The potential for an Andrew Romanov challenge to sitting, though appointed, Senator Michael Bennett prompted Markos to (modestly) quote his own self to the effect that primary challenges put the heat on and this is what prompted Senator Bennett to announce today his firm support for a public option in health care reform.
As far as Bennett's position on the public option goes, Markos is completely wrong and obviously doesn't know much about the Bennett record. In truth, Senator Bennett has supported a public option for several weeks, at least. (See this HuffPost piece on August 10.) His supporters say he's been for it for months, long before the prospect of a Romanov run, which has certainly been my impression as well.
If anything, his public statement today was more likely to have been influenced by the Broomfield County Democratic Party saying that it would not support any Democrat who would not publicly support the public option, and I'd say even that is unlikely.
In any case, Markos is flat wrong in his facts, though he may still be right in his over-all point that primary challenges keep current officeholders from wandering too far afield. It seems to have helped with Arlen Specter at least. Personally, I don't have a gripe with Bennett in what he says on health care. He wonders if a public option will be in the final bill, but anybody who's read a newspaper in the past month probably wonders the same thing.
I'm curious, though, about his economic philosophy. In an interview on public radio yesterday, he expressed opposition to Keynsian economics and said it had failed. That is not my reading of history. FDR used Keynesian economics during the depression. Unemployment went down and the economy expanded every single year, the sole exception being 1938, which was also the year that FDR pulled back from Keynesian economics and tried to balance the budget.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, says that the current banking crisis has been ameliorated through stimulus spending, i.e. Keynesian economics. He only regrets the stimulus wasn't bigger, a position echoed by Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor.
I would be interested, therefore, in what Senator Bennett has to say about this. Here are two historical examples where a Nobel Prize winner in economics says Keynesian economics worked. How, Senator Bennett, do you see this differently? If not Keynes, who? And why?
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