Absolutely Positively On Purpose

Steve Benen asks the kind of question more people should be thinking about.

Budget expert Stan Collender has predicted that Republicans perceive "economic hardship as the path to election glory." Paul Krugman noted in his column yesterday that Republicans "want the economy to stay weak as long as there's a Democrat in the White House."

As best as I can tell, none of this analysis -- all from prominent observers -- generated significant pushback. The notion of GOP officials deliberately damaging the economy didn't, for example, spark widespread outrage or calls for apologies from Matt or anyone else.

And that, in and of itself, strikes me as remarkable. We're talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country -- on purpose, in public, without apology or shame -- for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.

Maybe now would be a good time to pause and ask a straightforward question: are Americans O.K. with this?

And for the most part they are, because they've been convinced that Obama will do the opposite:  make the economy better for everyone else except them, and at their specific expense.  Obama, we learn, says he wants to make the economy better.  It's not better for a lot of Americans, therefore what Obama must have done over the last two years is made the economy better for everyone except me.

It's a load of crap, of course.  But depending on how cynical your worldview is, Obama's economic policies range from incompetent to being a purposeful tool of the bankers to being a Socialist revolutionary.  It's hard to dispel these myths without the economy actually getting better, so all the Republicans have to do is to make sure that doesn't happen.

Block all efforts to improve the economy, and you get rewarded for it.  I've been saying this, literally, for years now.  This year's midterms are proof this plan can work.  But people besides me are finally arriving at this conclusion.  The Republican scorched earth campaign has a cost, and we're the ones paying.  If America falls apart, the Republicans will gain power.

Only when they have regained the power they lost in 2006 will they suddenly begin to do the things for the economy that need to be done in order to maintain power.

To a point.  After all, it's pretty easy to do these days when all you have to do is say the First Lady is a radical racial revolutionary for disagreeing with you.  It's like falling off a log.

[UPDATE]  BooMan has some additional thoughts on this.

There are smart people in the Republican Party who know that the economy is going to suck for the next two years and that people are going to suffer. Some of them know that the federal government can do something about it and that cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans isn't going to help. They might even be worried that the American people will punish them if they refuse to do anything or to work with the president in any constructive way. But they're helpless to change course because they've poisoned the minds' of their base. And, it's not only their base, because I think most incoming freshmen are true-believing dittoheads.

So, Benen is correct. If you wanted to design a party to destroy America's economy, you couldn't do much better than the current GOP. But, are they going to do it for purely cynical reasons or because they're crazy? The answer is: a little of each. The top echelon...the movers and shakers...have never been social conservatives and the only ideology they're wedded to is keeping as much cash for themselves as possible. They probably don't want the U.S. economy to suck for the next two years, although most of them are smart enough to win at the casino either way. But the lower level Republicans, including a good percentage of their caucuses? They're going to fuck everything up because they're crazy. 

And that's pretty much it.