Visual source: Newseum
Eugene Robinson:
Unemployment is at 9 percent, the housing market is moribund, “consumer confidence” is an oxymoron, and three-fourths of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. So how is it that President Obama leads each of his likely Republican opponents in the polls? And why on earth is the gap widening rather than closing?
It’s simple: Voters are paying attention to what the GOP field is saying — not just the applause-line attacks on Obama but what the candidates propose to do about the economy. The more they talk, the more discouraged the electorate seems to become.[...]
The Republican field has utterly failed to develop a convincing narrative about the economy. The candidates act as if widespread disappointment with the performance of Obama and the Democrats will be enough to win the election. But voters are being given every reason to suspect that GOP policies will make things worse.
Ramesh Ponnuru:
For decades, conservatives have been trying to pull the Republican Party rightward and root out first liberals and then moderates. But that impulse grew stronger in the aftermath of the political defeats in the late years of George W. Bush’s administration, because conservatives believed that ideological impurity, especially on spending, had caused those losses. [...] But there’s little evidence that big government was the reason, or even an important reason, for Republican defeats at the end of the Bush years. [...]
Republicans were more popular in Bush’s first term, when they were expanding entitlements, than in his second term, when they were trying to reform one (Social Security). For most of the second term, they exercised more spending restraint than they had done in the first term -- and again, there was no evidence it helped them politically. [...]
The view that Republicans must avoid accommodation at all costs -- that the principal obstacle to achieving conservative policy goals is a lack of spine and not, say, a lack of popular support -- made them lose at least two Senate races in 2010. [...] That mythology influences the Republican presidential primaries, too. It’s why they have, to an unusual extent, showcased unpopular ideas that have no chance of going anywhere, such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency. It is part of the reason for the resistance to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: Conservatives fear he would be a big- government Republican, like Bush, and lead the party again to ruin.
Robert Reich:
At this point neither the Republican right nor the mainstream media wants to admit the yawn-inducing truth that Mitt will be the GOP’s candidate. The right doesn’t want to admit it because it will be seen as a repudiation of the Tea Party. The media doesn’t want to because they’d prefer to sell newspapers and attract eyeballs.
The media are keeping the story of Rick Perry’s cringe-inducing implosion going for the same reason they’re keeping the story of Herman Cain’s equally painful decline going — because the public is forever fascinated by the gruesome sight of dying candidacies. With Bachmann, Perry, and Cain gone or disintegrating, the right wing-nuts of the GOP have only one hope left: Newt Gingrich. His star will rise briefly before he, too, is pilloried for the bizarre things he’s uttered in the past and for his equally bizarre private life. His fall will be equally sudden (although I don’t think Gingrich is capable of embarrassment).
And so we’ll be left with two presidential candidates who don’t inspire — at the very time in American history when Americans crave inspiration.
Jules Witcover:
In an apparent effort to make himself sound more Republican than the other contenders, Mr. Romney declared that the Obama administration is "the most political presidency we have seen in modern history." [...] Governor Romney's allegation was a strange one in light of the president's track record over the last three years. In fact, fellow Democrats have repeatedly berated their man in the White House for being too conciliatory toward the congressional Republicans who are so conspicuously stonewalling him.
Until recent weeks, when President Obama finally decided that political partisanship may be his best hope for re-election and stepped up his assault on the GOP's intransigence, he had been under heavy fire from his own party for turning the other cheek.
Mr. Romney's charge that Mr. Obama heads the most political White House in modern times was all the more absurd in terms of history. Its pages are forever blotted by the political crimes and antics of the Nixon years, from burglary and bribery to massive lying and high-level cover-up. That era ended with the first resignation in disgrace of a president of either party, close on the heels of the first resignation in disgrace of a vice president -- both Republicans.
Bruce Bartlett:
The concept of balancing the budget annually is a bad idea but not an unreasonable one. However, the idea of mandating a balanced budget through the Constitution is dreadful. And the proposal that Republican leaders plan to bring up is, frankly, nuts.
The Founding Fathers took the necessity of balancing the federal budget to be self-evident – with no need to mandate it because economic circumstances severely constrained the government’s ability to spend more than taxes covered.