Polarization

Clive Crook says that Obama's big mistake was refusing to "disown the left." Krugman is right to disagree.

Obama has been moderately leftish. With interest rates at zero and the economy needing a jump-start, Obama did a stimulus but failed to take the left's advice to make it sufficiently large. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed health care reform with its liberal goal of fixing the malfunctioning private sector and fiscally conservative goal of fixing the long term deficit problem. However he did not follow the left's advice and include a public option. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed reform of the banking and financial system in response to the Great Clusterfuck of 2008. He didn't follow the left's advice and nationalize and/or break up the biggest "zombie" banks. This could have caused panic and further damage at a time when the global economy was fragile. Or it could helped the banks deleverage in an orderly manner and saved the taxpayers money. For me it's an open question. (They did end up performing "stress tests" to boost confidence, something the Europeans are copying in response to their sovereign debt crisis.) If we enter a "lost decade" it could be seen as a missed opportunity. Although a lot of banks have been liquified and/or absorbed into other banks, something the Firebaggers refuse to acknowlege.

Obama did follow the left's advice in creating a financial consumer protection agency, but housed it in the Federal Reserve Bank and might not back Elizabeth Warren's appointment to head it.

Jonathan Chait points out that Republicans have been unapologeticaly embracing the far Right and will lose elections in November because of this.

...The Nevada Senate race is a prime example. Harry Reid, once a dead man walking, is now sitting on a nice lead because Republicans nominated a lunatic to oppose him. "A total f*** up by the state and national Republicans to allow Angle to get nominated," a source notes to Ben Smith.

But of course there are numerous such fuckups. In Kentucky, Republicans turned a rock-solid safe seat into a toss up by nominating ultra-radical Rand Paul over party hack Trey Grayson. In Pennsylvania, they turned a relatively safe seat in Arlen Specter, who had been almost completely housebroken by the right since 2004, into another toss-up. (More importantly, they drove Specter from the party and made him the 60th Senate seat, allowing the passage of health care reform.) And in Florida, they turned another safe hold into a toss-up by challenging, and driving from the party, Charlie Crist.

Florida is actually the closest thing to a rational move for the right. First, I think Crist's current lead is far from safe, because the Democratic vote is likely to consolidate above its current abysmal level and that will come out of Crist's hide. Second, Crist is a genuine moderate, so there really was a more reasonable risk-reward calculation for conservatives looking to gain a more ideologically reliable Senator at the risk of losing the seat altogether. There's at least a strong chance that the Rubio challenge will burn them.

This is four Senate seats put at serious risk by running right-wing primary challenges, plus one enormous liberal domestic policy accomplishment. In all these instances, conservatives either celebrated the right-wing primary challenge or, at the very least, quietly accepted it. There was very little pushback at the time from the party establishment, other than a feeble effort in Kentucky. I have seen no recriminations whatsoever in hindsight. And yet it seems perfectly clear that the effect of these challenges has been a disaster from the conservative perspective. You don't have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning.