It’s the economy, stupid!

Well, it’s been quite some time since anyone posted here.  The thing about blogging is that momentum is the key.  When people are posting frequently, you get a virtuous cycle that encourages others to post.  On the flip side, when there is a sudden lull in posting, say around the holidays perhaps, everyone stops posting.  But it’s a new year, and maybe if I give this another go, there is a chance that our other contributors will be encouraged to post something worth your time.  Until then, you’ve got me.

The commentariat is all abuzz with a debate over whether, now that the House has passed the Job-Killing-Repeal-Obamacare bill, the Senate should even allow debate on it.  Harry Reid has said it won’t come to the floor for a vote.  Still, some in the left-leaning blogosphere want to see the senate Democrats drag out the debate, forcing Republicans into embarrassing votes on popular provisions of the law.

This seems to me like an obvious mistake.  The debate on health care is over. End of story. 

True, there are a handful of people still obsessing about the Affordable Care Act – the tea party. Everyone else is tired of this debate.  It passed, the world didn’t come to an end, and Democrats will continue to take deserved credit as popular provisions of the bill continue to become law.  But the president isn’t experiencing a resurgence in the polls because people are spending all of their time thinking about the ACA.  He’s surging in the polls because he signed a bunch of bills in the lame duck session that made it look like he is trying to fix the damned economy and because some good economic numbers posted.  Period.

So let the Senate Republicans spend their time whining that the Democrats won’t let them bring the repeal bill to the floor all they want.  In the meantime, the Democrats in the Senate should be brining a new bill to the floor every week dealing with small business loans, infrastructure projects, higher education access, etc.  And call the bills “The Small Business Growth Act” and “The 21st Century Workforce Investment Act”. If the Republicans shut up and pass the bills, great.  The president will get credit for getting stuff done and for being “bipartisan”.  If they filibuster and demand a vote on health care repeal, great.  The Republicans look like obstructionists who care more about some repeal bill that the president will never sign than they do about creating jobs.  Either way Obama wins.

The point here is this:  the economy is going to continue to slowly recover over the next two years.  The only question is how much credit the president and the Democrats will get for it.  With any luck, they will get a few bills through that actually speed up the recovery, but even if they don’t, FDR was elected and then re-elected twice before the economy ever really started to recover because, irrespective of the economic conditions, he looked like he was doing everything he could to get the economy moving again.

Or the Democrats could let the Republicans set the agenda, make them take a few mildly embarrassing votes.  Like Ezra Klein, I doubt that forcing them to take those votes will hurt the Republicans much, but even if it does, the Democrats will do so at the cost of looking like they don’t understand how badly the economy sucks.

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