A Washington Times columnist, Robert W. Merry, who is also the political editor of The National Interest, issues a warning to his fellow conservatives and Republicans:
“[I]f Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Warren have their way, their party will begin taking steps to…bring those working-class Americans back into the fold. If Republicans are flat-footed, the new Democratic populists could create a major fault line between themselves and Republicans on the issue of the big Wall Street banks. That represents the biggest threat to Republicans going into the 2016 elections.”
Paul Krugman on one of the reasons the economy is finally going into warp speed:
Meanwhile, back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.
With no Republican Congress elected in 2010, this would have happened in part back in 2011 and 2012.
Steve Benen counters the narrative that 2014 was a bad year for the country and President Obama specifically:
This was the year the economy improved to its strongest level in over a decade and the Affordable Care Act succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. It was the year the president scored foreign policy breakthroughs with Cuba and China, and advanced a landmark immigration policy.
This was the year Obama filled much of the federal judiciary with his nominees, deftly handled some important crises, freed American prisoners in North Korea, and sharply reduced the number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
It’s also the year the president saw his approval rating jump, bringing him in line with Reagan’s support at a comparable point in his presidency.
I don’t doubt that Obama wishes the midterm elections had gone the other way, but Beltway conventional wisdom notwithstanding, maybe 2014 wasn’t such a disaster for the president after all?