Reply #29: There are a few assumptions in your post.

[kentuck]

Scott Brown ran against a candidate that went on vacation. Massachusetts people can be very independent. Also, Democrats historically have not done as well as Republicans in off-year elections. I would not put as much stock as you do in that race.

Liberals will stay home this election? Is that something you know for a fact or is that wishful thinking? I do agree that some will stay home. However, nowhere near the numbers you might anticipate or hope for.

And the naked Republican argument that unemployment would only go up to 8%. Yes, they said that. However, unless you are a tea-bagger or similar, most folks understand that after the big banks crashed and employers started laying off people and the stock market with savings and 401K's crashed, then no one knew how bad it was going to get. Thanks to George w Bush and the Republicans primarily.

In order to counter this severe downturn, they did the only thing they knew would work - a heavy dose of Keynesian economics. That was the purpose of the huge "Stimulus Bill". There is little doubt that the stimulus and the bailout of General Motors did much to keep us from going off the cliff that the Republicans had led us to.

That is why the deficit is large now. However, we cannot forget that George W Bush doubled the debt in eight short years. Never in our history had we had such a huge turnaround from surplus to debt. Bill Clinton had left Bush and the Republicans a surplus of $260 billion dollars and a projected surplus of $5 trillion dollars. Bush turned that into a $5 trillion dollar debt and left a deficit of about $1.3 trillion dollars to President Obama, along with the worst economy since the Great Depression.

The Obama deficits are different from the Bush deficits in they were intentionally created to stimulate the economy, unlike the Bush deficits, which were created to give big taxcuts to his friends and to drive our economy into the ground. Is this too complex for "tea-baggers" to understand?