2012 = 2006?

It’s not just that you make a mistake; it’s that you cling desperately to that mistake and let it define you.

Katrina revealed George W. Bush’s basic incompetence in a way that 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq had not. So he was weak going into the 2006 midterms. There were going to be losses. No one who wasn’t being paid to say otherwise thought there were not going to be some losses.

And you have to assume that some people thought those losses would be smaller: they got rid of “Brownie,” made a lot of noise about “Katrina and Rita,” put Hayley Barbour on television as often as they could, talking about how Mississippi was rebuilt.

Damage control.

The problem was that one failure got people to look at other failures. And the sacrifices didn’t come from there.



After the 2006 election, Donald Rumsfeld resigned. There were rumors it might happen before then, but it didn’t.

A few weeks ago, going into the Wisconsin recall elections, there were rumors that Tim Geithner would resign.

That’s not going to be true now. So Barack Obama is going to go into a re-election campaign running what John Hempton astutely described as “the cravenly pro-finance Obama administration.”

Not pro-economy: that would involve employment and GDP growth, neither of which has been happening for so long that Sensible Centrist Brad DeLong is sounding more and more and more like me.

The center isn’t holding. Every pictures tells the same story.