And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal, so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.

That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I today remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994, but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan (and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins).

As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second. [snip]

So what’s up?

What’s going on?

I look around and I see a number of things:

• I see a press corps that is unconcerned with policy substance and the future of America and devotes itself to calling politics like a basketball game: “who wins the week?” “who wins the day?” Lately it’s been: “who wins the morning?”
• An electorate that in my fears appears to want to be led by a strong or a competent leader–or rather by a leader whom the press corps tells it wins lots of mornings–and that does not want to see its policy preferences actually enacted and satisfied, or that does not know what its policy preferences are.
• Multiple blockage points in our outdated eighteenth-century orrery of a political system that froze the distribution of power between President, Senate, and House where the distribution of power between King George III, Lords, and Commons had been in 1776–and thus that makes it easy to block things, and hence very easy to portray a president of the other party as a hapless failure.
• A recognition that if you make blocking everything the president of the other party does your highest priority, you do have a good chance of portraying him as a weakling and doing well in the next election cycle.
• 1994 and 2010 demonstrate that this nihilistic, anti-patriotic, un-American strategy works.
• Democratic barons–cough, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson, cough–who remind me of Wile E. Coyote standing in the desert after the Roadrunner has dropped a 500 ton weight from above: frozen and watching in place as the shadow covering him grows larger. Simply put, they do not understand that when they face the electorates of Nebraska and Arkansas, saying “but I helped block Obama from doing liberal things!” is not a strategy that wins them reelection. But “I backed the president, and the president did X, Y and Z, and look at how much better things are” might well be.
• On top of all these, everybody below the top 5% of the American income distribution today is not living any better than their predecessors did a generation ago. We all have lots of cheap electronic toys (I love mine). But offsetting that we have more congestion, longer commutes, and more expensive houses. For the top 5% things are better. For the rest of America, it looks as though they may well not be.
• Right now, for every 13 workers in America, we have one person who would be working in normal times–who was working back in 2007–and who now is not working. That means that two-thirds of American households today have one or more people in their or their parents’ or their siblings’ or their childrens’ households who would be working in normal times and is not working now. At the moment more people still think that this is George W. Bush’s fault than think that it is Barack Obama’s. But everyone agrees it is the governments fault somehow–although they are not sure how.

DeLong, like many liberals, has been frustrated with the Democratic party’s chasing of compromise with people who have no interest in actual compromise.  It’s been a fiasco from day one and continues to be a fiasco.  In the comment sections, some of DeLong’s commenters make the point that much that is wrong in our government could be fixed if the media actually did their job – you know reporting on news rather than acting like a bunch of wannabes hoping the cool kids will make nice.

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Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit. It’s hard to wrap your arms around Romney’s argument, because it’s an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.

That’s the nicest thing he says about Romney’s speech.

Not only does Romney elide vast swaths of established facts about the deficit, it’s fairly clear that he does not operate within the mainstream understanding of the term “deficit” at all. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly explained, modern Republican behavior and even language in relation to the deficit is completely nonsensical if you understand “the deficit” to mean the gap between revenue and outlays. Republican use of the term only makes sense if you define “the deficit” to mean “spending Republicans don’t like.” That’s why Republicansconsider it impossible to believe that one could simultaneously extend health insurance to the uninsured while reducing the deficit.

The final is the most damning:

 It’s [the speech] an expression of conservative moral beliefs about the role of government. While loosely couched in budgetary terms, Romney is expressing an analysis that resides outside of, and completely at odds with, mainstream macroeconomic forecasting and scoring assumptions.

It occurs to me that what’s happened is incredibly simple.  For today’s Republican base, caught up in the fundamentalist fervor of a war between good and evil, there is no solution that isn’t a moral solution.  Those sluts who have sex outside of marriage are bad people, irresponsible people, and giving them health insurance that covers contraception is immoral.  Those gays who want to get married are bad, irresponsible people and letting them marry is immoral.  And so on and so on.  The job of government is to enforce their morals until such time as paradise ensues.

THE LIE:

Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation. — Romney press secretary Andrea Saul

THE FACT:

Trickle-down economics is all Romney is offering. Think Progress:

In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital.

…Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.

…This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.

This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago.

Romney’s business career was all about throwing people out of work and looting their company pension funds for profit. When Romney was Governor of Massachusetts, his state ranked 47th in job creation.

The comments, however, are striking.  People remembering painful details of their own childhood experiences of being on the receiving or delivering end of cruelty.

We all have an elephant’s memory of the cruelties we suffered and inflicted as children.  That Mitt would try to excuse this incident by saying “I don’t remember” rings false.

President Obama’s announcement that he believes same-sex couples should be allowed to marry has opened the doors to several other Democrats and has solidified the party’s position — at least among its leadership — on the matter.

At this point, all of the elected leaders of the national Democratic Party support marriage equality.

The moves in the last week on the issue of marriage equality provide an example of how leadership works in a democracy.  Public opinion has been moving in the direction of marriage equality for a while.  I think we’ll see that movement pick up speed.  Not because people are thinking, “Oh well if Obama’s in favor now I am” but because the president’s statement moves marriage equality into a mainstream position.  It becomes more acceptable.  The president however waiting on his announcement supporting marriage equality until it was obvious that the tide was shifting.  In a democracy, elected officials get punished if they get too far ahead of public opinion.

At a time when the Republicans are becoming even more passionately anti-gay, the Democrats have established themselves as the party of the modern world.  If I had to guess, I’d say this move is aimed at much people under thirty as it is at the gay community.