Republicans will help pass Democrat bailout bill

Republican Senators are about to explore a level of fecklessness not seen since Sen. Larry Craig went fishing in a men's bathroom at the Minneapolis airport.

By so doing, they will help President Obama rescue the Democrat Party from the likely consequences of its own disastrous social engineering. Their votes will provide the majority Democrats the 60 votes they need to close debate on what is deceptively called an economic stimulus bill.

The defectors are Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, none of them strangers to liberal sirens.

In the absense of the Democrat "stimulus" program, a steroid shot for government growth, one of two things would happen:

* The economy would fix itself over a period of a year or two, with little or no inflation, and government would continue its usually modest role.

* The economy would, for one reason or another, stagnate or make a fitful recovery.

Neither of those outcomes is acceptable to the Democrat regime of President Obama. A passive role for government is not what he has in mind. A stagnant economy might doom his party to defeat in 2010, when all 435 House members and one-third of the 100 senators must stand for election.

Worse, from Obama's standpoint, his own chances of reelection in 2012 might fade as well.

Few things are more lethal to an incumbent party than a prolonged recession. That's why, when one occurs, the incumbent party tends to overstimulate, resulting in a spike in inflation. That is a tradeoff that incumbents accept because inflation, while troublesome, is rarely lethal on election day. The last time inflation played a big role in the defeat of an incumbent president was in 1980, when Democrat Jimmy Carter went down under the twin blows of stagflation, a blend of inflation and recession.

Another consideration also may be coming into play. In recent years, Democrats have been getting more and more of their financial support from the rich and very rich, who don't suffer from inflation because the returns on their investments tend to keep pace with inflation.

If the recession were to endure into the next campaign season, it undoubtedly would damage the Democrats' chances, perhaps severely. If the recession recedes before the next campaign, inflation might hurt the Democrats, but not much.