Okay, I'm going to try and limit posting here to one election item per day. Today's is that I had to post in its entirety, this piece by David Frum…
The income of the typical American collapsed during the Great Recession. And in the two years of recovery since 2009, median income has…declined another 4.1%.
Given such a record, how can the "out" party possibly manage to be losing in the polls? Apparently those families have decided that the out party offers them a future that looks even worse than the recent past. If so, that's a shocking indictment of GOP strategy. Would it really have been so impossible to devise a platform that offered the typical American family something beneficial from a change of administration? As is, they get only a promise that cutting the taxes of the wealthiest few will translate into opportunity for them — a promise that their own experience of the last round of tax cuts renders non-credible. In 2001 and 2003, the GOP cut taxes at the top, and incomes at the middle stagnated. Why would a voter at the middle expect anything different from another round of the same medicine? And this time, the tax cuts at the top come joined — not to an increase in Medicare spending as in the Bush years — but to a promise of dramatic Medicaid cuts straightaway, and dramatic Medicare cuts after that.
This is M.E. again. I think that's the election right there: People may think things are bad but Romney hasn't offered them anything better than "Trust me. I've run some successful businesses." They don't buy that cutting taxes for the rich will do anything except for the rich — i.e., the folks who don't need help. They may not even buy that Romney cares about doing anything except for the rich.