decline of about 1 percentage point in the incumbent’s vote. This may not sound like much, but a 10 percent decrease in conservatism might have saved seven of the 21 GOP incumbents who were defeated in these elections, including George Allen Jr. and Conrad Burns in 2006 and Norm Coleman and Ted Stevens in 2008.

But does the relationship cut the other way? Not so much, according to Abramowitz:

What about the other party? Interestingly, for Democratic incumbents, liberalism did not have a significant impact on electoral performance. Only nine Democratic senators lost their seats between 1992 and 2008. Having a strongly liberal voting record neither helped nor hurt Democratic incumbents, which may reflect the fact that liberal Democrats generally don’t emphasize ideological themes to the extent that conservative Republicans do.

Abramowitz cautions that it’s unclear whether a similar relationship prevails concerning the ideological leanings of challengers or open-seat candidates. But he nonetheless concludes that “..the evidence from two decades worth of Senate races involving Republican incumbents does raise serious doubts about the “move right and win” theory…While ideological moderates may have a hard time winning GOP primaries these days, they make stronger general-election candidates than hard-line conservatives.”
And with GOP moderates an endangered species in the 2010 mid terms, that is good news for Dems, who hope to hold their majorities.

Just the other day I was wondering if it was a sign of hard times that movies and television shows seem to be featuring obscenely wealthy people, even more than is usually the case. Similarly, it seems like there are an awful lot of people running for office this year who have personal money to burn, having clearly done very well financially even as their fellow-citizens suffered.
I still can’t prove my theory about movies and television, but according to a well-researched Jeanne Cummings article in Politico, this is indeed a very big year for self-funding candidates:

About 11 percent of the combined $657 million raised by all 2010 candidates has come in the way of self-financing — nearly double the 6 percent measured at the same juncture in the 2006 midterm, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.
Of the $134 million raised by all Republican House challengers as of June 30, a whopping 35 percent of the cash came from the candidates’ own bank accounts, the analysis found. Among Democrats, the percentage of self-made donations was just 18 percent.
If such spending stays on course, the Institute’s Executive Director Michael Malbin expects the GOP challengers’ field to eclipse the 38 percent self-financing high-water mark set by Democrats in 2002. “This is or is near a record,” he said.

Much of Cummings’ article focuses on the relatively low success rate of self-funded candidates in prior elections, and explores different reasons for that phenomenon, from lack of self-discipline to specific issues over how the candidate got rich to begin with. Several well-known candidates this year could have some of those issues:

Ohio businessman Jim Renacci, who is challenging freshman Democratic Rep. John Boccieri, for example, is expected to be attacked for going to court to avoid paying taxes on $13.7 million in income.
In the California Senate race, Republican Carly Fiorina, former head of Hewlett-Packard, is being criticized for laying off thousands of workers and taking a $42 million golden parachute.
[Florida Senate candidate Jeff] Greene is coming under fire for the way he made millions off the subprime mortgage meltdown. Those criticisms could be especially powerful in a state hit hard by foreclosures. And his relatively thin connections to Florida and prior celebrity lifestyle in Los Angeles — Mike Tyson was the best man at his wedding — are also expected to be used to paint him as an unsuitable senator for the Sunshine State.
And in Connecticut, [Senate candidate Linda] McMahon is trying to finesse using the wealth from her WWE enterprise while still distancing herself from the scandals — from steroids to sexual harassment — that have plagued the professional wrestling industry.

But as Cummings makes plain, rich candidates invariably claim they’ll be independent because they aren’t spending anybody else’s money, and a lot of voters buy it. It’s another good argument for public financing of campaigns, but until such time as that reform is enacted, there will be plenty of people who look in the mirror one fine morning, see a future governor, congressman, senator or president, and decide to share their resplendence with the rest of us.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has bad and worse news for Republicans who think the road to mid-term glory is paved with Democrats who oppose their tax cuts and support repeal of the Administration’s health care reform package. in his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ out today, Teixeira explains:

…Just 30 percent of respondents in a recent Pew poll favored keeping all the Bush tax cuts in place, while 27 percent said the tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed and the rest of the cuts should stay in place, and another 31 percent said all the Bush tax cuts should be repealed.

So much for the most widely-worshipped of GOP sacred cows. Then there is that other revered cause, the trashing of health care reform, about which Teixeira notes,

…The most recent Kaiser Health tracking poll now has 50 percent voicing a favorable reaction to the new law, versus just 35 percent unfavorable. This reverses a 44-41 unfavorable verdict from two months ago.

Democrats may have their problems in terms of historical patterns respecting the upcoming mid term elections. But public support for repeal of health care reform and irresponsible tax cuts are emphatically not the huge GOP assets conservative pundits and leaders have argued.

Anyone who has been active in politics since the prediluvian era of the 1990s can probably remember a time when a central event of every weekday was the arrival on the fax machine of The Hotline, once the Daily Bread of the chattering classes.
You can revisit those days–or, if you are younger, discover them–via a long article at Politico by Keach Hagey that examines The Hotline’s past, present and future in some detail. It certainly does bring back memories:

Howard Mortman, a former columnist and editor at The Hotline, remembers the first time he saw the process — a blinking frenzy of subscribers dialing in by modem, one by one, to get their pre-lunch politics fix.
“We would publish at 11:30, and you could go downstairs and see the lights flicker as people downloaded The Hotline from the telephone bulletin board,” he said. “At that time, in 1995, that was cutting-edge technology.”
Today, The Hotline is still putting out its exhaustive aggregation of cleverly titled political tidbits at 11:30 a.m., though subscribers hit a refresh button instead of a fax number to get it. But the sense of cutting-edge technology and unique content is gone, eclipsed by an exponentially expanding universe of political websites, blogs, Twitter feeds, Google alerts and mobile apps that offer much of what a $15,000 annual office membership to The Hotline offers — but faster and for free.

In effect, Hotline was the first “aggregator,” and as a result was an exceptionally efficient and even cost-effective way to obtain political news at a time when clipping services were the main alternative. And for all of The Hotline‘s gossipy Washington insider attitudes, it did cover campaigns exhaustively, from coast to coast, in a way that was virtually unique at the time.
If you are interested in the process whereby The Hotline has struggled to survive in the online era, or in the cast of media celebrities who got their start there, check out the entire article, with the appropriate grain of salt in recognition of the fact that Politico views itself as a successor institution.
The takeaway for me, though, is the reminder that for all the maddening things about blogs and online political coverage generally, it’s really remarkable how much is now available to anyone, for free, 24-7–material that is shared by the DC commentariat and, well, anybody who cares to use it. In The Hotline’s heyday, its subscribers (concentrated in Washington but scattered around the country) really did represent a separate class with specialized access to information that created and sustained a distinct culture.
If you have money to burn, there are still paywalls you can climb to secure a privileged perch from which to observe American politics, just as you can obviously learn things living and working in Washington or frequenting its real or virtual watering holes that wouldn’t be obvious to others. But we have come a long way. And it’s actually wonderful that the entire hep political world no longer comes to a stop shortly before noon, in some sort of secular Hour of Prayer, in anticipation of The Word rolling off the fax machine.

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.