Says Eric Cantor. Ezra Klein's postmortem:
It's possible, of course, that the administration decided that … there is no political strategy right now that wil lead to a serious agreement on jobs spending with Cantor and his members. It's possible that everything is going exactly according to the administration's plan and they're putting the finishing touches on a Truman-like campaign against a do-nothing, block-everything Congress. But if so, that's quite a statement about how much help the American people can expect from the federal government in the face of a weakening economy and a possible double-dip recession.
To me, from the zero GOP votes for the first stimulus, the last three years have been an exercize in calculated, cynical, partisan destruction. The Republicans greeted a Democratic president eager to reach to conservatives as a Jihadist Marxist they would try to destroy at all costs. They've stuck with the message through thick and thin.
Right now, the obvious strategy for emerging from the economic soup is short-term stimulus combined with a Grand Bargain on spending and taxes for long-term fiscal retrenchment. But this would improve the economy in the next year and so hurt Republican chances to regain the White House and Senate. Hence its evaporation. It is far more important for the GOP that Obama lose his job than that more Americans should save theirs' – even if it means voting against proposals they have endorsed in the past. For a decade, the Grand Bargain concept was taken seriously by both sides. Then after Obama's election, the GOP decided to go for broke on keeping revenues deeply depressed, while offering politically impossible proposals to end Medicare as an entitlement or abolish social security. And short term, it worked.
Long term, once voters really assess the choice next year? I'm not so sure. The only thing I'm sure of is that it is almost entirely up to Obama. His party is incapable of persuading anyone of anything.
The Dish 