Sean Wilentz: How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party. I wish I could buy this, but with McCain virtually tied in the polls, the Republicans don't look anywhere near dead enough for me. One no doubt small but voluble segment of Bush's defectors are those who claim he lost faith with true conservatism. A larger segment think he had the right idea but just executed badly. Neither shows any evidence of learning, and both are willing to give it another go with McCain, even if they trust him less now than they did Bush in 2000. But as McCain's steady rise in the polls shows, Republicans are still able to sway voters with some of the most hypocritical nonsense imaginable.

Historian that he is, Wilentz pulls out various examples of past debacles, including the collapse of the Federalists after 1800 and the demise of the Whigs in 1854 -- obscure examples today, but right in Wilentz's prime period. In those cases the parties actually died, but for the Democrats in 1896 and 1980 and for the Republicans in 1932 the parties merely struggled on in a lesser role, preserved in their geographical redoubts. That at most is what may still happen in 2008. The Republicans will still hang on to their hard core, because the hard core hasn't learned any better.

Wilentz isn't much of a political theorist, but he does touch on some important history:

Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, Rove informed a meeting of the Republican National Committee that he fully intended to make the War on Terror a partisan issue, charging that the Democrats could not be trusted to keep the nation safe. The White House's thorough politicization of a war crisis -- without parallel in modern American history -- would continue over the weeks and months to come, from Republican campaign ads to sudden announcements of elevated terrorist alerts by Homeland Scurity, seemingly whenever the president's poll ratings began to dip. In the midterm elections of 2002, barely a year after September 11th, public anxieties helped the Republicans win back the Senate and expand their majority in the House by eight years.

This worked even more improbably in 2004, mostly through the trick of keeping the war going, and continuously taunting the Democrats with their lukewarm support/opposition.

Despite his disastrous mismanagement in Iraq and his attacks on civil liberties at home, Bush finally managed to win the popular vote [in 2004]. Although his margin in the final tally was the slightest ever for a successful presidential re-election, he immediately announced that he had gained the political capital he needed to pursue his radical agenda. In only a matter of months, however, the bottom began to fall out.

Nothing fails like failure. The deepening quagmire in Iraq, coupled with reports that the administration had relied upon false as well as questionable evidence to justify the original invasion, soured the public's mood -- and led a few commentators, including some high-profile conservatives, to dissent from the conventional wisdom. According to George Will, the Bush presidency's crusade in Iraq had produced "a torrent of acrimony about the dubious inception and incompetent conduct of a war that ecame perhaps the worst foreign-policy debacle in the nation's history."

Bush's failures were well in evidence by 2004, but his supporters rallied to the cause anyway, a case of willful self-delusion the likes of which we hadn't seen since Nixon's 1972 rout. Republican interests held firm in 2004 because facing what Bush had done honestly would have cost them everything. The same interests are rallying around McCain for the same reasons -- money, political careers, ideological quirks.

Under DeLay's leadership, Congress became a virtual political extension of the White House. Until 2006, there was barely a peep of criticism from either Republican caucus as the Bush administration passed regressive tax cuts, invaded Iraq, mismanaged the occupation and vastly augmented executive authority on shaky legal grounds. DeLay also happily pursued numerous financial as well as political adventures. Chief among them was the K Street Project, designed to enforce absolute deference from Washington lobbying firms to the Republican regime by compelling them to hire party activists in exchange for favorable legislation and loosened regulatory oversight for major corporate clients. By systematically replacing the bipartisan lobbying ranks with GOP hardliners, DeLay attempted to make Republicans the only party with whom corporate America would be allowed to do business -- a partisan power grab of breathtaking audacity.

While DeLay is out of Congress now, it isn't clear that his (and Rove's, and many others') projects to bias non-governmental groups -- lobbyists, corporations, media, etc. -- to perpetuate Republican power have failed. As the Democrats gain power, the lobbies will become more bipartisan, but they may also grow mostalgic for the culture of corruption the Republicans thrived in.

David Leonhardt: How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy. Before getting into Obama's curious sense of economics, a little preliminary background worth quoting:

The fact that the economy grows -- that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one -- no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. Most families are still making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000. For these workers, roughly the bottom 60 percent of the income ladder, economic growth has become a theoretical concept rather than the wellspring of better medical care, a new car, a nicer house -- a better life than their parents had.

This runs against the fundamental American religion: the notion that things are getting better, especially from each generation to to the next. This has happened because Republicans have made no effort to check against growing inequality -- indeed, deliberately or not, they've promoted growth inequality. Obama intends to nudge against inequality by raising income taxes on incomes over $250K while reducing income taxes on everyone else. That hardly qualifies as redistributionist, but it starts to make the point.

Leonhardt quotes Obama: "Reagan's central insight -- that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing that pie -- contained a good deal of truth." I agree with that, but don't give Reagan any credit for it because he didn't do anything with the insight. For Obama, it seems to be a way of rebaselining Democratic politics, which isn't exactly how Leonhardt puts it:

Today's Democratic consensus has moved the party to the left, and on issues like inequality and climate change, Obama appears willing to be even more aggressive than many fellow Democrats. From this standpoint, he's a true liberal. Yet he also says he believes that there are significant parts of Reaganism worth preserving. So his policies often involve setting up a government program to address a market failure but then trying to harness the power of the market within that program. This, at times, makes him look like a conservative Democrat.

There is some gimmickry in Obama's market propositions, but they offer a way around the bureaucratic inefficiencies derided by Reagan, and also around the corruption and dysfunction Reagan favored.

When Reagan was elected, in 1980, tax rates on top incomes were so high that even liberal economists now say the economy was suffering. There simply wasn't enough of an incentive for rich people to start new companies or expand existing ones, because so much of their profits would have gone to the federal government. Someone making the equivalent of $5 million in 1980 -- in inflation-adjusted terms -- would have paid a combined federal tax rate of almost 60 percent, according to research by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two academic economists.

I can't speak for "even liberal economists" but this argument is patent bullshit. If true, nobody would have started a business in the US between 1935 and 1980 -- obviously, many businesses were started in that period. Where tax policy may have had an effect, it was because capital gains were taxed much less than income, so it made more sense to build long-term value in business. With Reagan there was less long-term incentive, which resulted in much profiteering as companies were plundered through LBO and similar deals. While such deals made some people extremely rich, they added virtually nothing to the productive economy.

I don't advocate restoring New Deal marginal income tax rates, but I also don't find them much of a disincentive for the rich to get richer. What I would do is make unearned income tax (capital gains, interest, dividends, profits, gifts, inheritance) steeply progressive over an individual's lifetime: it would be easier to get that first million, but extra millions would be taxed more and more heavily, with an especially stiff inheritance tax at the end -- it is, after all, the one tax that never incentivizes anyone. (E.g., people don't become more death-prone when estate taxes drop, or less when they rise.)

There is a good deal more in this piece. One thing that is clear is that Obama has a more nuanced understanding of economics than almost any politician I can think of. I doubt that will help him much during the campaign, since nuance (or for that matter logic) isn't something that people seem to want in their leaders. Whether it helps him as president isn't totally clear either. The two presidents who, at least relative to their time, seemed to understand economics best were probably Hoover and Carter, neither of whom was judged much of a success. On the other hand, Obama is much closer to the right answers here -- and not just much closer than McCain, who's only clue is that rich people seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

A lot of people are saying nice things about Joe Biden today. He seems to be pretty well regarded by just about everyone who finds themselves to the left of McCain and to the right of Noam Chomsky. For example, David Brooks, who's unlikely to wind up supporting Obama, endorsed Biden. Chuck Hagel said nice things about him. So did Hillary Clinton. But also most of the leftish bloggers I read had a good word for him. I don't have anything to add in that vein. I found his handling of the Georgia war to be irresponsible and provocative, by any standards other than those set by John McCain. The best I can say for his advocacy for partitioning Iraq is that it was unhelpful. I don't exactly know where he stands on Israel/Palestine, but one guess should suffice. Still, I don't think he's on the ticket to consult on policy. Hopefully he's there to chew up McCain's ass. How well he succeeds will make a lot of difference.