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Paul Krugman:

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable.

Ross Douthat:

But the study shouldn’t make liberals too cocky. The authors find that growing up in a recession can encourage conservative instincts as well. Downturns make young voters distrustful of unfettered capitalism, yes. But they also make them less confident in the federal government.

So far, it’s also making people distrust Republicans. But the biggest hit is going to be on incumbents.

WaPo:

In a new Washington Post poll, Palin beats other GOP leaders on two questions: who best represents the party’s core values, and who Republicans would vote for if the presidential nomination battle were held today. But she has particular appeal to the loyal followers of Limbaugh and Beck, two of the most popular conservative talk show hosts in the country.

As if there’s any doubt…

WaPo:

Opposition to President Obama and his policy initiatives is strong, but Republicans are split on GOP’s direction, leaders.

The argument: “Go right. No, go more right.” Only Republicans can save Democrats from being Democrats.

Robert J. Samuelson: Leave the Fed alone. And while you’re at it, get the government out of regulation. Nothing’s changed, now go away.

NEJM:

Six months have passed. Flu season is now here. After repeated delays, H1N1 vaccine finally arrived in our clinic earlier this month to the uniform relief of the medical staff. But my formerly desperate patients were now leery. “It’s not tested,” they said. “Everyone knows there are problems with the vaccine.” “I’m not putting that in my body.”

I was unprepared for this response, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. For weeks now, in the schoolyard of my children’s elementary school, other parents had been sidling up to me, seemingly in need of validation. “You’re not giving your kids that swine flu shot, are you?” they’d say, their tone nervous, if a bit derisive.

How to explain this dramatic shift in 6 short months? It certainly isn’t related to logic or facts, since few new medical data became available during this period. It seems to reflect a sort of psychological contagion of myth and suspicion.

Just as there are patterns of infection, there seem to be patterns of emotional reaction (“emotional epidemiology”) associated with new illnesses. When 2009 H1N1 influenza was first detected, it fit a classic pattern that Priscilla Wald recently outlined in her book Contagious [1]: It was novel and mysterious; it emerged from a teeming third-world city, and it was now making its insidious — and seemingly unstoppable — way toward the “civilized” world.

Opposition to President Barack Obama and his policy initiatives is strong, but Republicans are split on GOP’s direction, leaders, according to a Washington Post poll.

Politico – These storylines could seriously threaten Obama’s presidency if they become the dominant frame.

AP – In a five-year span, Candice Singer went from being a respected juvenile defense lawyer to a homeless meth addict who once broke into a house just to take a shower.

Politico – The longtime libertarian rock star suddenly finds his ideas resonating with a wider audience.

Riding the Diary Rescue streetcar tonight are blank frank, HoosierDeb, ItsJessMe, srkp23, and jlms qkw, with YatPundit in the motorman’s chair on an unseasonably-warm New Orleans night.

Diary Rescue is all about promoting good writers, so remember to subscribe to diarists whose work you enjoy reading.

The Rescues:

• Asking What Can a Poor Mom Do? self-proclaimed “Boulder hippie” Only Needs a Beat ties together rock music, a broken ankle, John Donne, the parts of her that influence Dick Cheney and next year’s midterm elections as she finds her answer: “to work hard to bring out the best in other people”. (ItsJessMe)
• For this self-described “geek world” article, fake consultant combines rare earth elements, China, and more in On Stimulating The Future, Or, “It’s The Ytterbium, Stupid!” (jlms qkw)
• In a short-and-sweet diary, MoralDK lives up to his or her moniker and shows us there’s more to being a progressive than signing petitions and emailing congresspeople. There’s a great example for all of us in Sleeping Bags For The Homeless – Detroit ‘09. (Blank Frank)
• dsteffen shares the story of this tragedy in How Regulation came to be: Our Lady of the Angels. (jlms qkw)
• Using the state of Massachusetts as a point of comparison, Provencalkid offers a delightful description of the site of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference, in Going to Copenhagen? A Guide For the (Happily) Perplexed. (ItsJessMe)
• Seneca Doane illustrates the drama in Washington, D.C. in Reid’s Role is to Deceive and Betray … Us? Them? Both? (jlms qkw)
• Inoljt dives into the data from the Keystone state in Analyzing Swing States: Pennsylvania, Part 2.5. (jlms qkw)

jotter has a weekend two-fer: High Impact Diaries: November 28, 2009 and High Impact Diaries: November 21-24, 2009.

sardonyx brings us Top Comments: Editing Edition.

Please join the Diary Rescue krewe this evening by suggesting your own rescues in this Open Thread.

The queen of daytime will interview the president of the United States during an ABC holiday special that brings together Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.

You almost always hear it referenced as “Reagan’s 11th Commandment.” It is a simple, one sentence warning against intra-party divisiveness that dates back two generations:

“Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”

The irony, of course, is that while it is almost universally attributed to Reagan, he was not its creator. Indeed, the so-called 11th Commandment was not authored by Reagan, it was authored in order to protect Reagan.

The year was 1965. The Republicans had just been slaughtered in the 1964 electoral cycle, one of the most complete and total annihilations in the annals of American politics. Not only had Lyndon Johnson been re-elected with well over 60% of the vote, but Democrats had achieved nearly insurmountable two-thirds supermajorities in both the House and the Senate. When the 89th Congress was gavelled into session in early 1965, there were only 32 Republican Senators, and just 140 GOP members of the House.

Reagan was gearing up for a run for Governor of California. His primary rival was the former mayor of San Francisco, George Christopher. Christopher, given the fact that a former movie star would have a built-in reservoir of goodwill with voters, was going to need to go negative on Reagan in order to gain a foothold in the race.

He never got a fair chance to do so. Before Reagan had even formally declared for the race, California Republican Chairman Gaylord Parkinson made the decree that negative attacks in the primary would not be tolerated. Christopher went negative anyway, because, at the end of the day, he really had no choice. But now his attacks, once standard fare in political campaigns, had the official seal of disapproval from the state party. Reagan won the primary easily, and in a good Republican year in 1966, scored a double-digit win over incumbent Democrat Pat Brown in the general election.

While it is often invoked as some inviolate rule of Republican campaigning, the hard truth is that the “11th Commandment” has been oft-violated during the forty-four years since its inception. Including, as Brian Williams pointed out in a 2007 piece for MSNBC, by Reagan himself:

In 1976, Reagan was a former governor challenging an incumbent of his own party — Gerald Ford — for the Republican presidential nomination. Ford, who made no pretense of following the 11th Commandment (he said only that he would “abide by the first ten”), had beaten Reagan in the early primaries. Reagan’s campaign was faltering, and his own advisers urged him to take the gloves off. He did. Campaigning in Florida that March, Ronald Reagan broke the 11th Commandment and attacked Gerald Ford. He accused Ford, who had then been president just 19 months, of presiding over “the collapse of American will and the retreat of American power,” and said Ford “must be held accountable to history for allowing this to happen.” He said Ford lacked “vision,” that he found it “difficult” to trust his leadership. He accused the president of favoring “pre-emptive concessions” in talks with the Soviet Union, and said, “I fear for my country when I see White House indifference to the decline in our military position.”

That said, neither Parkinson nor Reagan probably could have envisioned today’s GOP. In the past several months, the Republican Party has moved internecine warfare to a new level. The two most glaring examples were the sabotage of the party’s own nominee in New York’s 23rd Congressional District for insufficient conservatism, and the revelation this week that members of the Republican National Committee are pushing the idea of a proposed “purity test”, a ten-point agenda (or, as Devilstower pointed out this morning, more of a promise to halt an agenda) that Republican candidates must adhere to in order to avoid being shunned by the GOP.

This is much bigger than a mere squabble among candidates in an open seat Congressional or gubernatorial primary. Both of these actions were, in their own ways, putting the official party imprimatur on purging unworthies from the party ranks.

So how do Republicans square these recent actions with staying true to the legacy of their patron saint?

Conservatives would no doubt argue that they are, in fact, preserving Reagan’s Republican Party by making sure that it adheres to baseline principles that, in their view, are sacrosanct.

They want party unity, but they want it on their terms.

They are aided in this crusade by the fact that so-called moderate Republicans are so aware of their persona non grata status in the GOP that their desire to ingratiate the base knows no bounds.

In fact, two of the leading targets of the GOP purity crusade took the opportunity this week to remind Republicans that they really are, truly, one of them.

On Monday, Charlie Crist, who is increasingly imperiled in his desire to move from Governor of Florida to Senator from Florida, wanted to make it clear that he was every bit as committed to the right-wing values of the teabagger base as his insurgent opponent:

“It’s hard to be more conservative than I am on issues — though there are different ways stylistically to communicate that. I’m pro-life, I’m pro-gun, I’m pro-family and I”m anti tax,” the governor explained.

Meanwhile, the woman who was drummed out of the special election in upstate New York, DeDe Scozzafava, also wants people to know that in spite of her purging during the course of the battle in NY-23, her Republican bonafides are still largely intact:

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate in NY-23 who eventually dropped out after incurring the wrath of conservative acvists, says she would have fared pretty well on the so-called GOP “purity test.”

“I would have been at seven out of 10 on the list,” Scozzafava told CBS’s Face the Nation.

Leaving aside for the moment that 70% would be scored as an “F” on the GOP purity test as it is currently configured, it is telling that Scozzafava still feels compelled to remind voters just how much of a Republican she really is, despite the high-profile way in which the national party turned its back on her and embraced her third-party opponent, Doug Hoffman.

This is the reason why purity test author Jim Bopp (an RNC member from Indiana) made clear that past votes matter little in the calculation of ideological purity. What matters more, in his calculation, is what is done and said from this point forward.

The purity movement, in that respect, is less about igniting a civil war in the Republican Party as it is about trying to reposition the Republican Party further to the right. In this way, it is trying to be true to Reagan (though one with a sense of history might wonder how St. Ron would fare himself on such a purity test) while ignoring the 11th Commandment often attributed to him.

To do so successfully, they will need the so-called centrists to capitulate to the right. That might be a safe bet. In October, we had Connecticut Senate candidate Rob Simmons, in an act that bordered almost on parody, proclaiming that he would be adding a teabag to his copy of the Constitution. Earlier this month, Mark Kirk alienated longtime supporters in the abortion rights movement by voting in favor of the Stupak-Pitts amendment.

In an election year where a vast enthusiasm gap could create a perilous political environment for Democrats, these recent developments could be the saving grace for Democrats.

Indeed, it could be the salvation of the Democratic majority, no matter how it turns out. If so-called moderate Republicans resist this rebranding of the GOP, then the dissension will clearly do harm to GOP designs on shrinking the Democratic majority. We saw this in the New York 23rd, where a district with a sizeable GOP registration advantage turned to Democrat Bill Owens after the more moderate of the two Republicans running (Scozzafava) was driven from the race.

However, even if the purity movement succeeds, and the “moderate” Republicans are assimilated, that could benefit the Democrats, as well.

When the traditional media absurdly tut-tutted the challenge to Joe Lieberman in 2006 as a sign of Democratic intolerance of diverse views, they missed a key point. At the exact same time Lieberman was getting primaried by Ned Lamont, the most conservative member of the Democratic Senate delegation was being ignored. Ben Nelson of Nebraska did not face a primary challenge, either high-profile or low-profile.

The bottom line was simple: Nelson’s apostasy was less obscene than Lieberman’s, if for no other reason than simple political geography. Nebraska ain’t Connecticut, to put it mildly.

Republicans, in their fervor to rebrand the party, might be ignoring that lesson to their detriment. Insisting on rigid adherence to party orthodoxy might not hurt them in some states, but it is hard to see where a Mark Kirk, a Rob Simmons, or a Mike Castle gets traction running as an advocate of teabagger Republicanism.

We have already seen some evidence of this. In Delaware, the most recent poll from Susquehanna Research (a firm that also does private work for GOP candidates) found that Beau Biden now leads Republican Mike Castle in the state. This represented an incredible shift in voter preferences: a twenty-six point shift in eight months, according to the same pollster. No other pollster this year had given Biden the lead.

Therefore, there is a certain impracticality to this GOP purity crusade. Conservative ideological policy sell well in certain arenas, but less so in others. The problem for the GOP is that several of their most high-profile targets are in blue or purple territory.

That said, Democrats cannot merely rely on being saved by the possibly errant tactics of their opposition. They could control their own electoral destiny by putting together a series of accomplishments to take to the voters in 2010. The clock is ticking.

Absent that, the best the Democrats could hope for is that the GOP’s purge of its unworthies and insistence on ideological unanimity might save a few Congressional seats that otherwise would have been imperiled.

The leading Senate Democrat on military matters says an Afghan surge, not an American surge, is central to succeeding in the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.

Three years out, the GOP field does not offer a putative nominee. When Gallup polled on the Republican race for 2012, it asked about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Haley Barbour. Cheney covers all the ground these folks do, and then some.