What Does GOP Offer in Mid-Terms?

Though the majority party losing seats in mid-term elections is the historic norm and economic conditions enhance Republican prospects, I look at the poll numbers favoring generic GOP candidates and wonder what are they offering in policy terms? How likely is it that they will make things better if their power increases? Andrew Sullivan addresses this issue on The Daily Dish.

The other brutal truth is that the opposition has nothing substantive to offer to remedy this. If all they've got is keeping the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 a year, they really have got nothing. What they do have is cultural symbolism and the exhausted right-left tropes that were trotted out at the mercifully vacuous parade of God and Country on the Mall with Beck and Palin...Maybe in power, by some miracle, the Tea Party Republicans will actually propose the long-term massive cuts in entitlements they claim to believe in. But I don't believe it for a second. I don't believe they are in any way serious about spending restraint and are only serious about their bewilderment at the real America where racial, religious and cultural diversity is a fact, where illegal immigration has been plummeting, where gay marriage is winning, where legal abortion will never go away, and where the new empire the last administration embarked upon has bankrupted us for a generation at least.

The GOP and the Tea Party Right don't strike me as serious about deficit reduction either. Reputable economists on both sides agree that meaningful deficit reduction will require cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and defense spending plus raising taxes (which are lower than they have been in a generation). Tax increases of any kind are anathema to the right. So is any dent in American empire abroad. Republicans insist on repealing health care reform. The major reason HRC was supported by experts in health care economics was its start in controlling health care costs. The GOP offers no meaningful alternative. Sullivan hits this on the nose as well.

His (Obama's) success in bringing a modicum of healthcare security to the working poor is also a work in progress but again, the practical alternative on the table is ... what exactly?

--Ballard Burgher