Bush/GOP

Diving into the morning news cloud, you can discern an emerging thread threatening to become conventional wisdom - the election appears to be breaking toward Obama now. As we've reported on this blog over the last few days, there is all sorts of evidence coming from the McCain camp that they see the Electoral College slipping away. Early voting numbers show significant advantages for the Democrats, even in vital swing states. After trending toward McCain a bit late last week, the national polls are now trending Obama, and surprisingly the movement is two way - toward Barack and away from McCain. 

Increasingly, we will start to hear quiet talk of realignment, blowout, rout, coattails, new political era. For if the trends continue, we are headed toward a true blowout with the top of the Democratic ticket getting its highest vote share since 1964, Democrats having more ideological control of Washington since the mid 1960s and Democrats having the makings of a new very 21st century majority coalition they could ride for the next 30-40 years of politics. 

Their opposition, the conservatives and Republicans, have become intellectually exhausted, politically discredited and temperamentally reactionary and angry. This is a movement and party that prospered in the 20th century but now seems lost, adrift and resistant to the new politics of the 21st. In these last few weeks in particular, the GOP looks like a party that could be out of power for a very long time. 

For those on the American center-left, these are heady political times. But they are also sober and serious times, as the Democrats begin to confront the enormity of the governing challenges facing the next Congress and President.    

As is custom now, DemFromCT has an excellent analysis on all these new polling trends this morning over at Daily Kos.

On the day it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize for Economics, Paul Krugman joins NDN in singing the praise of Gordon Brown and in asking the question the public, the media and Congress must be asking - why did this White House get it so wrong?

At a special European summit meeting on Sunday, the major economies of continental Europe in effect declared themselves ready to follow Britain's lead, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into banks while guaranteeing their debts. And whaddya know, Mr. Paulson - after arguably wasting several precious weeks - has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities (although he still seems to be moving with painful slowness).

As I said, we still don't know whether these moves will work. But policy is, finally, being driven by a clear view of what needs to be done. Which raises the question, why did that clear view have to come from London rather than Washington?

It's hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Paulson's initial response was distorted by ideology. Remember, he works for an administration whose philosophy of government can be summed up as "private good, public bad," which must have made it hard to face up to the need for partial government ownership of the financial sector.

I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson's fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn't making sense.

Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.