I’ll cheerfully admit the following is a guess: I don’t think that a flaccid economy is going to provide all that much upside opportunity for Republicans. Not as much as they’d hope, anyways.

I think that’s right.

I think we all need to accept the fact that this won’t be a V shaped recovery.

This is true. It could have been a V shaped recovery, but all of this stimulus and quantitative easing and interest rate manipulation and bailouts will lead to a wide, basin shaped recovery that will last several years.

I’ll cheerfully admit the following is a guess: I don’t think that a flaccid economy is going to provide all that much upside opportunity for Republicans. Not as much as they’d hope, anyways.

To the extent that it does I think it will flow to the ones who are real fiscons, not socons. And within the fiscons, it will be mostly the ones who the public thinks are speaking credibly to the issues. What I mean by that is folks will look favorably on the ones who have a consistent track record of concern on fiscal issues, but not so favorably on the ones who feel more like sudden converts mouthing timely platitudes.

I think that’s good news for folks in the mold of say Mitt Romney, who can speak knowledgeably and extemporaneously about a wide range of economic issues. That will sell. But complaining about what the current admin has done so far and then reciting the party line is not, IMO, going to be sufficient. The seriousness of current economic circumstances means that the bar will be set progressively higher with each crappy month that passes.

In fact, though he’d probably never do it, it might not be all that bad an idea for Romney to consider running in the mid terms for a senator spot.

In the mid-terms, I expect to see an uptick in outsiders with economics backgrounds running, and fiscally responsible democrats and republicans running as independents.

Which is bad news for Congressional Dems.

What our cpuntry needs right now is a lot more jobs, and the question is where they will come from. Governments don’t create jobs. Profitable enterprises provide jobs. Any temporarily profitable enterprises created by fed gov’t expenditures of borrowed money will create only temporary jobs.

Besides, suppose we agree for the sake of discussion to call a bounceback in the economy as measured by GDP a “recovery.” It’s still quite premature to start talking about any such recovery as legitimate based on the paper thin gruel of a shallowing of unemployment claims and faint signs of a bottoming in RE sales, etc, etc.

We could easily see another turn down after a brutal 6 months of retail sales through this christmas, followed by more job losses and chain closures. And then there is the issue of the remaining outstanding bad loans that still stand to default. Word is there is another wave of these to come. Has that been priced into the markets yet? Or has it been accounted for only by the smart money that managed to get out from under, while some banks and other related companies know its coming and don’t know what they are going to do about it?

And none of this even addresses the issue of what the huge flood of additional US dollars is going to do to prices of all sorts of non-luxury staple imported items, like food and energy. The dollar has al;ready tanked in the neighbor hood of 10 to 20% versus various other currencies of stable, productive, solvent nations.