"Had Enough?"

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

No it won't work. Obstructionism doesn't really work as a national theme its only worked in local races like SD 2004. Obama now has the Presidency and huge majorities in Congress so any such campaign would be taken as whinning, or an attempt to disquise your own ineffectiveness. What the hell are you guys going to bring up the Olympia Snowe won't vote for? Once the sideshow in MN is completed all you need is one vote and Snowe will likely be persuaded.

If the midterm is nationalised which I doubt it will and "Had Enough" is the compaign theme then it would most likely be the theme for the GOP. People don't understand what a filibuster is and how many votes you need. Your best bet would be to leave well enough alone and try to localise this election. Nationalising it would hurt your chances in Kentucky and maybe North Carolina and Missouri if Turnout is at 2006 levels. You got some very good candidates like Carnahan, Hodes, Mongiardo, Ryan etc. Let them run there own campaigns as they see fit.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Even a stabilization of the economy at a lower level than that associated with the corrupt Dubya-era, credit-fed boom could seem an improvement... or at least the right direction. There are likely to be fewer jobs in 2010 as lots of kids get pushed out of the job market as retail stores close due to reduced consumer spending and public policy encourages the hiring of 'family breadwinners' even in menial jobs but for living wages. The good side of that is that the menial jobs will probably be better paid than when kids who used the jobs to support cars, clothes, and electronic goodies are in school or are doing homework instead.

We absolutely cannot return to the Dubya-era economy of illusory prosperity -- a false prosperity based upon people consuming assets or going into debt just to keep up appearances as real pay shrinks for most people. That is no more possible than expecting heat waves to reverse the cooling of December in January.

The American economy stank when FDR was President from 1934 to 1940... but such was tolerable because people saw a pattern of improvement and saw no chance for a return to the economy of the 1920's. FDR won landslide victories in 1936 and 1940. After Dubya, Obama has much leeway with results.

FDR only got reelected in 1940 becasue of the start of WW2 in Europe. Republicans won the issue of the economy in 1940 but lost on NAtional Security concerns.

Some Republicans seem to act as if the wise course is to obstruct the efforts of Barack Obama and the Democratic majority so that the Democrats can fail and the Republicans can offer their own alternative -- essentially their own agenda of Profits First, People Never. It is a huge gamble, one that can fail badly politically and weaken their political position in elections of 2010 and 2012 at the least, or one that can succeed politically but make things worse -- and leave some Hard Right Republican with an economic situation even direr than that that we now have -- and an opportunity to establish a plutocrat's paradise/worker's hell. (That system: no unions, no corporate taxes but instead highly-regressive sales taxes and capitations, no minimum wage, no welfare, 70-hour workweeks, plenty of child labor, the vote limited to the rich, working people generally being wrecks in their middle 30s... )

That is a gamble -- a huge gamble, one that depends upon the catastrophic failure of the Other Side as well as the society as a whole. That is a revolutionary stance that only extremists can support, Right or Left. If we are lucky, then the consequences are the failure of the Hard Right as it is further discredited. Conservatism will have to re-emerge slowly as cautious conservatives develop within the Democratic party and eventually split from it. We might have a split around 2020 between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, the Republican Party having gone the way of the Federalists and Whigs. If we are not so lucky, then we might get Karl Rove's system on steroids.

It's a bad gamble for everyone, one to be avoided. My suggestion to the Republicans: whittle away a little on the edges and do what is necessary for survival in a time of Obama's success and a recovering economy. Political success isn't worth the ruin of society.

Republicans do not want to return to the Bush economy.  They are opposing the stimulus package cause it is too big and has become to much of a giant thank you note to Special Interest Groups who help purchase this last election for Obama. They also believe that people are now starting to save more of there money instead of just spending and borrowing and Obama and the Dems wants them to be irresponsible again. The savings rate needs to be 10% or higher not 3.6%. Obama and the Dems seem they are goign to act as a substitute for the irresponsible spending of consumers and having the Fed Gov't do it instead. Well as Sam Spade and others have been saying what happens when people quit buying Gov't bonds. The Gov't funds there spending by selling bonds and if they can't sell them anymore like CA can't what happens? It won't be a 1930's Depression, it will be a 1920's German Hyper Inflation.