Call it bad luck. President Obama gets passed a stimulus bill aimed to revive the economy, and Karl Rove says that what he’s really done is revive the GOP. Arguing in The Wall Street Journal that “sometime late this year or early next the economy’’ would have rebounded “on its own,’’ Rove contends that the bill sets us on a path to wasteful spending, higher taxes, and the return of Republicanism. Obama, Rove says, “has already re-energized the GOP and sparked a spending debate that will last for years. The president won this legislative battle, but at a high price — fiscally and politically.’’ So it’s bad luck for Obama that he took over when the economy had merely cratered and hadn’t yet bored a hole so deep that we could see magma coming up from the center of the earth, because this sets the stage for a return to the policies that Americans repudiated last November. Bad luck that the permissive, `party on!’ policies of Bush and Greenspan and the other bubblemasters had produced only a paralytic credit crisis and a wolf of a recession at the time of the election, and not a full blown depression complete with riots, shantytowns, and marathon dances, because Rove—without the agreement of any credible economist on the left or the right–can now speciously argue that the economy would have recovered on its own. Bad luck that Obama passed this bill before more people were out of work, more people were evicted, more businesses closed, more kids had to drop out of school, because now Rove can believe that people not driven to the depths of utter desperation will all the sooner ingratefully wonder `what have you done for me lately?’ Bad luck that the party whose tax cuts for the rich stimulated a whopping deficit that we carry into this recession still myopically views tax cuts as stimulating a way out. Bad luck that millions of jobs lost in the last months didn’t include Karl Rove’s slot at the Journal, because now the Boy Pseudo-Genius whose divisive, destructive and fear-mongering tactics gave this country arguably the worst president in its history (arguably, as in, one could argue the point—but I won’t) still has a forum in which to propound his thoroughly invalidated views.
