For the life of me, I can not figure out why anyone would be voting for the GOP in the fall.
Wingnuts aside, I've talked with a few "swing" voters who often vote Republican but voted for both President Obama and John Kerry and I've reached the conclusion that they're leaning towards the Republicans because these voters are very, very confused. Let me see if I can outline the paradox here...
1) They want the government to fix the economy, which means job creation and faster growth.
2) This requires government spending.
3) They want the government to stop spending.
Of course the government needs to continue spending in order to stimulate job creation and faster growth, then focus on deficit reduction after we're out of this hole. Hell, even if you're a tax cut fetishist, you agree that spending, in the form of tax cuts, is necessary to stimulate the economy. Again, tax cuts are a horribly inefficient way to do it and it grows the deficit, but if these voters want growth and jobs they're going to either need to support more spending in one form or another, and if they want real growth, they need to support direct stimulus spending -- not tax cuts.
The upshot here is that if the Republicans take back Congress somehow, nothing will happen. No spending, no tax cuts, no stimulus. Just investigations and a lot of screeching about fringe issues like mosques and "terror babies."
And that raises another freakish aspect of the paradox. These swing voters are leaning towards the Republicans despite the paradox and despite the avalanche of fire-eating crazy.