The news is really gloomy about November, but then I got to thinking, maybe it's not so good that we win in November. I mean to sustain the current atmosphere for another two years? That doesn't sound so good and Obama running for re-election in a climate like this doesn't look so good either.
However, if the Republicans take charge and nothing happens for another two years, then what? A Mussolini-type emerges from the Tea Party and a huge chunk of the country goes fascist? That sounds wild, but not out the realm of possibility.
More likely the Republicans would be repudiated and liberals/progressives sweep back in. Obama's second term has many of the changes we've been looking forward to.
So, what the hell! They can't repeal health care, just not fund it. So we wait two years. We've waited a hundred since T.R. first introduced the idea. We can wait two more.
There really is a contest between liberals and conservatives going back oh so many years. Wilson and his internationalism; Hoover and his hands off business and the economy. I'm reading H.W. Brands "A Traitor to His Class", another great tome about FDR, one of my favorite guys of all time.
The parallels of the Great Depression to the Great Recession are interesting. FDR had the advantage of nearly three years of Hoover presiding over the country going bust before he took office and he took it with an incredible super majority. For example, the bank reform bill, passed within days of his inauguration in early March (then it switched to January in '36), wasn't even read by most of Congress. They didn't have time to print it up. They simply trusted FDR to do something positive with the money situation. The cover of the bill was physically presented with rolled up newspaper behind it and shown to Congress. Can you imagine?
Oddly, the next thing FDR did was slash the budget and balance it. He abhorred deficit spending. It wasn't until much later that Keynesian economics came to the fore and, of course, then there was WWII which was all about deficit spending. The curious fact is that if we hadn't had the Great Depression, we'd be floundering around much like FDR in the 30s. We are to a great extent anyway, but at least the lessons of those days informed Bernanke, Paulsen, and Geithner how to avoid a total meltdown.
Too bad the country at large hasn't caught on to what we've avoided and many have become incredibly angry that it all hasn't been fixed-- presto, chango. But, the electorate is terribly ill-informed. What a lot of wasted anger is rolling around the country these days.