2010 - %3, September

McConnell's Mush

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| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 10:09 AM PDT

Over at Outside the Beltway, Dodd is unhappy with the mushy brand of campaigning he's seen so far from the Republican leadership:

Assuming (as I do) that the GOP will take at least the House, and possibly the Senate, the party must run on specific proposals in order to garner the leverage necessary to roll back the last few years of Democratic excesses. If they stick to their current (apparent) game plan and just run on not being Democrats, they will have neither a mandate to repeal Obamacare, et al, nor the will.

Unfortunately, despite a series of “Establishment” Republicans being sent packing by the base, all the signs so far indicate that McConnell and Co. just want to get their power back, not to actually do anything with it. Boehner’s been better, but the resistance to campaigning on a theme of, say, Paul Ryan’s Roadmap is unmistakable. The party need not endorse the specifics of Ryan’s plan in every particular to set forth a plan of action along those lines.

Well, yes, except for one thing: if they did that, they'd lose. The public doesn't want to hear about spending cuts except in the most general, stemwinding terms, and a concrete plan of action "along those lines" would be massively unpopular with the electorate. McConnell and Boehner know this perfectly well. So instead they serve up mush.

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“You got the Belgians running Europe?”

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| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 9:43 AM PDT

Tony Blair on George Bush:

One of the most ludicrous caricatures of George is that he was a dumb idiot who stumbled into the presidency. No one stumbles into that job, and the history of American presidential campaigns is littered with the corpses of those who were supposed to be brilliant but who nonetheless failed because brilliance is not enough....

To succeed in US politics, of that of the UK, you have to be more than clever. You have to be able to connect and you have to be able to articulate that connection in plain language. The plainness of the language then leads people to look past the brainpower involved. Reagan was clever. Thatcher was clever. And sometimes the very plainness touches something else: a simplicity that is the product of a decisive nature.

And then there are the other times:

In his new book, A Journey, Mr Blair writes that the former US president was confused by the presence of Guy Verhofstadt at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa.

“He didn’t know or recognise Guy, whose advice he listened to with considerable astonishment,” Mr Blair writes. “He then turned to me and whispered, ‘Who is this guy?’ ‘He is the prime minister of Belgium,’ I said.

Belgium? George said, clearly aghast at the possible full extent of his stupidity. ‘Belgium is not part of the G8’.”

Mr Blair explained to Mr Bush that Mr Verhofstadt was there as “president of Europe”. Belgium held the presidency of the EU council at the time.

Mr Bush responded: “You got the Belgians running Europe?” before shaking his head, “now aghast at our stupidity”, Mr Blair writes.

OK, fine. This doesn't mean Bush was dumb. Just....what's the right word to describe this? Uninformed? Incurious? Provincial? "A simplicity that is the product of a decisive nature"?1 I mean, I know the guy was good at recognizing people, so it's not that. I guess he just didn't give a damn.

But I admit that this is mostly just an excuse to have fun taking a potshot at Bush. I kinda miss that. Sarah Palin is too easy a target.

1Really, you have to give Blair credit for this phrase. I wonder how many alternatives he had to cross out before he came up with it? What it means, obviously, is that Bush was a shallow idler who was allergic to learning any actual facts that might get in the way of doing whatever he wanted to do in the first place. But Blair's formulation sounds so much better, doesn't it?

Breaking Down Unemployment

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| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 8:43 AM PDT

Is our current sky-high unemployment structural or cyclical? Roughly speaking, cyclical unemployment just means the economy sucks and everyone is doing badly. Structural unemployment means that certain industries are doing badly, and the economy needs time to adjust as people leave declining industries and get retrained to work in healthier ones. Policywise, the difference is simple: we think we know how to attack cyclical unemployment: looser monetary policy, more federal stimulus spending, and so forth. But structural unemployment is a tougher nut. There are things you can do to address it, but not much. Mostly, you just have to gut it out.

So which do we have now? I think Annie Lowrey has the right take:

The problem seems to me to be both: The unemployment is cyclical and structural. Most sectors have suffered from the turndown, but job losses are concentrated in some industries: In residential construction, they are down 38 percent since 2006. (Between Aug. 2007 and Dec. 2009, unemployment in construction quintupled from about 5 percent to about 25 percent.) In health care and education, however, jobs are up.

Here is a chart I made from Bureau of Labor Statistics data that shows the phenomenon. (The chart shows total jobs in major sectors since 2005.) Most sectors — retail trade, business services, wholesale trade, finance — have had moderate job losses one could reasonably chalk up to an economy-wide lack of demand. Let’s think of those as sectors characterized mostly by cyclical job loss. Then, there is manufacturing and construction. Jobs there have taken a nose dive, and the problem seems to be structural. Moreover, the job gains in education and health might thought to be structural as well.

The "normal" unemployment level is about five points less than it is today. I wouldn't be surprised if perhaps three of those points are cyclical and two are structural. Unfortunately, too many people look at the structural component and throw up their hands. There's nothing we can do about that! But we can do something about the part that's cyclical. And even if we can't get back to normal immediately, isn't it worth it to get from 9.5% unemployment to 7% unemployment while we wait for the construction industry to rebound — or for all its excess workers to eventually find new lines of work? Of course it is. So what are we waiting for?

Will Labor Day Gridlock Hurt the Dems?

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| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 7:34 AM PDT

This weekend congressional Democrats may rue the day that they required states to put up big promo signs on road construction projects telling drivers that it was funded by the stimulus. That's because, according to the Wall Street Journal, the record number of stimulus-funded road construction projects are threatening to cause huge traffic jams in lots of major metro areas around the country, potentially putting a serious damper on the last vacation of the summer for many travelers.

Joe White writes:

Roads and bridges need to be rebuilt and repaired, and in many parts of the country summer is the best time to get the work done. This year, the normal hassles of dodging construction delays have been exacerbated by some 12,000 or more highway projects funded by the federal stimulus program.

More travelers will be on the road, too. Compared with 2009, when the recession-era travel buzz word was "staycation," the number of people taking a significant trip this weekend is expected to be up nearly 10%, auto club AAA predicts. Gas is under $3 a gallon, on average, so it's no surprise that an estimated 9 out of 10 of those travelers will likely be doing exactly what I plan to do: Driving a long way in their cars.

The traffic jams couldn't come at a worse time for Democrats. Already they are heading into the final stretch of this year's midterm election campaign season facing a host of grim polling numbers suggesting that they could lose not just the House, but the Senate too. But those polls are based on data from calls conducted BEFORE millions of American hit the road this weekend. Now, instead of winning kudos for creating jobs with all those road construction projects, Democrats could suffer the wrath of millions of Americans who got stuck in traffic. After all, thanks to the big signs on the road, all those Americans mired in endless traffic jams will know exactly who to blame for their troubles.

A Sense of Where We Are: Oklahoma!

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| Wed Sep. 1, 2010 6:51 AM PDT


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