Despite what it says on the sidebar, I do not read Robert Reich every day. For one thing, he only posts about twice a week. But for another, I find his optimism inspiring but exhausting. Among my friends, I am considered the optimist. This is faint praise. Still, I think of myself as vaguely optimistic. I really do think that things will get better. Sometimes; I mean on good days; when I’m drunk. No, no, no! I’m more optimistic than that. But I consider myself a realist, and Reich’s optimism at least borders on the unreal.

Let us look at his article yesterday, Why The Republican’s Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy—Setting Working Class Against the Poor—Is Backfiring. His argument is that the Republicans were very effective at portraying the poor who used SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid as just those “shiftless blacks” driving around in their government paid-for Cadillacs. That wasn’t even true then: the poor have always been primarily white. But what was true is that if you had a job, it was good enough that you didn’t have to be on SNAP and Medicaid. Now most of the poor who qualify for these programs are people who are working—many of them working multiple jobs! His conclusion: it is going to be hard for the Republicans to get middle class whites to vote against their own interests in the name of “getting” those “shiftless” poor.

The article is a good one and it lays out what I think is an even bigger problem: insecurity in the middle class. It used to be that if you had a decent middle-management job at some corporation, you knew that as long as you did your job well, you were set for life. That’s no longer the case. Pretty much the conservatives have gotten what they always wished for: a nation of contractors—at least as far as the middle class goes. This isn’t a situation that anyone except the very wealthy like. But unlike the poor, the politicians do listen (a little) to the middle class.

Where I think that Reich gets a bit too optimistic is in saying that the Republican divide-and-conquer strategy is backfiring. He’s right that it is hard to use this particular strategy of convincing workers that people on welfare are the enemy. But the Republicans have been very inventive in coming up with different ways to divide and conquer. After all, their think tanks don’t spend their time coming up with policy. They can use 100% of their resources on coming up with ways to set different sets of people against each other.

Now, it is true that the great conservative propagandist Frank Luntz seems to have given up the project. According to him, there are no longer magic words that can convince people to support policies that go directly against their interests. But give the Republicans time. I certainly think that cracks have appeared on what was always an unstable dam. Their evil geniuses are working on the problem, however. And right now, they have real power in Washington. And even if they lose that, the courts will be conservative for many years to come.

Some people don’t like that I’m so hard on the New Democrats. I don’t want to over state it, but there is a reason: they have been destroying the nation for two decades! So now we find Robert Rubin ranting on about “financial discipline.” On the pages of the Financial Times he tells us, Sound Government Finances Will Promote Recovery. He thinks he is threading the needle. More or less he is saying, “We don’t have to make a choice between job creation and economic austerity because economic austerity will create jobs!” This is a funny attempt to thread the needle give that this is exactly the argument that those calling for economic austerity have always made. I’m afraid Rubin has missed the eye of the needle by quite a ways.

As I discussed last year in, Alberto Alesina Wasn’t Right, the idea of “expansionary austerity” has been shown to be a cruel joke. Alesina argued that if businesses saw that governments were balancing their budgets, they would decide that the future looked bright and start spending. This is, of course, a supply side story of how the economy works. By this way of thinking, what drives the economy is the supply of goods rather than the demand for goods. It doesn’t work that way at all. Even a child should see, businesses create the products that they believe their customers will want. Thus, if a business owner sees that most of his customers are unemployed and have very little money, he will not hire more people to produce more products that his customers won’t buy.

But I’m not an economist, so let’s hear what a great economist has to say about the rubbish that Rubin is shoveling. Brad DeLong wrote, Department of “Huh”?!: Where is the Arithmetic in Robert Rubin’s Financial Times Piece?[1] So DeLong provides the math and it turns out that stimulus is a great idea and austerity is not:

Of course, I have an answer to DeLong’s question. There is no math in Rubin’s op-ed because austerity is a matter of faith, not economics. When business owners are asked why they aren’t hiring, they say it is lack of demand for their goods. It isn’t that they think the government is going backrupt. It isn’t that they are concerned about “regulations” (although I’ll admit with all the right wing propaganda, a lot of businesses are unnecessarily worried about Obamacare). It is that they don’t have the customers and cutting spending will—Are you ready to be shocked?!—make the situation worse.

For four and a half years, Robert Rubin was Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. And as such, he was the architect of Clinton’s strong dollar policy. I understand that people who don’t know much about economics immediately think, “But don’t we want a strong dollar?” And the answer is, “Yes! If you don’t want a job!” A strong dollar is great for people who already have lots of money. It means they can buy imports very cheaply. But it also means that our exports are very expensive. Thus, other countries don’t buy as many of them. Thus, fewer Americans are employed. When you hear “strong dollar” just think “gift for the rich from the poor.”

This is a great example of why our government is so messed up. The Democrats are supposed to be liberal. But the last two Democratic Presidents and the current one are all economically conservative. This is why the Republican Party has stopped being conservative and is now radical. Given that the Democratic elites have taken over all the old conservative economic policies (and in many cases made them even more conservative), what are the Republicans to do? Truly, I don’t know what their options were, but the one they picked was, “Go crazy!”

So we are left with a country where even conservative voters are to the left of the Democrats on economic issues. Yes, I still think we must vote for the Democrats. If the party wins presidential election after presidential election and controls huge majorities in Congress, the party will move to the left on economic issues. But the Democrats are currently not much of a choice. If you only care about gay marriage, then the Democrats are not bad. If you care about abortion rights, then the Democrats are pretty good. If you care about birth control, the Democrats are very good. But if you care about anyone who might exercise those rights having a decent job, then the Democrats are really quite bad. And Robert Rubin’s career and recent op-ed proves that.

[1] DeLong is a great economist, ’tis true. As a writer, not so much. That should have been, “Huh?!” Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

You’ve probably heard of the George Washington Bridge closure story. Even though it was a small story, it was too delicious for liberals. What it looked like was that henchmen of Chris Christie caused a huge traffic jam in Fort Lee because it’s Democratic mayor endorsed Barbara Buono rather than Christie. Now it has been shown that as improbable as it sounded, this is exactly what happened.

Before I get into this, I want to state again that the Democratic Party (in New Jersey especially) acted unconscionably. When this story first broke, I think a lot of people thought, “Didn’t all the Democratic mayors endorse the Democratic candidate for governor?” And the answer is, “No. The elected Democrats of New Jersey showed exceptional disloyalty even by Democratic standards.”

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to this story. I was sorry for the people of Fort Lee, but it was not an especially important story—especially on the national level. But I did notice something interesting about the reactions. On the left, there were a lot of people who really wanted it to be true. First, Christie is a bully and this story played right into that narrative. What’s more, he had just won an election that he didn’t deserve to. The people of New Jersey should have rejected him powerfully given that he stands for pretty much everything they are against. And there was a certain sense in which it served as a good lesson to the people of New Jersey coming right after the election.

But the more common reaction, even on the left was skepticism. I heard more than one person say, “Why would he do it?” That really struck me because that is exactly what the Foreign Editor says in All the President’s Men about Watergate. The arguments were even the same: Christie (Nixon) was way ahead of Buono (McGovern). It just didn’t make sense.

I was of two minds about this. First, they were right: it didn’t make sense. Second, many other things that Christie did during the campaign didn’t make sense either. For example, why have the Senate election a couple of weeks before the general election? That wasn’t going to make Buono win. That was done just to add a couple of percentage points onto his election win. What I think it mostly means is that Christie has created effectively a kind of criminal enterprise in the State of New Jersey, just as Nixon had nationally.

Jonathan Chait wrote a good column this morning, Chris Christie 2016: A Bridge to Nowhere. He argues that whatever chance Christie had to run for president in 2016 is now gone. And Chait has long agreed with me that Christie had little real chance. My problem always was that the whole “New Jersey asshole” act that northeasterners seem to love, does not play well elsewhere. This scandal just feeds into it. It used to be that he seemed a lot like Tony Soprano (just not as nice). Now it seems he is Tony Soprano. And the fact that he didn’t have to be directly involved in this petty act of political retribution only makes the image stick more.

But the real reason that this kills Christie’s presidential dreams is that reporters are now going to go crazy looking into every scandal the man has ever been involved in. If Christie’s people were willing to go after a small town (Less than 40,000 population!) mayor for the sin of sticking by his own party, what would they all not be capable of.

The ultimate resolution to this would be that Christie would be forced to step down as governor. And then, Obama could nominate him to run the Department of Transportation. That’s a joke of course. There is no way Christie will be forced to step down. But the part about Obama putting him in charge of Transportation is exactly the kind of thing that Obama would do. Remember: Democrats aren’t loyal. After all, the Democratic president did not endorse Barbara Buono. What a great opportunity for Obama to polish his bipartisan credential even more.

Larry J. Sabato is a political scientist with a long history of accurately predicting the outcomes of elections. He hasn’t done such a good job during the last two election cycles, so of course, now he’s writing for Politico. He just published, Republicans Really Could Win it All This Year. That’s a pretty stupid title when you consider a few things. First, they obviously can’t win the presidency. Second, they already have the House of Representatives, and no one really expects them to lose it. And third, everyone knows that that the Republicans might take control of the Senate. That’s why I recently argued in Don’t Cry for the Democrats that even if they lose the Senate in 2014, they will almost certainly get it back in 2016. What Sabato should have titled his article is, “Republicans Really Could Win the Senate This Year.” It would have been a boring title, but it would have the advantage of being accurate and just as boring as the article itself.

Sabato claims that there are three things that really matter for the 2014 elections. First, is presidential approval. His argument is that presidential approval often hurts congressional candidates of his party. But not always. He also makes the totally unsubstantiated claim that it is just as likely that Obama’s approval rating will fall as that it will climb. I don’t see that at all. Obama is not Bush the Younger. I think he’s gotten about as unpopular as he can possibly get. What’s more, his current unpopularity is mostly due to the bad Obamacare roll-out, and that is definitely on the mend. Now, I don’t see Obama’s approval rating going way up, but I do expect it to get somewhat better over the next ten months.

The second important issue is the economy. File this one under “Sherlock, No Shit.” Still, he spends only two paragraphs on the subject. Mostly, he uses it to make an incoherent argument that a bad economy will be good for the Republicans but a good economy will not help the Democrats. He concludes with a perfect example of statement that says nothing but appears to, “So even if the economy continues to improve, Obama and the Democrats might not reap an electoral benefit.” That’s right, if the economy is booming, it might not help the Democrats. Alternately, if the economy is booming, it might help the Democrats. In other words: Sabato has nothing to say on the subject.

The final issue can also be filed under “Sherlock, No Shit”: the electoral playing field. This is what everyone is talking about and is the basis of, Don’t Cry for the Democrats: there are a lot more Democrats up for re-election than there are Republicans. There are 21 Democrats up and only 14 Republicans. But in 2012, there were 23 Democrats versus 10 Republicans and the Democrats managed to gain two seats. What’s more, the Democrats can lose 5 seats and still maintain control of the Senate.

Sabato ends his column with nothing more than a bunch of speculation, stated as though it is proof:

Basically, all he’s got here is that the 2014 election will be a wash in the House and the Republicans have a decent chance of taking over the Senate with a slim majority. This is exactly what I’ve been saying for at least the last year. But let me put a positive spin on what Sabato wrote:

In other words: Larry Sabato has added nothing of value to the discussion of the 2014 election.

Afterword

I want to be very clear here. My point is that Sabato is adding nothing to the discussion and that he seems to be cheer leading for the GOP. His conclusions are pretty much the same as mine in, The Next Three Election Cycles. That conclusion is that the Republicans will do slightly better than the Democrats but that mostly it will be a wash. But the way that Sabato puts it, it is that it is going to be a great year for the Republicans. It could be, just as it could be a great year for the Democrats. But the information he provides points to a wash. He seems to be pushing back against a groundswell of pundits saying that the Democrats are going to do well in 2014. No one is saying that.

The Senate managed to overcome a filibuster because a whole six Republicans voted to allow formal debate on a bill that would provide extended unemployment benefits for another three months. Wow. What an amazing show of empathy and compassion from the party that hugs the Bible so close to its chest. Only 37 Republicans (Just 86%!) of those present voted not to allow debate about extend unemployment insurance. This is what we call a triumph of bipartisanship!

Of course, it basically means nothing. The Senate has passed a lot of stuff in the past that hasn’t gone anywhere. John Harwood laid out the current situation:

I know he’s serious because Harwood is not a jokester. To me, it would have been clear enough to tweet, “Boehner aide: despite Senate procedural vote, unemployment benefits extension likely to go to the House of Representatives.” Under the control the modern Republican Party, that is nowhere. You know the old song:

For some reason, Jonathan Chait is sounding very optimistic this morning, How Democrats Can Force Republicans to Help the Unemployed. His basic idea is to tell the Republicans that unless they pass the unemployment extension, they will scuttle the Farm Bill. I don’t think that will work, but Chait is certainly right when he says, “Agriculture subsidies are a huge, bloated entitlement that shouldn’t exist at all on the merits, but Republicans like them because they benefit rich white people.” Again: wow. I didn’t think Chait was willing to come right out and speak the truth on that matter.

He also brought up an issue that is very aggravating to us liberals:

This is all quite true, but it is also the kind of thing that liberals tell each other. Conservatives tell themselves something different, “Well, the deficit wasn’t so bad back then. Anyway, we’ve learned our lesson!” This is total crap, but I think it is important for liberals to understand that this is what conservatives are thinking. It can be easily destroyed with a little history. When Reagan was running for president, one of his biggest complaints was our out of control spending. Once he was in office, he ballooned the deficit in unprecedented ways. Once Clinton was in office, the budget again became a big deal. But then once it was actually balanced, the Republicans claimed that that was a bad thing. Still, deficits mattered, but surpluses were no good. So Bush got rid of the surpluses and then some and then some more. It was, after all, under Bush that we got our first trillion dollar deficit. Under Obama, that deficit has nearly been cut in half. But today, all the Republicans claim that Bush was wrong. Again, while a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans have learned their lesson: budget deficits are bad. So any claim by Republicans that this time is different and that they aren’t like old Republicans is just bunk.

Of course, Chait is only talking about the past. If the Democrats offered up a huge tax cut for the rich, the Republicans would not be concerned about adding “to the deficit in an irresponsible way.” If it was an unnecessary war with Iran, there would be no budgetary concerns. In fact, it wouldn’t matter what the money was spent on, as long as it ultimately went to the rich. This is why Republicans continue to push the totally refuted claim that “tax cuts pay for themselves.”

The reason that Republicans scream “class warfare” every time income inequality is brought up by liberals is that the Republican Party really is engaged in a class war. This is why last year at this time they had no problem getting rid of the highly progressive payroll tax holiday, but fought to the end to stop taxes going up a couple of percentage points on the rich. The problem with hopeful articles like Chait’s is that liberals tend to underestimate just how much the Republicans hate the poor. Sure, they want to give money to rich white farmers. But they don’t want to do it as much as they want to take money away from the poor, who I assume they always image as black.

But Chait could be right. I hope that he is. But recent history has shown that you can’t “triangulate” Republicans. They are determined to hurt the poor and (just as important) stop Obama from getting anything he wants.

I’ve got my mojo back a bit. And so I’m very eager to write three long and involved articles that need to get done today. But there is so much else to write about. Paul Krugman went on vacation from writing columns for the last week. As I result, I stopped checking his blog. I shouldn’t have. He’s an addict. He just can’t help himself. Anyway, on Friday, he wrote an amazing short post, In Praise of Art Laffer. I am no fan of Laffer. Previously, I wrote of him, “He greatly annoys me, because all he does is smile and babble.” And Krugman doesn’t have a fondness for him either.

But in a recent article in Business Insider, Laffer responded to his 2009 prediction of soaring inflation. For the record: inflation is low: too low, if you ask me or pretty much any reasonable economist. The reason Krugman is praising Laffer is that his response was honest:

This is a big deal because most economists and similar types somehow justify their predictions. One big one is that inflation actually is high and that the government is just lying about it. That, of course, is ridiculous. I go shopping every couple of days and I don’t see prices going up. In fact, I see them as being really stable. Another common excuse is that the Federal Reserve is artificially keeping inflation low by keeping interest rates low and through its quantitative easing program. That has been shown not to be true experimentally. But there are many more excuses to choose from, so it shows a decent amount of intellectual integrity on Laffer’s part to admit his error.

Krugman asks what I think is an honest question, “I do wonder exactly what model Laffer was using.” I think I have an answer for that. Laffer may have at one time been a real economist. But for decades, all he’s been has been a conservative apologist. I don’t think Laffer had any economic model that predicted that inflation was going to soar. It is just that everyone on the right knew that interest rates were going to soar. Think about all the stuff from Alberto Alesina and Reinhart-Rogoff about how economic austerity would cause growth (or at least stop stagnation). Most conservatives (even the economists) just grabbed onto a plausible sounding excuse to justify what they wanted to believe. Look at Greg Mankiw who believed in stimulus under Bush, didn’t believe in it under Obama, and was laying the groundwork to believe in it under Romney.

So I’d be shocked to find that Laffer actually had a model that predicted inflation and wasn’t just following the pack. He believed inflation would soar because Obama was president. Had McCain been elected and enacted the same policies (and as far as I can tell, he would have), Laffer never would have predicted that high inflation was just around the corner. It’s great that Laffer is admitting straight up that he was wrong. But I’m sure that his next “model” will simply be what all the other conservatives are pointing to as the reason why things always go to hell when a Democrat is in the White House.

Last night I watched the first segment of 60 Minutes. It looked like they were going to do a hit job on the clean energy industry. And I was not disappointed. After all that we’ve been through the last couple of months with the show, I am now convinced that someone is in charge who has a real conservative ax to grind. First we had Benghazi. Then we had the NSA whitewash. And now we’re back to what was effectively a rant about Solyndra going out of business and “wasting” a half billion dollars!

The documentary We’re Not Broke (currently available on Netflix) reports that every year, the federal government loses $70 billion from corporations using offshore tax havens. Yet 60 Minutes is concerned that the government spent a couple billion dollars investing in cutting edge technologies that have not paid off? That’s not reporting. That’s propaganda.

Leslie Stahl listed four clean energy companies that had gone out of business. Then she added, “I’m exhausted.” Four companies exhausted her! No wonder her reporting is so bad. If saying 14 syllables exhaust her, then doing any research would be out of the question. (Note: in the transcript, more was written, but she gave up after the four in the actual interview.) The answer to this from Steven Koonin was, “As I told you at the beginning, the energy business is tough!”

Think Progress published a great article with some informative charts, 60 Minutes Hit Job on Clean Energy Ignores the Facts. It responded:

Despite the fact that the vast majority of start-ups go bankrupt, the government’s investments do far better. Even with the half billion given to Solyndra and Abound, the “DOE Loan Guarantee Program has a whopping 97 percent success rate.” Now I’ll admit, if 60 Minutes had presented the story accurately, it would have been a puff piece, “Government Program Really Successful in Clean Energy Funding!” But why not a puff piece? The show was more than willing to present a puff piece to justify NSA spying.

According to Media Matters, one of the people 60 Minutes interviewed for the segment, energy expert Robert Rapier, tweeted after the the show that he gave them a list of successes and told them that solar energy was the future. But that conflicted with the narrative that Leslie Stahl and company wanted to present. So that information didn’t make the cut.

Perhaps the most egregious (but hardly shocking) fact about the story was that global warming was not mentioned once. In fact, about half way through the story, it became clear to me who was really behind it: the fracking industry. Stahl dutifully noted that that natural gas was “relatively clean.” Well, in terms of local pollution it is quite clean. And in terms of global warming, it is a hell of a lot better than other hydrocarbons. So in that regard, I guess it is “relatively clean” in the sense that eating off the floor is “relatively clean” compared to eating out of a dirty toilet.

Also not mentioned were the huge subsidies that traditional energy supplies get. When Vinod Khosla said there was no down side to gas made from trees, Stahl responded in voice-over, “Well there is: first off, his clean green gasoline costs much more than what you pay at the pump.” (BTW: there was no “second off.” That was her only complaint about it as an energy source.) I guess that Stahl and her producers have never heard of externalities: costs that we all pay for that isn’t factored into the price. You know: like global warming and oil spills. And then there are all those tax subsidies that Exxon-Mobile gets by keeping all their profits off shore. And there is much more. The price we pay at the pump is not the price we pay. The real price we pay is much higher. Higher than Khosla’s gas? I don’t know. He might be a charlatan for all I know. But the fact is that even with all its unfair advantages, soon the fossil fuel industry will be beaten by solar.

But Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes are doing everything they can to push that day off as far as possible.

Martin Longman wrote an interesting article over at Booman Tribune yesterday, GOP’s Irrational Exuberance. It’s about the Republicans and their conviction that they are going to totally rock in the 2014 elections. Longman isn’t so sure. He thinks that “they will have to develop a positive message.” If he’s right, then all hope is lost for the GOP in 2014, because the party just doesn’t have a positive message. That’s what made Reagan so important to the conservative movement: as vile as his policies were, he seemed like he cared. (He didn’t really; he was the leading edge of winner-take-all conservatism.)

What I think will happen in the 2014 election regarding the Republicans is what always happens. The Republicans will run the same old candidates and hope that the Democrats just don’t come out to vote. (This is unfortunately, a highly successful approach.) But as I discussed this last week, the GOP attempt to get better candidates won’t work. Almost half of the Republican Party is made of fools who believe the Fox News propaganda as faithfully as they believe the Bible.

You see, it doesn’t matter what the “establishment” Republicans want for candidates. What they believe in are exactly the same things that the Crazy 40 believe in. Oh, I know! The establishment types don’t really believe that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than get an abortion. And they don’t believe that God Hates Fags. But they know that they can’t upset the Crazy 40 or they will be decimated in the general election.

And let’s look back on the notable crazy candidates of the past. In 2010, it was Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell. But even if the Republicans had nominated better candidates who had won the general election, the Republicans would not have taken control of the Senate. In 2012, it was Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. But again: had better candidates been nominated and won the general election, the Senate would have remained in control of the Democrats. Right now, the Democrats have 55 seats (including two leftist independents who caucus with the Democrats) in the Senate and the Republicans have only 45. So even if all of the 4 crazy Republican poster children had won, the Democrats would still control the Senate.

What’s more, those last two elections were ones where the Democrats had vastly more seats to protect. And that is again the case in 2014. But in 2016, it will be the opposite. And that means a couple of things. First, it means that the Republicans only chance to take over the Senate is to do it in 2014. Second, it means if they take over the Senate, they will only have it for 2 years, under a Democratic president so it won’t do them much good anyway. And third, it means that the in 2016, the Democrats could again have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

As for the House, the gerrymandering continues to help the Republicans. But as each day goes by, the gerrymandering has less and less impact. I’ve argued that 2016 will be a huge year for the Democrats where what little gerrymandering advantage the Republicans still have will not be enough to maintain control of the House. Given that the Democrats will also likely keep the White House, 2016 will look a lot like 2008. But even that will not cause the Republicans to make any policy changes. That will have to wait until 2018, when they find that they can’t even win elections in an off year anymore. But they may not be willing to make changes even then; they may just disintegrate. (Note: the next redistricting takes place after the 2020 elections—an on-year election that is likely to benefit the Democrats. If I were a Republicans I would be terrified. Or maybe not, because if I were a Republican, I would be an idiot.)

Regardless, I think Republicans have advantages in 2014 that will allow them to keep the House and if they are very lucky, take over the Senate. It will be a last hurrah for them, however. And no amount of strategy is going to change 2014 in a big way. It will mostly be a wash, regardless of what candidates the Republicans manage to nominate.