Yes, folks, it's more Blue Dog-bashing: More than ever now it's the economy, stupid -- is it possible that the Blue Dogs really don't get it?

Did the Paulson-Bernanke bailout ever aim to do more than cushion the blow of the meltdown for those least harmed by it?

by Ken

First I want to say thanks to all of you out there who kept visiting and reading while Howie was away. It was a worrying thing, that thought that there might not be any readers left when he got back.

Then let me say that I've had fun these several weeks. (Huh, is that all it was?) For better or worse, I'll be trying to keep up my writing the pace of my writing here -- well, not that pace, for goodness' sake, but on a more regular basis than I've sometimes managed in the last year. We have a lot of really great readers, and it's been lovely having closer contact.

Now, as to this post, it's not what I originally intended to write today. What I had planned was a grabbag of quick hits on an all-over-the-place assortment of items left over in my 2008 "To Write About" bag, things for which I never managed to find the right fit or angle or whatever -- by and large things I couldn't quite figure out how to write about. But after I mentioned this to Howie, he sent a note: "Blue Dogs are going to oppose Obama's stimulus package."

Normally I consider the Blue Dogs his beat, as part of that whole CD-by-CD nitty-gritty political coverage he does so well. All I had on the subject were some general thoughts. But the general thoughts started festering, and finally I figured, well, is there a bigger, not to mention nastier, item lurking in my "2008 leftovers" bag than the economic mess? It was only after I'd written this piece that I discovered Howie had already written one on the subject. And so, on the theory that there can never be enough Blue Dog-bashing (and since I can still use the extra time to figure out how to write about my grab-bag items, now scheduled for tomorrow), let's go, Blue Dogs!

I imagine that in January 1933, as President Franklin Roosevelt took over stewardship of the U.S. economy, facing the only mess in living memory worse than our own (and bear in mind, we haven't yet seen the full scope of our own), there were Democrats in Congress who thought that President Hoover, in watching over the country's three-year free fall, had gotten the whole economy thing just right, and why muck with a successful formula?

Really now, you would think that the scope of the current mess is sufficient to capture the imagination of even today's Hooverite Dems. As jobs continue to disappear at a pace that beggars the imagination (not to mention the forecasts even of many of the gloomier economists), WE ALL PAY THE PRICE. The economists I listen to, and I mean people like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker and Ian Welsh and Stirling Newberry (and it seems to me about time we started listening to them rather than the band of buffoons who either cheerled or actually engineered us into this mess), are agreed that there's far more danger in doing too little than too much to turn the economy around.

Again, we have no evidence that we're anywhere near bottoming out, let alone that we've begun moving in an upward direction. And one thing that should be beyond discussion is that economic downturns and upswings aren't symmetrical. As the downturn widens and deepens, it becomes self-reinforcing. Even I understand that as the job hunt becomes ever more hopeless, job-hunters give up hunting. And as prospects for the long-delayed upswing become less clear, businesspeople are not only less able to keep their business going but lose all incentive to make the kinds of investment needed for a resumption of economic growth -- even if they could afford to borrow the money to invest.

My greatest fear about the still-unseen Obama package is that it may be too little, too late. I hope Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi are already drumming this into their respective caucuses (not to mention Minority Leaders McConnell and Boehner and their economic wizards), and that the president-elect's economic and congressional-liaison teams are prepared to launch an all-out educational blitz -- again bipartisan, of course -- in support of the new administration's bold, forward-looking package (I can dream, can't I?).

Of course, as regards the distinctly Southern tinge of the Blue Dog caucus, it's also worth keeping in mind the second of the "two things we learned about our politics and our economy in 2008," according to Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column yesterday:

"In matters economic, the Civil War isn't really over."

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