NP: David Bowie, The Singles Collection

Everyone knows the economy is going to be a crucial factor in the 2010 midterm elections. What I'm wondering is just how it's going to manifest itself. Case in point is this piece from Steve Benen that goes to great lengths to point out how much worse off we'd be had the daggone gubmint not stepped in to keep things from falling part.

Obama said yesterday that "we'd be in a deeper world of hurt" if we'd listened to Republicans. It's hard to overstate who painfully accurate this is. Go back and look at the GOP arguments from January and February 2009. How did they propose dealing with the crisis? By cutting government spending, pushing a balanced-budget amendment, demanding a capital gains tax cut, and imposing a five-year spending freeze.

Faced with the most pressing economic challenge in generations, the GOP proposed dangerous gibberish. The consequences of the Republican prescription would likely have been catastrophic.

Emphasis mine. The problem here is that, despite how obvious this may seem to defenders of the recovery act, it's not provable. That alternative universe doesn't exist, especially now that Fringe is done for the season. And if we've learned anything about the Karl Rove-era GOP, it's that they'll seize on any non-zero possibility that they are, in fact, right -- see the Iraq/al Queda connection, evolution, climate change, etc. -- and flood the airwaves with claims that even though it's unlikely, their version of events is true. Even now, the GOP is swearing up and down that (a) there actually isn't any appreciable job growth and (b) even if there was, there'd be more if only the Democrats hadn't fucked with it.

Now, empirically, this seems to work on about 20% to 25% of the public, which is coincidentally just about the same size at the Tea Party. And it works better the further removed people are from the problem. So I'm really curious to see how this one plays out.