Republicans Digging Their Political Graves With A Policy Of Obstructionism

It's no coincidence that job approval ratings for congressional Republicans are in single digits. Most Americans are furious that the concerted strategy of all obstructionism all the time, orchestrated by unsavory characters like Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner and Jim DeMint who would rather see America fail than Obama succeed, is hindering progress on the president's plans for digging the nation out from under the mess Bush and his GOP-- and Blue Dog-- allies in Congress dug for us. All the talk about violence and revolution probably isn't helping much either. Yesterday former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was one of the first to admit it: the Bush Recession is now the Bush Depression.

The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can't find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway... This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale.

But all we get from GOP "leaders," whether Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Ryan, Miss McConnell, Kyl, Cornyn or "Bobby" Jindal, is blatant political game playing and destructive obstructionism. The newest GOP game is keeping large numbers of critical Obama appointments from being confirmed.

Yesterday the Republican Party of Virginia was savvy enough to fire its hapless state party chairman, twittering extremist Jeffrey Frederick, a die-hard and hysterical obstructionist-- in a state that Obama won, and where two Senate seats and three House seats went from red to blue in the last couple of cycles.

Virginia Republicans ousted their embattled chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick Saturday at a tense meeting that left the party bitterly divided as its leaders try to staunch years of election losses and head into the state's crucial November elections.

Frederick's dismissal came after he repeatedly refused to resign despite public requests from nearly every top-ranking Republican officeholder in Virginia. They accused him of incompetence and mismanagement.

But at the heart of the dispute is a struggle that is tormenting Republicans both in the state, and nationally -- whether to rigidly pursue an agenda dominated by conservative social issues or to reach out to more moderate voters with a pledge to focus on economic issues. The conflict has split the party and overshadowed Republican efforts to win back the governor's mansion in a campaign that is viewed by many to be a critical harbinger for the national elections in 2010.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party is starting to mobilize against the obstructionists-for-obstruction's sake in Congress. The DCCC has targeted 35 districts across the country represented by Republicans in the House of Representatives that were won by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

The vulnerable California districts with Republican representatives that were won by Obama are those of Reps. Dan Lungren of Gold River (Sacramento County), Mary Bono-Mack of Palm Springs, David Dreier of San Dimas (Los Angeles County), Elton Gallegly of Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), Brian Bilbray of Solana Beach (San Diego County), John Campbell of Newport Beach (Orange County), Ken Calvert of Riverside and Howard "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County), the committee says.

But it's not just California. Around the country, these are the Republican obstructionists who are in trouble; the percentages are the final Obama/McCain scores in the CD:

Mike Castle (R-DE)- 62/37%
Bill Young (R-FL)- 51/47%
Ileana Ros-Letinen (R-FL)- 51/49%
Tom Latham (R-IA)- 53/45%
Peter Roskam (R-IL)- 56/43%
Mark Kirk (R-IL)- 61/38%
Judy Biggert (R-IL)- 54/45%
Donald Manzullo (R-IL)- 53/45%
Ahn Cao (R-LA)- 74/25%
Dave Camp (R-MI)- 50/48%
Fred Upton (R-MI)- 54/45%
Mike Rogers (R-MI)- 53/46%
Thaddeus McCotter (M-MI)- 54/45%
Erik Paulsen (R-MN)- 52/46%
Lee Terry (R-NE)- 50/49%
Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ)- 54/45%
Leonard Lance (R-NJ)- 51/48%
John McHugh (R-NY)- 52/47%
Pat Tiberi (R-OH)- 53/46%
Jim Gerlach (R-PA)- 58/41%
Charlie Dent (R-PA)- 56/43%
Randy Forbes (R-VA)- 50/49%
Frank Wolf (R-VA)- 53/46%
Dave Reichert (R-WA)- 57-42%
Paul Ryan (R-WI)- 51/48%
Tom Petri (R-WI)- 50-49%
Many of these incumbents-- as well as the ones representing districts where Obama and McCain were tied, like Vernon Ehlers (MI-03), Dean Heller (NV-02), and Steve LaTourette (OH-14)-- are telling themselves that without the burden of as terrible and backwards-looking as McCain, they'll be in better shape. But now the leaders of the GOP are looking even worse than McCain: Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford, Mitt Romney, the Louisiana exorcist, Mike Huckabee, Rush Limbaugh. Maybe they'll trot Fred Thompson or Bob Dole out again; and as unlikely as it seems, Michael Steele could still be considered a party leader in 2010.

The Republican problems are dramatized in areas like [California's CD-03], the Sacramento district Lungren represents, which is considered a stalwart of GOP conservatism.

In 2001, the district's voter registration was 54 percent Republican, 34 percent Democrat, and 13 percent "decline to state," [non-partisan political analyst Allan] Hoffenblum said.

His latest analysis shows that the same district has lost nearly 30 percent of its GOP base and is now 40 percent Republican, 38 percent Democrat and 18 percent decline-to-state.

There, as in other regions of California, "Republicans can no longer be elected by Republican alone-- they need crossovers," Hoffenblum said. "The decline-to-states will be a significant factor in the 2010 election cycle."

Those decline-to-state and moderate swing voters voted for Obama because they want change. The Republicans are offering more of what made the mess and, worse yet, obstruction to that change. If the Democrats don't beat arch-obstructionists like Lungren, Calvert and McKeon in California, McCotter, Upton and Rogers in Michigan, Gerlach and Dent in Pennsylvania and Ryan and Petri in Wisconsin, it's because they haven't done an effective job recruiting and financing viable candidates.

And the outlook for the Senate races is similar. Obama won North Carolina and Richard Burr's disapproval ratings are high and getting higher. Democrats are also likely to take red-held seats in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Ohio, where Obama won, as well as Florida unless Charlie Crist runs, and probably Missouri, where McCain did edge Obama by a narrow margin.