Thomas Jefferson Street

I sort of understand why people like Facebook and other so-called social networking sites. They offer a convenient way to keep up with people who live far away, or whom one doesn’t make time to see very often. Perhaps best of all, the sites offer a way to find long-lost friends or connect with people with similar interests. And while the sites encourage a self-centeredness--witness those whose "updates" include utterly inconsequential play-by-plays of getting off a plane and collecting luggage at baggage claim--it’s still a step up from having to listen to someone next to you give those reports, loudly, on a cell phone.

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Do you remember economic uncertainty? The GOP spent most of the 2010 campaign season issuing dark warnings about the terrible consequences of economic uncertainty. Uncertainty was the great peril stalking the U.S. economy, and the Republicans would not stand for it.

That was then. Or more specifically, that was a talking point in service of making permanent the (deficit-exploding) Bush tax cuts. Months later, with the topic du jour being raising the national debt ceiling, GOP lawmakers seem not only comfortable with economic uncertainty generally, but are actually actively trying to foment the dread condition. And what do you know? Big business isn’t especially wild about it.

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The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wonders how politicians like Michele Bachmann and Pat Toomey can actually advocate for political inaction in the face of the United States hitting its national debt ceiling. Noting that all mainstream economists and political leaders agree that hitting the debt limit without raising it will cause an economic crisis (if not a full-blown recession), Ezra suggests and dismisses that perhaps pols like Bachmann and Toomey are blinded by a moralist view of the debt--that it is bad because debt is in and of itself bad, not necessarily for larger economic reasons.

But I wonder if there’s not a simpler, if more cynical explanation: That pols like Bachmann and Toomey simply don’t know what they’re talking about, either through willful ignorance or political cynicism.

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“OK,” says the professor. “Who can tell me what makes for successful political campaigns?”

“High name recognition and ample funds,” call out an enthusiastic chorus of students. “A strong reason for running can help,” a few add. “But, absent the other components how would they establish their ‘brand’?” they ask.

For more than a month it appeared as if Donald Trump would add a fourth component to the list: unmitigated gall, seasoned with proper amounts of vulgarity and ghoulishness. But not so fast. To paraphrase how another member of a club we will call “the rich, the famous, and the fallen,” featured in this space last week, might put it, “times could be a changin.”

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