Blame Games: Dems Give Up On Economy After Weeks Of GOP Obstruction | TPMDC

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It was a Democrat -- James Carville -- who coined the phrase "it's the economy, stupid." And to this day, leading Democrats understand that Carville was correct. They get it all the way down to their trembling bones. They'd love to take dramatic steps to improve the economy, but Republicans are using every tool at their disposal to prevent that. It's led Democrats to blame Republicans explicitly for causing Americans economic pain for short-term political gain, but it also means we're not going to see much in the way of economy-improving legislation in the months ahead.

"They think the worse the economy is come November, the better they're going to do election wise," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at a press conference this morning.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) echoed that analysis last month on a conference call with reporters.

"If [the GOP] can stop the recovery from occurring, if they can create as much pain as possible, people will be angry and will not vote at all or will vote against those in the majority," she implored.

With Republicans pushing for tax cuts for the rich and blocking unemployment benefits, you can see where they're coming from. And yet, with unemployment hovering near 10 percent, and a midterm election threatening to sweep them out of power on Capitol Hill, Democrats are trapped and running out of time.

They can't pass anything other than modest stimulative measures without running into obstruction, mostly from Republicans -- but they face similar obstacles within their own party. Compounding matters is the fact that the Senate schedule is packed to the brim with other must-pass initiatives and that the White House is divided over whether the President should press Congress to spend more money (stimulus) or to retreat into deficit reduction mode (anti-stimulus).

With leadership like that nobody (particularly at the White House) is picking up a megaphone and demanding Congress (particularly Republicans) do something significant to reduce unemployment. And they're not gonna.

"Look at what we had to go through for the last eight weeks," said Reid's spokesman Jim Manley. "The fact is that we have a Republican party that's betting on this President to fail. We'll continue to look at additional efforts to provide help for the economy but the fact is in this heavily polarized Senate, it's very difficult to get stuff done."

Checkmate. Suddenly, a picture has emerged of Democrats stumbling toward November with nothing to show the unemployed, only to feel the full wrath of a disenchanted electorate.

"I think Americans are angry," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer at his weekly press availability yesterday. "They were angry in 2006. They were angry in 2008. They changed leadership. They are still angry. Their economy is still not working the way it ought to work.... Unfortunately their anger, which should be focused on not returning to the Bush-Hastert-Boehner-McCain policies," is now redirected at Democrats.

The problem is that, to counter that perception, Democrats would have to take significant legislative steps right now to lower unemployment (let alone to keep it from growing). But there's no easy way for them to do that, so instead, with a double-dip recession threatening, they're taking an incremental route.

"President Obama will continue to press Congress to extend unemployment benefits and pass commonsense measures to strengthen our economic recovery - like extending unemployment insurance and COBRA, supporting our clean energy economy, providing aid to state and local governments, and saving the jobs of thousands of teachers," reads a statement from Obama's top economic adviser Larry Summer's today.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols