Obama's roost

Paul Krugman sees bleak times coming with years of terrible job markets and political paralysis. The tide will turn most grimly against the Democrats, whose losses

will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right and demoralized the movement that brought him to power.

Despite all this, the midterms probably won’t give Republicans the majority in the House. But the losses will be big enough to deny Obama a working majority for any major initiatives in the rest of his first term. (My guess is that he’ll be reelected thanks to the true awfulness of the Republican nominee). Since Republicans are dead set against any of the things I think could help pull the economy out of its rut, this means more economic stagnation.

It's a damned shame that the President has blown the political capital of his election on being kind to high finance rather than beating the drum of banking reform to ear-pounding levels. The chickens are on their way home.