if you’ll permit the political interlude, on friday a couple of blogs picked up on this thought. but i thought of it first! i just didn’t post it until today, because i couldn’t really decide if i wanted to post something completely unrelated to being over here. but whatever, here goes.
there is, i think, a narrative developing (potentially) that is being completely overlooked by the mainstream media. consider: the following things should be happening by October/November:
(1) healthcare reform passes. It continues to get more popular. people start to learn about the good things it will do right away–for those playing at home, that would be “no more donut hole, dependent children covered until 26, insurance access for those with pre-existing conditions” and more, as a democratic staffer put it in a memo.
(2) the economy starts adding jobs. most estimates i’ve seen hover around 200,000 jobs a month. from now till election day, we should get eight jobs numbers. so we’ve added 1.8 million jobs (factoring in a little extra for the april number). (“almost two million jobs since march” is not a bad talking point.) being conservative, let’s say the unemployment number goes down a percent, so it will have gone from over 10% to under 9%. i have no proof of this, but i’d bet that people start feeling better about the economy when people they know get jobs, even if they don’t get jobs themselves, so there’s some sort of multiplicative effect.
(3) more stimulus has been spent, and three more positive GDP numbers, which will by that point be 5 consecutive quarters of growth.
(4) more and more troops coming home from iraq–the combat mission in iraq is scheduled to end this august.
and,
(5) a whole 6 months more to take control of afghanistan, and of seriousness about al-qaeda on the af-pak border. (i don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that we are getting close to osama, since we are finally taking it seriously. maybe there’s a 2-5% chance we capture or kill him this summer. not big, but not nothing.)
anyway, the point is, this won’t just energize the democratic base, it will convince independents that republican nihilism is really damaging and a waste of everybody’s time. and none of this is crazy, either. i don’t think the narrative for the dems is that hard to create, and it’s hard for me to see what the argument is from republicans given that they’ve opposed every one of these policies every step of the way. maybe my head is in the clouds here, and of course these things might not happen, but if they do (which, again, I don’t think is all that unreasonable to expect), it’s hard for me to see how dems take massive losses.
this weekend i’ll be in barcelona…then next week home for pesach!!!