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September 13, 2010 at 08:00 PM
Polls increasingly show gathering momentum for a Republican takeover of at least the House–and give Republicans an outside chance of taking the Senate as well–in November’s mid-term elections.
A study released last week by the bipartisan American University Center of the Study of the American Electorate indicates that Republican turnout in statewide primaries exceeded Democratic turnout by more than four million votes. The study said that the average percentage who voted in Republican statewide primaries was the highest since 1970.
While most of those involved in the insurance business are conservative, and probably elated at the coming results, history–and even top Republicans–are not as enthusiastic.
For example, top officials in the House Republican caucus recently noted that only one or two members of their caucus have even a slight grasp of economics, and are dependent on Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., to articulate the caucus’ position on economics.
And, they also point to September 2008, when, despite being warned by President Bush, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and other top Bush administration officials that without the Troubled Asset Relief Program the entire economy would fall off the cliff, House Republicans voted against the legislation establishing TARP. That caused the stock market to drop 500 points in one day, and the less radical Senate to go through many machinations to resurrect the bill.
In testimony before a House hearing on AIG in 2009, Paulson noted that if the banks hadn’t been bailed out with the money that has mostly been paid back, unemployment would have soared to perhaps 25% of the entire economy.
