Joe Klein?s latest TIME column attempts to downplay the predictions of widespread Democratic losses at the polls this fall.
Yet his closing paragraphs tend to work against his argument, as he discusses the financial reform bill:
[T]he most accessible news from the bill is that one unpopular big (Wall Street) was impinged upon by another (government regulators), who don’t have a fabulous track record when it comes to being outsmarted by the Madoffs of this world. The other headline was that the bill funds 68 government studies, all of which ? I’m sure ? will be carefully read and implemented.
This is a “solution” that doesn’t connect with the “problem” perceived by the electorate, which is the government’s affinity for bailouts. “The big guys got taken care of,” says Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, one of 53 congressional Democrats who lost their seats in the 1994 Republican tsunami, “and everyone else is getting hammered. There is enormous frustration about that, and people tend to take it out on the party in power.”
