Are Umarried Women the Key to 2014 Midterm Elections?

Despite protests to the contrary, the Republican Party is maintaining its war on women when not temporarily distracted by the GOP's war on the poor.  The GOP opposes equal pay legislation that would protect women and seeks to oversee every intimate aspect of women's bodies, and in some states are pushing for laws that would make it harder for women to escape abusive marriages.   Thus, the claim that the GOP is not anti-woman - other than perhaps those who opt to stay home barefoot and pregnant - simply do not match up with objective reality.  A piece in Politico looks at the role unmarried women may play in deciding the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections.  Here are excerpts:

[M]arital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.

A majority of American households are now unmarried, and nearly a quarter of the presidential-year electorate were unmarried women. But marriage is now politicized too. Nearly 60 percent of those who call themselves Republicans are married and three-quarters of the conservative Republican base are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.

But if you want to know why unmarried women are now the focus, it is not because they are assuredly Democrats, or even assuredly voters. In an off-year election, and when so many are struggling economically, unmarried women are no guarantee at the polls.

In our most recent national survey, just two-thirds of unmarried women who voted in 2012 said they were almost certain to vote in November, and 10.5 million unmarried women who voted in 2012 are project to stay home in November.

And in our latest poll done for NPR – conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic – the Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot (44 to 43 percent), but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.So, if you are a Democrat and want to change your electoral fortunes in November, unmarried women are the biggest and best opportunity. Right now, these are votes on the table

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce. That is the main finding of the research we have conducted over the last couple of years. For most Americans, the economy is a challenge every day.

[O]ur research shows that what motivates them to vote are economic issues, particularly those that affect working women and mothers. In Virginia, much of the Democrats’ advertising was focused on abortion and contraception and no doubt increased Democratic support, but it did not raise turnout among unmarried women.

The take away for Democrats is that they must not only stress the issues of equal pay and contraception/abortion, but they must also stress that the Democrats are better for economic prosperity for all and that it is GOP obstructionism/policies that have  deliberately held America;s economy back as the GOP sought to destroy Barack Obama - and millions of Americans along with him.

Thanks to the GOP, Five Million Americans Won't Get Health Insurance

As the year 2013 comes to a close, it is worthwhile to recall one last time some of the "gifts" that the Republican Party has bestowed on Americans: (i) an economy that is still struggling thanks to GOP opposition to economic stimulus and drastic cuts in spending at the state and federal level, (ii) over  one million unemployed workers who have been kicked to the curb and cut off from emergency assistance, (iii) the continued degradation of the separation of church and state, (iv) no progress on comprehensive immigration reform, and (v) over five million Americans who will not receive health insurance.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this last "gift" to the American people:

Do you need health care coverage? Are you too “rich” to qualify for Medicaid but too poor to receive subsidies under the Affordable Care Act? Do you live in a Republican-controlled state? If you answered yes to all of the above, then you’re out-of-luck. Here’s the Associated Press:

About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America. […]

The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children.

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser’s analysis found.

This will impact as many people as the disruption in the private insurance market that generated a month’s worth of outrage over President Obama’s (broken) promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” The key difference, however, is that . . . .  these Americans—who, barring a change in the law, are stuck in the coverage—are poor, marginalized, and ignored.

On that note, in fact, it should be said that this gap will deepen existing racial inequalities: The 25 states that have rejected the expansion are home to the majority of the nation’s poor, uninsured blacks, a direct product of our long history of racist policy making.

The Republican Party is the reason these people won’t receive health insurance and gain access to valuable medical services. The Medicaid expansion is fully funded by the federal government for the first three years, and mostly funded after that. It’s a win-win for the state and its residents. But in the twenty-five states that won’t participate, the GOP governors and legislators would rather deprive their citizens of needed benefits than cooperate with President Obama and the Affordable Care Act.

Remember this when Republicans insist they have an agenda for low-income families; if that were true, the party wouldn’t be united in denying health insurance to millions of poor Americans.

American Workers Have Unprecedented Anxiety About Jobs

The Republican Party gives a lot of lip service to caring about jobs and the economy, yet rather than pass meaningful legislation to spur the economy upward, the GOP's sole focus - when not maligning gays to please the Christofascists - is obstruction of anything and everything Barack Obama proposes, the Affordable Health Care Act in particular.  Meanwhile, other than the wealthy who are getting richer, the rest of us are experiencing downward mobility and increased fears of job loss and/or whether or not we can pay our bills and support our families.  The GOP truly has its head up its ass.  A new survey reveals just how anxious many Americans are about jobs and the economy.  The Washington Post has details.  Here are excerpts:

American workers are living with unprecedented economic anxiety, four years into a recovery that has left so many of them stuck in place. That anxiety is concentrated heavily among low-income workers such as Stewart.

More than six in 10 workers in a recent Washington Post-Miller Center poll worry that they will lose their jobs to the economy, surpassing concerns in more than a dozen surveys dating to the 1970s. Nearly one in three, 32 percent, say they worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, also a record high, according to the joint survey, which explores Americans’ changing definition of success and their confidence in the country’s future.
Job insecurities have always been higher among low-income Americans, but they typically rose and fell across all levels of the income ladder. Today, workers at the bottom have drifted away, occupying their own island of in­security.

Fifty-four percent of workers making $35,000 or less now worry “a lot” about losing their jobs, compared with 37 percent of ­lower-income workers in 1992 and an identical number in 1975, according to surveys by Time magazine, CNN and Yankelovich, a market research firm.
Lower-paid workers also worry far more about making ends meet. Fully 85 percent of them fear that their families’ income will not be enough to meet expenses, up 25 points from a 1971 survey asking an identical question. Thirty-two percent say they worry all the time about meeting expenses, a number that has almost tripled since the 1970s.

Americans’ economic perceptions often divide along political lines; supporters of the incumbent president are usually more optimistic about the job market and the health of the economy. But that’s not the case with this new anxiety. Once you control for economic and demographic factors, there is no partisan divide. There’s no racial divide, either, and no gender gap. It also doesn’t matter where you live.

There is a reason workers like Stewart are so nervous in today’s economy. That reason is the economy itself. There are still 11 million Americans looking for work who can’t find a job. The unemployment rate is 7.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1980, except during recessions and their immediate aftermaths. Adjusting for inflation, average household incomes for the poorest 40 percent of workers have fallen steadily — by more than 10 percent, total — since 2000.

There's more and it is depressing.  And most of these workers likely have no healthcare coverage.  Not that today's Republicans give a damn. 

When Will Obama and Congress Be Honest With the Public

Far to many politicians on both sides of the aisle would rather tell Americans what they think they want to hear as opposed to the honest truth.  Of course on the Republican side of the aisle the situation is compounded by the fact that far too many in the GOP, including many Republican members of Congress, lost touch with objective reality years ago and have been living in a fantasy world ever since.  But that doesn't mean the objective truth isn't the truth.  A piece in the New York Times looks at America's future economic prospects and the reality is that just doing for the most part more of the same is not going to address the urgent problems facing the nation.   Here are some highlights:

[T]he only way to break out of this deadly cycle is with extraordinary leadership. Republicans and Democrats would have to govern in just the opposite way they ran their campaigns — by offering bold plans that not only challenge the other’s base but their own and thereby mobilizes the center, a big majority, behind their agenda, to break the deadlock. If either party does that, not only will it win the day but the country will win as well. 

What would that look like? If the Republican Party had a brain it would give up on its debt-ceiling gambit and announce instead that it wants to open negotiations immediately with President Obama on the basis of his own deficit commission, the Simpson-Bowles plan. That would at least make the G.O.P. a serious opposition party again — with a platform that might actually appeal outside its base and challenge the president in a healthy way. But the G.O.P. would have to embrace the tax reforms and spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles first. Fat chance. And that’s a pity. 

As for Obama, if he really wants to lead, he will have to finally trust the American people with the truth. I’d love to see him use his Jan. 21 Inaugural Address and his Feb. 12 State of the Union Message as a one-two punch to do just that — offer a detailed, honest diagnosis and then a detailed, honest prescription. 

On the diagnosis side, Obama needs to explain to Americans the world in which they’re now living. It’s a world in which the increasing velocity of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are reshaping every job, workplace and industry. As a result, the mantra that if you “just work hard and play by the rules” you should expect a middle-class lifestyle is no longer operable. Today you need to work harder and smarter, learn and re-learn faster and longer to be in the middle class. The high-wage, middle-skilled job is a thing of the past. Today’s high-wage or decent-wage jobs all require higher skills, passion or curiosity. Government’s job is to help provide citizens with as many lifelong learning opportunities as possible to hone such skills. 

In the State of the Union, I’d love to see Obama lay out a detailed plan for tax reform, spending cuts and investments — to meet the real scale of our problem and spur economic growth. We’ll get much more bang for our buck by deciding now what we’re going to do in all three areas, and signaling markets that we are putting in place a truly balanced approach, but gradually phasing it in. If you tell investors and savers that we’re going to put our fiscal house in order with a credible plan, but one that is gradually phased in, all the money now sitting on the sidelines paralyzed by uncertainty will get off the sidelines and we’ll have a real stimulus.

 
I still believe that America’s rich and the middle classes would pay more taxes and trim entitlements if they thought it was for a plan that was fair, would truly address our long-term fiscal imbalances and set America on a journey of renewal that would ensure our kids have a crack at the American dream.

If only we had a second-term president, unencumbered by ever having to run again, who was ready to test what really bold leadership might produce.

 Sadly, I am not holding my breath.

Will the GOP Ever Learn From the Experiences of Other Countries?

If the Republicans in Congress had had their way, we would have seen extreme austerity measures and huge decreases in federal government spending.  In short, exactly what politicians in Europe pushed through.  And the results of such austerity in Europe?  As the chart above indicates, unemployment has soared in Europe while declining in America.  The same holds true for GNP growth as shown by the chart below where America is out preforming austerity stunted Europe.  But real world experience means nothing to GOP ideologues not to mention their totally untethered from reality Christofacsist base. 

A piece in The Economist looks at what Republicans should have learned from Europe, which largely made the same mistakes that were made in the 1930's in the midst of the Great Depression.  Here are highlights:

Five years later, only America has surpassed its pre-recession output. For now, it appears to be on a steady, if disappointing, growth trajectory. Japan had the worst recession of the bunch but rebounded quickly. It has since struggled amid seismic disasters and various China troubles. Britain and the euro area have until recently followed very similar trajectories, but British output turned up nicely in the third quarter while the euro area officially re-entered recession.

The really distressing thing is to try and project these lines forward a bit. Japan is in recession. Britain may be out of it, but on the other hand may not. The euro zone has not grown for over a year, is almost certainly contracting faster in the fourth quarter than it did in the third and may well continue shrinking into 2013.

And then there is America, trudging steadily upward to the beat of its own drummer. How long can the divergence between America and the rest persist? And on what terms will these lines cross again? One thing seems reasonably clear: America will not be able to rely on demand from the rest of this bunch to keep its line going up. Most of all, it will have to count on the durability of domestic demand.

And how does one prime the pump of domestic demand?  Through government spending which provides buying power to consumers who in turn purchase products that further prime the economic pump.  The Germans and British rejected this reality (and Germany forced the rejection on to other European Union nations).  Yes, the U.S. government deficit needs to be reined in.  But when and how it is done is critical.  A  heavy handed approach as has been the case in Europe kills economies as opposec to strengthen them.  Will the GOP learn from any of this?  Sadly, I'd say that chance is doubtful.

Salt Lake City Tribune Endorses Obama

It is more than a little bit interesting that in states where he is best known - i.e., Massachusetts where he was governor, and Utah where he worked to save the Olympic Games - Mitt Romney is not overly popular.  Indeed, in Massachusetts, Obama is leading him by double digits.  Now, the Salt Lake City Tribune has come out and formally endorsed Barack Obama for re-election over Romney.  That those who know him best are running in the other direction ought to make some folks open their eyes.  Or at least stop chugging down the Kool-Aid quite so rapidly.  Among the reasons cited for rejecting Romney are his countless position changes and his refusal to offer meaningful specifics of any of his supposed plans if elected.  Here are highlights from the Tribune's endorsement of Obama:

 

Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.

But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal . . . .  Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.

Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

More troubling, Romney has repeatedly refused to share specifics of his radical plan to simultaneously reduce the debt, get rid of Obamacare (or, as he now says, only part of it), make a voucher program of Medicare, slash taxes and spending, and thereby create millions of new jobs.

If this portrait of a Romney willing to say anything to get elected seems harsh, we need only revisit his branding of 47 percent of Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, yet feel victimized and entitled to government assistance. His job, he told a group of wealthy donors, "is not to worry about those people.

And what of the president Romney would replace? For four years, President Barack Obama has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to pull the nation out of its worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, a deepening crisis he inherited the day he took office.

In the first months of his presidency, Obama acted decisively to stimulate the economy. His leadership was essential to passage of the badly needed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Though Republicans criticize the stimulus for failing to create jobs, it clearly helped stop the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs. The Utah Legislature used hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to plug holes in the state’s budget.

The president also acted wisely to bail out the auto industry, which has since come roaring back. Romney, in so many words, said the carmakers should sink if they can’t swim.

Obama’s foreign policy record is perhaps his strongest suit, especially compared to Romney’s bellicose posture toward Russia and China and his inflammatory rhetoric regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.

Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.

OUCH!!!  Candidly, the Tribune's reasoning ought to make sense to every rational voter who cares about the nation and the common good.  Sadly, many cannot see what the Tribune so well describes and I have to wonder what motivates this blindness.  Is it racism? Is it greed and a desire to pay less in taxes no matter the consequence to the nation or others? Is it religious extremism and bigotry that cannot accept a president who see all of us as citizens whether we be black or white, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian, etc.?   Is it the fear that white privilege is slowly fading away?  Whatever it is, I do not believe it stems from anything good or honorable. 

Is Obama Blowing His Presidency?

While I concede that Barack Obama has inherited one of the worse messes in the history of the country as he begins his presidency, I am increasingly worried that he is missing the chance to show commanding leadership and push for the systemic changes needed to not only turn the economy around but also to usher in the "change" he promised throughout his campaign. Be it his timidity on pushing forward on gay rights issues to leaving - in my view - far too much of turning Wall Street around in the hands of the very people who helped create the current economic crisis, Obama just simply is not acting as the dynamic leader that I and so many others had hoped for - or what the country so desperately needs. On the economic front, if his administration blows the window of opportunity to stabilize the banking system, he will be behind the eight ball for everything else he seeks to undertaken. Sadly, his minions overseeing Wall Street do not seem to grasp this fact or the fact that regular citizens are just plain over Wall Street's apparently limitless greed and "let them eat cake" mentality. Frank Rich looks at the financial crisis in a New York Times column today which Obama and all of his staff ought to be required to read. Here are some highlights:

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Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

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Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

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It [AIG] has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

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But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle. They know that the corporate bosses who may yet lay them off have sometimes been as obscenely overcompensated for failure as Wall Street’s bonus babies. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, chief executives at businesses as diverse as Texas Instruments and the home builder Hovnanian Enterprises have received millions in bonuses even as their companies’ shares have lost more than half their value.

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[R]hetoric won’t tamp down the anger out there, and neither will calculated displays of presidential “outrage.” We must have governance to match the message. To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.

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We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?

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As the nation’s anger rose last week, the president took responsibility for what’s happening on his watch — more than he needed to, given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words. To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail.

The Destructive Center

Paul Krugman at the New York Times has another must read column that looks at the dangers of failing to act sufficiently to revive the quickly failing U.S. economy. Sadly too many - particularly in the GOP - prefer to play politics and make debate points rather than face the fact that business as usual will likely bring upon us a catastrophe. Of course, had the GOP worried more about sound economic matters and less about abortion and bashing gays, much of the crisis just might have been averted. Meanwhile, real people are losing their jobs daily and real families are losing their homes. Barack Obama needs to wake up quickly to the fact that the GOP doesn't give a damn about average Americans. They only seek to coddle the religious lunatic fringe and the well off. Here are some column highlights:

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What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses? A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

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Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years. Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

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One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending. . . . All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

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But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy. After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate. Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support. . .

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So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo.

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[R]ather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.” No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

GOP Bad Faith Economics

The efforts of the GOP members of Congress to obstruct meaningful legislation aimed at halting the nation's economic free fall continue with no apparent concern about the negative consequences to rank and file citizens who are losing their jobs in huge numbers. I have condemned this efforts previously and two good columns today look at the unconscionable behavior. The first is a piece in the New York Times by Paul Krugman. The second is a column in the Washington Post by E.J. Dionne. In each case, the columnist look at the actions of the GOP who care nothing about average citizens unless they are unborn fetuses or wealthy high rollers. Here are highlights from Krugman's column:

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As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.

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So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

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First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

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Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money. Here’s how to think about this argument: . . . it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

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But here’s the thing: Most Americans aren’t listening. The most encouraging thing I’ve heard lately is Mr. Obama’s reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: “I won.” Indeed he did — and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost.

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E. J. Dionne goes further and states in part as follows about the obstructionist GOP:

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Beneath the warm pledges of bipartisanship and the earnest calls for cooperation in the midst of a grave crisis lurks an unpleasant fact: From the moment it loses power, the opposition party turns to the task of getting it back.

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On Friday, Gallup released a devastating report, based on 30,000 interviews over the course of 2008. It found that last year an average of 36 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats and only 28 percent called themselves Republicans. Gallup noted that this was the largest advantage for the Democratic Party in more than two decades.

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Both Thiessen and Hensarling reflect an important undercurrent in Republican thinking: that the GOP should place its bets on the prospect that Obama's policies will fail, knowing that if the president succeeds, he and the Democrats are likely to gain ground no matter what Republicans do. This is hardly in keeping with the bipartisan spirit the White House seeks to foster. But it's a lot easier than coming up with new ideas.