So I said I'd be gone Monday to Friday. But I didn't say what time Friday. So think of this as a practice post, not evidence of a blogging obsession that won't allow me a full week's vacation. I'm just stretching out, limbering up, preparing to jump off the bench and get back in the game.
That, or I've been aching to get back on the blog and tap something out and am truly, totally addicted.
Matt's spent much of the week calling bullshit on the scores of lazy journalists unwilling to label the Bush administration's policies as bankrupt without sniffing that the "Democrats clearly have no ideas of their own." As Matt notes, the Democrats have no end of ideas and, if those journalists, like me, had resolved to read every policy proposal CAP, the PPI, and The Century Foundation put out, they'd know full well how staggeringly many ideas Democratic think tanks have kicking around. But they haven't, instead, they ignore the e-mails and push this tired storyline.
On the bright side, since the substance is there, what we're looking at is really a marketing failure. Bush has his Ownership Society which, though gleaned from a CATO crib sheet dating back to the mid-80's, at least sounds like something new. Clinton was a "New Democrat", promising welfare reform and more market-based solutions. Bush 41 lacked an umbrella for his ideas (which, mind you, he did have -- his health care proposal was a worthwhile piece of work) and he was thus said to lack "the vision thing". Reagan had supply-side economics, plus the cure-all of optimism.
