Assault of thoughts - Politics/polling edition - 11/4/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

I don't usually get too invested in politics unless there is a historical, ideological/philosophical, or policy issue to talk about - but there are a few interesting electoral/polling things to go over:

- Andrew Sullivan ponders how the new Republicans will react to raising the country's debt limit. He predicts there may be enough votes against it, and quotes Tim Rutten who says that would be "apocalyptic". I'm not entirely sure if that's true. So what would happen if they refused to approve it? Marginal spending cuts, tax increases, and accounting gimmickry to cover it. It would not be good for the economy at all, but I'm not sure it would send shock waves. Our creditors are going to have the first lien on our revenue, and until that changes I can't imagine "apocalyptic" is the right word to describe what would happen. Certainly it wouldn't be good, but Republicans are interested in halting spending, not snubbing creditors.

- Paul Krugman argues that nobody cares about process and chides the Obama administration for spending too much political capital on health reform and too little on stimulus. This is similar to a lot of the far left complaints that Obama lost because he was too centrist, but I think it's a little more sensible. The Krugman point is more that Obama didn't do macroeconomic policy right, which leaves us with a bad economy, which is ultimately the biggest factor in this election loss. Populists grow out of bad economies, and it would be a lot harder to spin Obama as a socialist if employment was lower. This I can agree with, although I disagree with a lot of other far-left critiques of Obama that complain about his centrism. Krugman ties it up nicely and probably pretty accurately, albeit perhaps a little optimistically: "If Obama had used fancy footwork and 2 AM sessions to pass a big public works program, and this program had brought unemployment down, Republicans would be screaming about the process — and Democrats would have comfortably held control of Congress."

- Jonathan Catalan blogs his reaction to the failure of Proposition 19 in California (the most exciting ballot measure I got to vote on was a bond initiative...)

- Evan shared with me the unfortunate loss of a candidate and acquaintance of his, Ben Lowe in Illinois's 6th district. Lowe is a twenty-something graduate of Evan's very well-regarded evangelical undergraduate alma mater, Wheaton College, who ran an uphill battle against Peter Roskam - a Republican with a firm grasp of the district that actually attends Evan's old church. The updates of the race that Evan sent me really drove home how dumb and ironic some of the Republican rhetoric has been. Roskam went on and on about Washington insiders and bureaucrats and the people rebuking politicians, and elitist Democrats, etc. - and the guy is running against a young kid that raised less than three percent of the money he did. Roskam's biggest donor? Goldman "we own Washington D.C." Sachs. Lowe's biggest donor? No-name, private, Presbyterian, Whitman University. Lowe frequently mentioned the environment and working families in his campaign... Roskam harped on the "liberal agenda" and even used Bible stories as a political prop to attack "the left". And all the while Roskam refused to debate and wouldn't even acknowledge the fact that he had an opponent. Every time Evan would update me on this it would piss me off in the same way that it pisses me off when a millionaire former-governor or a tenured university professor has the condescension to call me an elitist that doesn't understand regular Americans. Anyway, Lowe lost but it may not be the end of his political career. Who knows. Thanks to Evan for the regular updates on this particular campaign.

- Andrew Sullivan shares the age composition of the 2008 and 2010 election cycle. Republicans and Tea Partiers often try to claim that they are looking out for the interests of future generations... well the future generations themselves seem to beg to differ.

- Finally, Andrew Sullivan identifies a Keynesian (that's KEYNESian, not Keynan) majority of the electorate. Forty percent of the electorate favors deficit reduction while 54 percent of the electorate favors tax cuts and stimulus spending (the problem, of course, is that the share of the 54% that support tax cuts and the share that support stimulus spending don't like each other very much).

UPDATE: I did want to mention one election I just learned about last night that I'm very happy with - Alan Grayson (D-Florida) lost to his Republican opponent. Grayson has been bothering me long before he got the attention of the Daily Show crowd... with Ron Paul he's a big threat to central bank independence, which is an important defense against irresponsibly inflationary monetary policy. He's also just an old-style demagogue - slandering his political opponents rather than marshalling real arguments. We haven't seen that much (certainly some) of that on the left lately but Grayson represented a disconcerting example of it that I was a little worried about. I'm glad he's out after only two years. Actually, this election wasn't quite as bad as a lot of people are making it out to be - quite a few of the Republican demagogues lost too, which is nice. It's still probably going to be a pretty rough Congress in these next two years.