Mid-Term Post Mortem

I’m a little late to this but, hey; it’s been a busy week.

As expected, Republicans have won a sizeable majority in the House of Representatives and failed to win the Senate, despite making some gains there as well, resulting in divided government for at least the next two years.

Republicans were the big winners, but why? As I’ve pointed out several times in the past (here, here, and here), it’s sickening to think that the same folks that (a) were largely responsible for the structural weakening of the American economy and the germination of the financial crisis over the past decade; and (b) did everything in their power to block the Democrats’ economic recovery agenda over the past two years, have now been rewarded with large electoral gains. Now, obviously, the economy is still in rough shape, what with unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent. But does anyone truly believe that the recovery would have been stronger and quicker under Republican governance?

Which brings us to those pundits who maintain, “if only Obama and the Democrats had spent more time ‘focusing’ on the economy, growth would be higher, unemployment lower, and Democrats would still have a Congressional majority”. Of course, as Paul Krugman points out, these people fail to specify what a greater “focus” on the economy would have consisted of. Would greater “focus” consist of a larger, more robust stimulus package? Or simply the president touring the country, repeating over and over, “We’re totally focused on the economy”? Of course, as it turns out, those who assert that the president hasn’t focused enough on jobs and the economy generally wanted a smaller stimulus package (or none at all) and have attempted to block (oftentimes successfully) all subsequent economic recovery legislation in the Senate, from extension of unemployment insurance to tax cuts for small businesses to aid for states and municipalities.

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have noted, we are essentially “giving the keys back to the folks who crashed the car.” Very disheartening, indeed.