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I would almost feel bad about airing any kind of post-election sentiment given that the fools and reactionaries (were any of them among the handful of SB readers, that is) would presumably chortle with delight… but, let’s face it, they’re going to chortle with dismally-misguided delight anyway. Despair, fear, anger, resignation, it doesn’t matter; any reaction at all, or even the absence of any proclamation, would serve their purposes adequately. These are the people who are entrenched in an endless war on straw men, after all. They adapt information to their conceptual framework rather than adapting their conceptual framework to information.

So, fuck ‘em and I’ll write what I want.

Really, I’m just kind of… lacking in much of a reaction, anyway, at least in terms of feelings. Economics offers all kinds of valuable concepts that can be used outside of the dismal science, not least among them the idea that expected news is typically “priced in” by the market, and thus the official arrival of such news does not lead to any noticeable subsequent response.

So, I suspect, with the 2010 election. We were told what to expect for months, and it pretty much happened as predicted; am I now to wail and gnash my teeth? Throw a hissyfit, stamp my feet (or otherwise behave like a TPer)? Not feeling it, sorry.
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This is mostly just an attempt to review a few things, and examine whether any sense can be made of them, for my own benefit. Though of course, as always, anyone who wishes is welcome to play along at home.

Now then. Here we are with just (thankfully) a couple of weeks left until the 2010 general election.

We’re less than two years removed from an eight year debacle of a Republican presidential administration, which has left us a legacy including:

• growing budget imbalances (after inheriting surpluses from the previous administration)
• military adventures which turned into continuing, and ruinously-expensive, foreign occupations that have made our own country no safer and have probably, on balance, brought only negligible benefit at best to the residents of the occupied countries.
• an enormous financial crisis which led to a deep recession, now technically over but leaving unemployment stuck at the double-digit threshold.

Additionally, America’s vaunted market capitalism private sector has proved itself, essentially, completely bankrupt. Morally, intellectually, and financially. The financial sector imploded through its own reckless greed and the auto manufacturers imploded through their own stupidity (to simplify matters greatly), both requiring government intervention to bail them out. The oil industry presided over a disastrous and humiliating flood of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. And private industry, in general, seems capable only of enriching the ownership class and associated elites whilst, as a job-creation machine, it appears to be entirely unfit for purpose.

The Republican opposition has had nothing to offer in response to any of this, other than meaningless bluster and a constant refrain of “no no no no no” to absolutely any action that the current government takes or even proposes.

So, naturally, reactionary sentiment is apparently “surging” and expected to hand the Republican party increased power at all levels of government along with, perhaps, control of congress.

What am I missing, here?

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I see that the other day, friend Paul posted an item indicating that Democrats’ polling numbers have actually turned back toward the light, of late, with of course a corresponding slump in the Republican “surge.”

Wishful thinking? Actually… probably not.

I mean, come on. It’s as though no one in America has ever lived through a general election before. How often does election coverage not only begin with months of expectations for a completely one-sided outcome, but then continue those expectations throughout the last several weeks of the campaign?

I realize that I’m going dangerously far out on a limb toward making predictions of my own, but it is not and never was likely that the “GOP, GOP, GOP” drumbeat was going to remain the only noise heard from our political punditocracy between July and November. Consider:

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