Too Late Now

I'm sure the rhetoric will be soaring, but any motivational speech that's focused on jobs, employment, growing the middle class, etc., needed to happen about ten minutes after the first inaugural. They had the right idea initially, but their subsequent failures in judgment lay in (1) seeing the Recovery Act as finished policy, not as a down payment on a Second New Deal, (2) assuming that Fed recapitalization and holding down interest rates would cause a thousand flowers to bloom, and (3) convincing themselves that a poorly written health-care bill would yield a bigger political payoff than a well-written public works bill. Granted, all of these policy initiatives were arguably better than doing nothing, but they were simply inadequate to address the crisis of the existing order, and unless Team Democrat can figure out a way to gain control of both Houses of Congress after the midterms, nothing more is going to happen on the jobs front. At this point, it's all about damage control until 2017.

---Baron V