Eve,

You miss the real "snapshot." The Republicans are now trotting out Gov. Sanford as their spokesman on the economy. Yes, the guy who helped bring us this:

www.thestate.com/.../627124.html

and this www.thestate.com/.../628792.html

This is his response:

www.thestate.com/.../624907.html

Yes, he's that fucking stupid. But what would you expect from a "self-made" guy (he married his money).

The microcosm here isn't the economy, it's the stupidity and mismanagement of the GOP.

Eve, I suspect that if the economy had tanked nine months earlier, your man Huckabee, not Mitt, would enjoyed the pseudonymous "-mentum." Mitt may have been the most competent-seeming of the GOP bunch this year, but he didn't just come off like the guy who fired you from your last job. In some states, he actually was the guy who fired you from your last job. In economic downturns, conservatives don't reach for competence, or the appearance thereof; they reach for populism. And if Fred Thompson had even a Lebowskian work ethic, his brand of Cadillac populism would have sold. But he didn't, and that left Mike Huckabee, whose populism was of the authentic variety, which conservatives accept only when the fake kind isn't on offer.

Go into South Carlina with the economy the talk of the nation, the national GOP jumping onto its current screw-the-workers bandwagon, and John McCain careening about like a madman chasing a headless chicken, as we now know he would inevitably have responded to any national crisis of sufficient magnitude, and Huckabee would have looked like cash money to conservative voters.

The real lesson here is the mnaner in which unforeseen events can unfold [and unfold from out of nowhere] and shred political narratives....left and right....to bits

For example, the current narrative [from, say, Paul Krugman] is that 2009 will be a hellish year economically, but 2010 will be much better than many anticipate.

This is his best guess; and as the current Noble Prize winner in economics that counts for something. But look at all the prognostications that went awry in the past year economically. We should be waiting for the Dow to break 20000.00. We should be factoring into our budgets the $5.00 a gallon cost of gasoline. We should be stratigizing about how to beat back nations like Venezuela and Russia awash in petro dollars. We should be thankful that the BRIC countries are still growing strongly to offset the bad economic news in America and Europe.

And no one was prepared for what happened this Fall in the financial industry. Concommitantly, no one really knows what is going to happen next. Not beyond the next couple of weeks. It is the difference between predicting changes in the weather and changes in the climate.

If there is a lesson to be gained from  all the ideological huffing and puffing about capitalism and socialism and bailouts and recoveries it is that the best course of action is always pragmatism. Fortunately, America has generally come back to the center economically when things start to go askew. Obama is in that tradition, so I suspect he will forge an intermediary path as well.

But his most important task in my view is to yank as much power away from the Corporatist ruling class as he can. And it's out there, don't fool yourself. He has to start shifting the take home pay back to the poor, the working class and the middle class. If the economy goes over the edge and the middle doesn't hold we can almost certainly expect a political tumult of ominous proportions.

Not that my own predictions are exceptions to the rule, of course.

george walton