Snowe Job

Paul Krugman wonders HERE what it is the Blue Dogs want, as nothing they say or ask for seems to make any sense. I believe I already answered that question HERE: Blue Dogs wanna be important for being Blue Dogs, no matter what that may actually mean. They are the middle children of politics. - XMASTIME

We like to feel bad for Olympia Snowe having to retire because of her "frustration" with the "polarization" in Congress, but, as Matt Yglesias points out, Snowe used her unusually large influence as a moderate in ways that made no fucking sense.

Were these good ideas? It seems to me that they were not good ideas. That there was, in fact, no logic behind them. The policy logic behind the Obama stimulus clearly dictated a bigger rather than a smaller package of aid to state and local government, but if Snowe rejected the policy logic behind the Obama stimulus she could have simply rejected the whole idea. Similarly, the policy logic behind the Bush tax cuts ("Reagan proved deficits don't matter") argued for the Bush proposal while the policy logic of rejecting debt-financed semi-permanent tax cuts argued for rejecting Bush's whole approach. These were the key moments in recent American budget history. Polarization and partisanship aside, she had plenty of power at these moments. She just failed to use the power to any meaningful effect. didn't make any sense on the merits and just reflected a mindless less is better than more mentality. That's not because of "polarization"; it's because their position

Like the independent voter we swoon over every fourth year,  the "moderate" in Congress finds him or herself in a disproportionally strong position, and it'd be nice if they used this power for something useful other than basking in the power itself. Curious that Yglesias even mentions Evan Bayh in his post without writing that Snowe is merely the GOP of the Blue Dogs. Who sucked. And who has the balls to call their kid "Olympia"? Wtf?