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This one is easy. If the Republican Party thinks the best way to attract voters to their cause if to tell jokes that amuse a minority and offend a majority of the voting public, who am I to complain? If they want to take to the ramparts to defend a joke that most people find offensive, why would I want to stop them? They may think this is a winning long-term strategy, but I promise you it is not.

Mike Duncan is campaigning for a second term as chairman of the Republican Party by promising to make it "an accelerator of change."

Call me crazy, but isn't conservatism all about "standing athwart history, yelling stop!" How can you do that and accelerate change at the same time?

More seriouly, someone inside the party decided to leak what was supposed to be a very private memo to RNC members about the future of the party. Greg Sargent reports:

"Republicans have grown accustomed to having our party recognized as the `Party of Ideas,' but we must acknowledge that many Americans today believe the party is stale and does not deserve that label," reads one of the memo's starker assessments, adding that "we have not used our principles to provide solutions to the kitchen table concerns of middle-class America."

"We must recognize that being the `Party of Ideas' requires daily effort to apply principles to the particular public policy questions of the day," the memo says. "All Republicans have an obligation to develop principled solutions rather than falling back on ideology alone; we must show how our ideology can be applied to solve problems."

I don't expect them to follow his advice, but if they do, their time in the wilderness might not be nearly as long as I've thought. One thing I can say with certainty, however. There is no way that Republicans are going to listen to this from David Frum:

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats -- but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time. So the question for the GOP is: will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion.

And it will potentially involve even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues. That is a future that leaves little room for Palin -- but it is the only hope for a Republican recovery.

The problem with Frum's argument is that there is already a political party occupying the political space that Frum describes: its the Democrats! Then again, parties that lose their way tend to recover first by becoming a lite version of their opponents, and then eventually by staking out new ground as new issues and fights emerge. Think, for example, of how the useless Democratic Party of the late 1980s morphed into the New Democrats / GOP-lite party of the Clinton years, followed eventually by a Netroots-led rebirth that produced the Obama campaign. It took more than 20 years, but eventually we got there.

Cycles, people. It's all about political cycles.

Dick Cheney, speaking to Senate Republicans on the auto bailout:

"If we don't do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever."

It took Republicans nearly 35 years to shake off that label, and when they finally did it was more by accident than deliberate action. The echoes of the Depression didn't dissipate so much as they were drowned out by the chaos of the late 1960s. New issues replaced old ones, and soon the Depression was almost entirely forgotten as a political force.

We are in another one of those pivotal moments where the narratives of the past give way to the narratives that will define our political future. This past election was the second of two huge Democratic waves, producing a historic candidate who ran a historic campaign premised almost entirely around a transformation of our political system. Despite all of the nation's problems, he's set to enter office with an approval rating of well over 70%, with an even higher percentage of the Millennials, a generation that dwarfs even the Baby Boom, fully on board.

In the midst off all that, what do Republicans do? Do they get serious about remaking their party's image, or do they continue to embrace the politics that got them (and us) to this place? I expected their would be fights, and at times even a bit of chaos. But if you had predicted that just one month after the election, the Republican caucus would rally behind a new form of Hooverism, I'm sorry, but I would have told you that you were nuts.

Center for American Progress sets up neo-Hooverism for you. John Judis breaks it down:

If you look at the history of the Great Depression, what tipped that event from a global recession to depression was precisely a series of dumb, craven -- or in Keynes' word, "feather-brained" -- moves by politicians blinded by ideology or by narrow self-interest. An interest rate hike here, a balanced budget there, a spending reduction or two, and we went from ten to twenty percent unemployment. Don't imagine for a moment that the failure to bailout the auto companies isn't one of those feather-brained moves.

Put it this way. What we have learned from the economics of the Great Depression is that in order to end the spiral of unemployment, government has to throw money at companies and consumers. It should be trying to raise wages, not lower them. The Wall Street bailout was a fiasco, but it was probably better than nothing. And the auto bailout was considerably better thought-out. Now there is a good prospect that two of the Big Three will fail, jeopardizing, perhaps, as many as a million jobs. That's exactly the kind of thing that Americans should not be doing. But don't tell that to those great patriots Corker, DeMint, or Shelby. They know better.

I tend to fall into the "deficits matter" camp - in fact, the accumulation of massive deficits under Republican Presidents is one of the first things that caused me to question whether or not I should leave that party - but there are moments when focusing on them can do far more harm than good. And this is without any doubt whatsoever one of those moments.

Only government is large enough to spend the sums of money necessary to get us out of this mess. That, more than any other single thing, is the lesson of the Great Depression. When the downward spiral starts, either you go big, or you go down hard.
When private citizens and businesses move themselves to the sidelines, only government can step in to prevent collapse. We know this. It's not controversial. And as Yglesias shows, its not even all that hard to explain:

For an individual, it's true that high savings rates are virtuous and bring the prospect of greater prosperity in years to come. Thus, it's seductive to think that public sector budgeting is the same. But it just isn't the same.

When you're facing a recession, especially a recession wherein monetary policy has little ability to stimulate aggregate demand because the banking system is all seized up (remind you of anything?), you need public policy to stimulate aggregate demand. The recession is caused by overall demand for liquidity getting too high. In those circumstances, it becomes rational for any given individual and any given business to also prefer saving to spending. But that only makes things worse. What's needed is for the government to break the cycle with deficit spending. Marcus' alternative theory was tried by Herbert Hoover in the early 1930s and again by Japan in the 1990s and it doesn't work. What did work a little was the New Deal and then the truly balls-to-the-wall spending of World War II worked much better. Excessive virtue amidst the current crisis will doom us all.

Meanwhile, none of this is to deny that it was a mistake for the Bush administration to run up such huge deficits. The flipside of the need for deficit spending during a recession is that responsible political leadership takes advantage of good economic times to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio. The fact that Bush did the reverse makes us worse positioned to cope with the current crisis than we would be had he behaved more responsibly. But past irresponsibility does not imply that future irresponsibility in the opposite direction becomes a good idea.

My biggest fear in all of this? It is that despite all of our knowledge, we will choose to repeat our past mistakes, making things far worse than they would otherwise need to have been.

Long time readers of this blog won't be surprised by what Nate Silver writes today: The Mountain West is the nation's new swing region.

Key grafs:

As a result of the Mountain West swing, the region-wide Bush-Kerry gap of 14.82% and 1,177,675 votes dropped to 263,062 votes and only 2.98% between McCain and Obama. The closest state that matches this gap is Montana, which McCain won by 2.26%....

In the two Mountain West states we can safely say are now structurally Democratic given voter registration totals (Nevada and New Mexico), Obama improved by double digits in 43 of those states' 50 counties. Half of those 50 counties drew 10,000 votes and above, and Obama improved by double digits in 23 of 25 of those....

Though Obama didn't win Montana, that state has clearly shifted back from an all-red enclave. Given the success of Brian Schweitzer, Jon Tester, and Obama's dramatic gap-closing vote gains in Montana, it's clear that the Democratic Party brand as a whole has made dramatic gains in what is now the swing region's swing state.

Given all the foregoing, it's time to bring around the point we made at the outset, about how the Mountain West shift breaks the back of Republican base presidential candidacies.

Consider the electoral advantages Democrats hold elsewhere. Democrats have strong holds on the following: 77 EVs on the Pacific Coast (CA, OR, WA, HI), 117 EVs in the Northeast (ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, DE, PA, MD, DC) and 65 EVs in the Upper Midwest (MI, WI, MN, IA, IL), accounting for 259 electoral votes...

Republicans are on the losing end of the age and racial demographic shifts. Young voters and Latinos went overwhelmingly for Democrats. First time voters tend to brand themselves to one party, and that's nothing but good news for Democrats. Folks like Michael Barone will continue to write pieces about how the kids won't show up in the future, and Democrats should encourage that kind of straw-grasping. Democrats have caught up in the field program technology that gave Republicans a kind of false comfort in at least a several-point field turnout cushion.

The attitude was, "until you knock us out, the champ is the champ." Well, consider 2008 a knockout.

Remember: 2008 was the beginning, not the end. Realignments are multi-election phenomenon. Before we can declare an Obama realignment, we need to win in 2012, and we need to win bigger than in 2008. To do that, we need to spend the next four year working our asses off to make government work again for the people.

The stories about how "angry" the "left" has become over Obama's cabinet appointments just will not die. For awhile the stories were simply the creation of political reporters with column space to fill, and I was doing my best to simply ignore them. Like I always say.... judge people by their actions, not their words.

But now Steve Hildebrand, the former deputy national campaign director for Obama, has taken up the argument, and he's a bit too important to ignore. So....

Not surprisingly, I'm with TPM's Greg Sargent and against David Sirota on this one. Greg:

The key point here is that Hildebrand seemed willing to feed that creation by perpetuating the false idea that the "left wing of our party" doesn't want Obama to be "pragmatic" and harbors a set of wild-eyed priorities that are somehow at odds with what Obama views as our major challenges.

Republican's have been running this game for years, so its surprising to me that so many on the left don't understand what's going on.

One of the best ways to stake out the mythical center in American politics is to claim that your policies are under attack from allies whose preferred policy positions are more extreme than your own. Their supposed craziness make you seem moderate by comparison, reframing your proposals as both pragmatic and centrist.

Moreover, it creates a compelling media narrative that almost always excludes your true opponents on the other side of the aisle. Rather than argue with them, it instead allows you to argue with a straw man, leaving you in complete control of the terms of the debate. After a few weeks or months of beating the stuffing out of the guy you can declare victory, bringing the entire debate to a close before it has even begun.

In an ideal world, this isn't how politics would work, of course, but so what? We don't live in an ideal world, and we never will.

C'mon progressives, get over yourselves. The political universe does not revolve around you, nor does it conform to the laws that you have constructed in your heads. Obama's got to govern by the rules that exist out here, not in there. If you want perfection, then politics is not for you.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Ezra gets it:

Check out that framing: Withdrawal from Iraq, health care reform, and climate change are repositioned as mainstream priorities rather than liberal agenda items. Indeed, Obama's attention to these, in Hildebrand's telling, might annoy liberals for a time, but is important nonetheless. Presuming this is a calculated messaging strategy and not just some odd writing on Hildebrand's part, it reads as an effort to take the liberal agenda and rename it the center, which necessarily means redefining both the center and the liberal agenda. So health care reform becomes what the country wants, while liberal priorities are assumed to be something further left than even that. It's an interesting strategy, and was well-explained by Mark Schmitt in his seminal essay on Obama's theory of change:

I appreciate the conflictual nature of politics. I don't think there's some cross-partisan truth; I understand that the Republican conservatives are intractable. I know those advantaged by the current structure of power are determined to preserve it, and the well-funded campaign to destroy any possibility of progressive governance will be as intantaneous and intense as anything in 1993...But let's take a slightly different angle on the charge that Obama is "naïve" about power and partisanship. Suppose you were as non-naïve about it as I am -- but your job wasn't writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is not merely to describe the situation exactly, but to find a way to subvert it. In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.[...]

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put 'em on a committee. Then define the committee's mission your way.

UPDATE II: So does Atrios:

The Obama campaign didn't exist to make me feel good, and the Obama presidency won't either. I don't especially like his people punching the dirty fucking hippies under the bed, but on the other hand if they manage to convince people that Obama is a sensible centrist who wants to do sensible centrist things like build SUPERTRAINS, get out of Iraq, not torture people or invade random countries, strengthen labor protections, reduce income inequality, improve education, provide health care for people, and reduce poverty, while those DAMNED DIRTY HIPPIES just won't shut up about their magic ponies, it's fine by me.

For years we've had Democrats railing against those crazy hippies as an excuse to not do all of those things. If Obama's people are going to rail against the hippies and use it as an excuse to do them, fine with me. If.

UPDATE III: And Ambinder:

In Steve Hilderband's "trust us" caution today, I see a bit of a genius move: By all means, we must reject all the concerns of the die-hard leftists, and instead, move sharply toward the center of American politics, doing such reasonable, centrist bipartisan things as bringing the troops home from Iraq, making health care affordable, and embarking on a massive public works projects and using government policy to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

Also, this:

What the left really objects to -- if the left really objects to anything, and, really, there's no evidence that the "left" is upset -- ... actually, I'm going to interrupt this sentence and redefine "left" as that old Washington liberal interest group crowd; what they object to is Obama's decision to create an administration that does not give Washington-based liberal interest groups a privileged seat at the table, that does not use traditional political liberal means to achieve progressive ends, that does not, at least a priori, buy into the symbological, circularly stimulating priorities of liberal interest groups. (Case in point: Joe Lieberman.)

As you read this, remember one thing: The Millennial Generation is bigger than the Baby Boom.

A New York elementary school has been re-named in honor of President-elect Barack Obama. Ludlum Elementary School in Long Island's Hempstead Union Free School District was re-named at a board meeting Thursday, at the request of numerous school students.

"Just to watch these kids after the board voted on what they asked them to do, they were so elated," school district superintendent Dr. Joseph Laria told ABC News. "You want to talk about "Yes we can!"? That was a lesson in democracy."

Effective immediately, Ludlum will now be known as Barack Obama Elementary School, following a decision by the board to adopt the resolution drafted by students and staff.

Before this month's election, the 5th grade class had a mock presidential debate at the school, which sits near Hofstra University, site of the third and final presidential debate between Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

"The kids were really into it," Laria said. "They had this fabulous debate...it was just outstanding."

"The children received such a response from the community and the parents that they were so energized that they said that if Obama becomes president, we would be so proud to have our school named after him, especially because this is an African-American and Latino community that celebrates diversity," said Laria.

Most of the school's students are African-American or Latino, the superintendent stated.

So on Thursday night the kids came before the board to read essays describing what they had learned from the mock debate experience and appealing for the school to be re-named.

Their resolution read as follows:

"Whereas the Ludlum School students conducted a mock presidential debate related to the recent presidential elections and whereas the students did a wonderful job of carrying out their tasks and demonstrating their patriotism at an early age and whereas in recognition of their efforts and the victorious feat of Sen. Barack Obama in becoming the first African-American president of the United States, it be resolved that the Hempstead Board of Education proudly renames Ludlum Elementary School as the Barack Obama Elementary School."

The board then adopted the resolution by a vote of 5-0, re-naming the school immediately.

"People in the audience just stood up and applauded," said Laria. "It was very well received...very poignant."

The school is now planning a re-dedication ceremony following Obama's inauguration in January, complete with the unveiling of a new sign.

And of course, the nation's 44th president is invited, Laria said, as is New York Governor David Paterson, who once attended Hempstead High School in the same school district.

So is the school receiving any criticism from anyone opposing the name change?

"As of this moment, no," noted Laria, emphasizing that the re-naming stemmed from the wishes of the students.

"The lesson in civics and democracy that these kids learned and even the process of coming before a public body and making a presentation, it was all child-oriented and that's what touched me," said an "enormously proud" Laria. "It wasn't some board member for political reasons grand-standing."

However, the name change might take a little while to sink in with some employees. When answering the phone today, a school official still said "Ludlum"...

Time to clear out the clippings folder again...

+ The Economist shreds the conservative movement here. And I mean shreds. Key graf:

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today's pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

+ Henry Waxman dethroned John Dingell as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If the environment and climate change are your top issues, this may be the best news you get all year. Windy explains why.

+ When Forbes is singing the praises of Britain's fully socialized National Health Service, you know things have changed.

+ Speaking of health care, as a means of heading off comprehensive reform, the insurance industry has offered us a deal! If we are willing to mandate that everyone in the country buy insurance, they are willing to sell it to us. How noble of them! If we are willing to pay, they are willing to sell. Why didn't anyone think of that before?

+ Do big bonuses make for better workers. No, they do not. I can't say I'm surprised. In my own experience, large bonuses do one of two things, neither of which are good. Either they ratchet up stress levels to the point that people are much less happy along the way to achieving them, or they ratchet up stress levels along the way to missing the bonus, a misery that is compounded by feelings of bitter disappointment down the line. Of course, I've never worked for or been around companies that pay out Wall St. styled bonuses, so maybe that's different. Although this research would certainly suggest not.

+ Esquire magazine has just republished the "seven greatest stories" their magazine has ever told. "The School" by C.J. Chivers made the list, as it should. It's one of the best magazine pieces I have ever read, and if you haven't read it, you should stop whatever else you are doing and fix that now.

+ DesignForObama.org is really cool.