A Provocative Thought

A loyal reader sends the following email:

If I were President Obama, I would be hoping for a Republican takeover of Congress in the 2010 elections. And not just any takeover, but a takeover by hard-core fiscal conservatives. Here's why:

(1) If the current Democrat-controlled Congress cannot pass Obama's core agenda before the 2010 elections, then it probably never will, especially in the context of persistent deficits. Meanwhile, as pundits have noted before, it's hard to blame the other party for policy outcomes when the other party has very little power.

(2) If, as I (and others like Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, and Fareed Zakaria) fear, we may be entering a Dark Age of the modern era -- a decades long period of stagnation and retrenchment -- then our best hope is to accelerate the timeframe for a wholesale, draconian reinvention of the social contract. This, in turn, requires precipitating a fundamental political crisis, and it seems like the best chance for this in the near term is a no-holds-barred government-shutdown battle after a
fiscal-conservative sweep in the 2010 elections.

This is quite an interesting thought. And, it is precisely for an analogous reason that I am glad that the Prez and Congress are both Dem-controlled. I think they WILL pass the Obama program. And I think that THAT will cause a government shutdown battle, because of the deficit and huge new taxes that will be "required" (always, this "required" thing, for tyranny).

Either way, not an optimistic view....