Bluer than blue

Even the NY Times is starting to catch on to the notion that blue state politics don't work out quite so well in bad times...............

And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

This helps explain why the Republican Party might be competitive in the Northeast for the first time in years. Chris Christie is easily leading Jon Corzine in the race for New Jersey’s governorship. Rob Simmons might unseat Chris Dodd in Connecticut. Rudy Giuliani, who has experience with blue-state crises, is pondering a run for the statehouse in New York.

And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel remarked last fall. But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all.

That’s why Franklin Roosevelt waited until 1935, when the Great Depression seemed to be waning, to push Social Security through Congress. It’s why Lyndon Johnson established Medicare at the peak of the long post-World War II expansion. And it’s why Massachusetts’s health care plan and California’s cap on greenhouse-gas emissions both passed at the height of the recent boom, rather than the bottom.

Obama is still broadly popular, and the public is still broadly sympathetic to his administration’s agenda. But the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t have a bold new liberal era without the growth to pay for it.

The president wants to govern America like a blue state. But for that to work, he’ll need the nation’s economy to start performing more like Texas.

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