Monday, December 10, 2012  Politicians, Change, and the GOP  How
do parties change?  Over the weekend, my Salon column was about
the GOP candidate rollouts last week, and how unimpressive they
were on policy. I mean, not that they promoted foolish policies,
but that they mostly don't really do policy at all. Which
follows on the Romney campaign, which also gave up early on
policy.  I contrast it with George W. Bush, who actually did
campaign on public policy ideas. It's really worse than that;
the current GOP not only isn't very good at devising public
policy solutions, but has mostly given up on recognizing
problems. Yes, they did figure out that unemployment has been a
significant problem over the last few years (John Boehner's
frequent refrain about "where are the jobs?" is quite
appropriate for an out-party leader during a time of high
unemployment), but even there they seem to forget about
employment for months at a time, and of course their proposals
to deal with it are identical to their policy respons