Last Call

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki bemoans that the GOP will be rewarded by voters for doing nothing about the jobs crisis.

But people are underestimating a number of factors that could allow the G.O.P. to pursue an obstructive line without being much punished for it. To begin with, studies show that voters are more likely to hold politicians accountable for economic conditions when there’s “clarity of responsibility”—and responsibility for the economy now belongs to Obama and the Democrats. The recession started long before Obama took office. But, from a voter’s perspective, he had two years with sizable majorities in Congress to do something about it. While the 2009 stimulus plan succeeded in making the recession less awful than it might have been, you rarely get credit in politics for what didn’t happen. More important, in launching the plan, the President effectively took responsibility for the result. If you try to fix it, it’s yours. The Republicans were out of power for two years, and now control only one house of Congress. They can dodge blame, since they’ve had little chance of enacting anything. Coöperating on a bill would make it harder for them to disclaim responsibility for a weak economy at election time. They need to do enough to seem as if they cared about unemployment but not so much that they get blamed for it.

Well then, who's letting them get away with that obviously cynical plan?  Would be nice if you called them on it rather than saying "Well, here's what they are doing and it's crap but what can a major national news outlet do to set the record straight."

In addition, while most voters say that they want the government to do something about jobs, talking about voters in general is deceptive: different sets of voters react to economic conditions quite differently. The Republican base is actively hostile toward more government spending, and polls show that swing voters think that reining in deficits is the main priority. That reduces the pressure on Republican politicians to do something about the jobs crisis. Compounding this is the fact that Republican and Democratic voters seem to have different expectations of officeholders. The economist Douglas Hibbs has found that, historically, Democratic voters were more likely to punish incumbents for presiding over periods of high unemployment, while Republican voters were likely to punish incumbents for presiding over periods of high inflation. And a study of gubernatorial elections found that Democrats who presided over increases in taxes and spending were rewarded by voters, while Republicans who did the same were punished. Voters, it seems, don’t expect Republicans to do much about jobs, so they’re not penalized as much for inaction. Uncooperative Republicans are really just delivering what their constituencies expect.

Republican voters expect Republicans to do nothing, and that GOP lawmakers want to do nothing.  They win, because Republicans apparently only give a damn about themselves.

It’s not that the Republican approach is popular: one recent Bloomberg poll found that forty-five per cent of those surveyed think congressional Republicans are responsible for the gridlock in Washington. But it seems to be working: for the past year and a half, the Party has consistently gone for a do-nothing approach and voters have consistently rewarded it. In the run-up to last year’s midterms, Republicans were explicit about their opposition to past, present, and future stimulus programs. They won a landslide victory. And, just last week, in two special elections for the House, Republican candidates who campaigned largely against Obama’s policies won seats in Nevada and New York by margins that were much bigger than expected. Americans may be saying that they want the government to use fiscal policy to get the economy moving again, but the way they vote tells a different story. Perhaps fourteen more months of economic stagnation and no job creation will change that. But, for now, it’s not only our representatives who are to blame. It’s ourselves.

Gee, by taking advantage of low-information voters for 30 years the GOP has managed to wreck the country.  If only there was some sort of media outlet who could spread corrections to that theory...

Funny how that works.