John Nichols | The Nation

For the past several years, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan has complained that the US economy has been growing at too slow a rate.

Now, as unemployment rates drop and job creation seems finally to be accelerating, Ryan is suddenly fretting about the prospect that the economy might grow too quickly.

Why?

The answer has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.

Despite the steady—make that unrelenting—opposition of Ryan and other leaders of the Republican-controlled US House, the Obama administration can now point to a pattern of monthly decreases in the unemployment rate. While the administration’s response to the unemployment crisis of the past three years was less than it should have been, a combination of stimulus policies and investments, as well as the determination of the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, appears to be working. For the fifth straight month, unemployment has fallen. The rate now stands at 8.3 percent—down from 10 percent in October 2009.

The official unemployment rate is now at the lowest point since the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency.

But it is the pattern of decrease that matters politically.

Consider this historical detail. At the start of 1984, after several years of brutal hard times, unemployment had fallen to 8.3 percent. The economy was still unsteady, especially in the manufacturing towns of the Great Lakes region and much of the South, but there was little question that the unemployment rate was falling. As more people got jobs during 1984, the rate continued to decline. It was this pattern that Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign pointed to in television advertising that celebrated “morning in America.” The sense that the country was on the right track—even if it had not arrived—contributed mightily to Reagan’s landslide re-election win that fall.

Could Barack Obama be headed for the same sort of improvement in his political fortunes? In 1983, Reagan’s approval rating in Wall Street Journal polling had dipped below 40 percent, and at the start of 1984, it was hovering in the low mid-40s. Obama’s approval rating never went as low as Reagan’s, and it now is 48 percent in the WSJ/NBC News polling.

If unemployment continues to decline, Obama would seem to be well positioned to run his own “morning in America” campaign this fall.

That’s good news for Obama, and perhaps for the Democrats aligned with him. That’s not such good news for the Republican opposition.

Washington Republicans, who have blocked the president’s economic initiatives over the past year (even going so far as to threaten extensions of unemployment benefits), had been planning to run against Obama and the Democrats with a 2012 campaign claiming that current policies are not working.

But what if they are working?

Perhaps this explains Paul Ryan’s sudden objection to maintaining the current policies of the Federal Reserve.

Over the past year, Ryan has been an increasingly bitter critic of administration economic policies, painting the president and his aides as inept—or worse—and arguing aggressively that they must be removed from power in order to spur growth

Now, Ryan is changing his tune.

Instead of worrying about slow growth, Ryan is suddenly fretting that things might start going a little too well.

Complaining about the threat—at least in his head—of inflation, Ryan’s urging the Federal Reserve to stop implementing policies that are designed to decrease unemployment.

The Federal Reserve has, as part of its historic charge from Congress, a responsibility to address and fight unemployment. Too frequently over the years, the Fed has disregarded tha charge, and erred overwhelmingly on the side of Wall Street bankers and speculators rather than working Americans.

The Fed remains a troubling player.

But, to his credit, Fed chair Ben Bernanke has been more respectful than his predecessors of that charge and fiscal common sense. He has done so by working reasonably closely with the Obama administration to hold interest rates down. The hope has been that, by doing so, the Fed could encourage economic growth in a country where many regions continue to experience a recession and where some major cities suffer with unemployment rates that have edged toward Depression-era levels.

The strategy appears to be having some success.

And that seems to have upset Paul Ryan. When Bernanke appeared Thursday the Ryan’s House Budget Committee, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin announced that he feared that the Fed was loosening its standards on keeping inflation low as part of its push to bring down unemployment.

This, Ryan warned, was unacceptable.

The Budget Committee’s stance is remarkable. A House Budget Committee chair is pressuring the Federal Reserve to let interest rates rise at a time when many states are still struggling to create a sufficient number of new jobs.

At the same time, other Republicans on Ryan’s committee are attacking the Fed for trying to address the mortgage crisis.

In other words, after more than a year of obstruction by a Republican-controlled US House that has refused to act to address unemployment and underemployment, and that has rejected sound proposals for addressing the mortgage crisis, Ryan and his allies are attacking the Obama administration, Bernanke and the Fed for trying to do something.

That’s bizarre enough.

But even more bizarre is the fact that the attacks have come as fresh jobs figures confirm a pattern of improvement under policies put in place by the administration and the Fed.

Ryan’s new tack of attack may excite those Republicans who would sacrifice job growth and economic improvement for their own political gain. But it’s a stunning stance for the representative of a Congressional district that has been battered by factory closings in its major cities and some of the highest patterns of unemployment in his state. Unemployment rates for cities in Ryan’s 1st Congressional district remain among the highest in Wisconsin, as cities such as Kenosha and Janesville struggle to fill the void created by the closures of auto plants in recent years.

To be sure, Ryan is a rigid partisan. No one seriously expects him to cheer news that goes against the interests of his party and his own political ambitions.

But it is unsettling, indeed, that the representative of an industrial district that took a brutal hit with the collapse of the economic house of cards constructed by the George W. Bush administration and Congressional Republicans such as Ryan would conjure up a new attack just as things appeared to be taking a turn for the better.

The sad fact, confirmed again and again, is that Paul Ryan is more interested in playing politics than he is in improving the fortunes of working Americans—even the working Americans he is supposed to represent.

Readers of Tom Paine’s The American Crisis will have a hard time finding the line referenced by Mitt Romney in his Florida victory speech: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

A very hard time.

I’ve lectured on Paine at major universities, keynoted Paine commemorations across the country and written books that review and analyze his writings, and I never came across Romney’s quote in my examinations of the pamphleteer’s essays or letters. But, just to be sure, I contacted my friend Harvey Kaye, the great biographer of Paine, and asked him whether he was familiar with Romney’s “lead, follow…” line. Kaye’s response: “I never read anything by Paine that sounded like that—doesn’t even sound like him.”

The same responses came from other Paine scholars and enthusiasts.

No surprise there. Anyone familiar with Paine’s canon knows that the greatest of the founding fathers did not peddle empty platitudes of this sort.

But there was Romney misattributing the line to Paine, as part of  his primary night attack on President Obama.

“In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said, ‘lead, follow, or get out of the way,’” chirped the Bain Capitalist. “Mr. President, you were elected to lead. You chose to follow, and now, it’s time for you to get out of the way.”

If Romney cannot get his recollection of the past right, it is hard to take his assessment of the present seriously.

Of course, it should not be all that shocking that the candidate who has never been able to shake the trappings of aristocracy that so offended Paine would neither known nor understand the author of American revolution.

If Toryism has a contemporary face, it is that of Mitt Romney.

Everything about this millionaire son of privilege says he would have chosen the security of King George III and the British Empire over a dangerous alliance with the radicals who rejected the divine right of kings and declared “all men are created equal.”

But even if Romney had strayed into the revolutionary camp, it is a safe bet that he—like the effete John Adams—would have been ill at ease with real revolutionaries like Tom Paine. Unlike the “sunshine patriots” that he decried in The American Crisis, Paine was not satisfied with the casual reordering of society.

And that reordering would not have favored vulture capitalists.

It was Paine who argued, in his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, that taxation of the rich with an eye toward redistributing wealth should be seen as “an act of national justice.”

“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained,” explained Paine. “All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”

Oh my, it looks like Sarah Palin might not be speaking at this year’s Republican National Convention.

Either that, or she will be the keynoter.

The party’s most recent vice-presidential nominee is now officially at war with Mitt Romney and Republican establishment figures—epic losers like Bob Dole and John McCain, epic spinners like Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter—who have rallied to save the campaign of the fumbling frontrunner.

The former governor of Alaska has for days been doing everything in her power to aid the campaign of Romney’s chief challenger, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But Palin’s petty sniping has proven insufficient to derail Romney. So, now, she has dropped the rhetorical equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the GOP’s political and pundit powerbrokers, dismissing them as “Stalinists” and acolytes of the one figure more reviled by conservative base draggers than former Soviet strongmen: anti-poverty campaigner Saul Alinsky.

Palin has now given a sort-of endorsement to Gingrich, telling Fox News: “if for no other reason to rage against the machine vote for Newt, annoy a liberal. Vote Newt. Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.”

But, despite the silly “annoy a liberal” line, the machine Palin is raging against is the Republican establishment.

“We have witnessed something very disturbing this week,” Palin writes in a broadly circulated Facebook post. “The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.”

Palin savages Romney as “a candidate who admitted to not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan days.”

Palin hails Gingrich as the candidate who “brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s.”

But Palin reserves her real fire for Republican insiders who have attacked Gingrich as somehow out-of-synch with the Reagan legacy:

“We know it because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him, let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.”

What’s Palin’s play here?

She is not going for a top spot on Mitt Romney’s Christmas-card list.

But she may be going for something bigger.

By positioning herself as the champion of the party’s grassroots in a battle with an aging and out-of-touch establishment, Palin is staking a claim on the party’s heart and soul. It is she, not Gingrich, and certainly not Romney, who may be best placed to come out of a bitter nominating fight as the favorite of the delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa and of Tea Partisans who will need to be energized if Republicans are going to be viable in the fall.

Even as she attacks the likely GOP nominee, Palin makes herself the essential Republican. That translates into talk of her as a convention keynoter, a vice presidential prospect or a Cabinet member in a new GOP administration. Palin would take the keynoter gig, in a heartbeat (high-profile, few risks), but don’t think that she would casually lower herself to accept another second spot on a crashing Republican ticket.

Whatever the specifics, Palin is establishing herself as someone Romney is going to need. Indeed,if the eventual nominee does not bow to the Alaskan’s demands, it will be hard to unite an increasingly factionalized party. So Palin gets the upper hand, even if Gingrich loses.

And if Romney loses in November, well, then it is Palin who will be able to say “I told you so”—as she stokes speculation about a possible 2016 campaign.

—Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising

Just hours after he delivered a State of the State address that he hoped would set the tone for his campaign to avert a recall election threat, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was hit with exactly the sort of news that embattled politicians fear most.

Two former aides to Walker—one of whom was in the employ of his campaign until just days ago—have been charged with felonies and misdemeanors in the ongoing “John Doe” investigation of wrongdoing by aides, political allies and campaign donors with links to the embattled governor.

These charges follow closely on the filing of felony charges against Tim Russell, a former Walker deputy chief of staff and one of the governor’s closest aides over the past decade.

The aides charged Thursday were, according to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, engaged in fundraising activities and other political work while working on the staff of Walker when he served as county executive.

Chisholm explains in a fifty-seven-page complaint that Russell and the newly indicted aides established a “secret email system available to and used by select ‘insider’ staffers for both official and unofficial business.” That system was built around a wireless router that was kept in an armoire in the office of Walker’s deputy chief of staff’—just a few feet from Walker’s office. Its existence was “never disclosed to county employees outside a closely held group within the Walker administration.” 

The complaint discuses the exchange of thousands—yes, thousands—of e-mails involving fundraising and political activity. Many of these e-mails from the deputy chief of staff who is now charged with four felony counts of misconduct in public office, Kelly Rindfleisch, and top political aides to Walker, including Keith Gilkes, who went on to serve as the governor’s chief of staff.

Walker has said that during the campaign he was in constant communication with Gilkes about fundraising and campaign strategy.

And Rindfleisch, it appears, was in constant communication with Gilkes and other campaign aides.

Despite the fact that it is illegal for county officials to use their offices for campaign work, Rindfleisch revealed in one e-mail that “half” of her taxpayer-funded work was “for the campaign.”

Another individual who appears to have been in e-mail contact with  Rindfleisch was Reince Priebus, then the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, now the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Additional e-mails went to the campaign of Brett Davis, a Walker ally who was running for lieutenant governor in a 2010 Republican primary. Davis lost that race, but now works in the Walker administration as a top appointee of the governor. The manager of the Davis campaign for lieutenant governor was Cullen Werwie, who exchanged emails with Rindfleisch.

Werwie, who now serves as Governor Walker’s spokesman, has been granted immunity in the John Doe investigation.

For Rindfleisch, Walker’s former deputy chief of staff, the charges are very serious—major felonies that carry with them the prospect of multiple years in jail. The fifty-seven-page complaint against her, and against a lower level political operative named Darlene Wink, provides a rough outline for what political observers in Wisconsin have begun to refer to as a classic “Pay-to-Play” political operation, where key government aides are involved in both policymaking and campaign fundraising from parties that are interested in those policies.

The added twist is that rarely if ever has an investigation into this sort of activity revealed that discussions about money and policy were mixed on a “secret email system.”

The investigation is ongoing. It continues to expand at an exponential rate, touching more and more of Walker’s inner circle, including aides in the county executive’s office, 2010 campaign aides and donors, and aides in the governor’s office and Walker’s current campaign. Notably, Rindfleisch, who was paid by Milwaukee County taxpayers during the 2010 Walker campaign, left county employment after Walker’s election to help organize the new governor’s inauguration. Rindfieisch then went to work as a top fundraising aide with the governor’s political operation, Friends of Scott Walker, with which she was employed until January, 2012.

Sources close to the inquiry say that the “John Doe” investigation is still in the early stages of sorting through mountains of information obtained in FBI raids and related investigations of Walker aides and donors. That means that the steady flow of charges and complaints could extend their the recall campaign that Walker is all but certain to face, after one million Wisconsinites petitioned for his ouster.

The full impact of the investigation on the recall campaign will only be revealed over the period of the next several months.

The potential that the “John Doe” inquiry will be a major political problem for Walker now seems a good deal greater than it did just days ago.

Here’s why?

The latest complaint ties wrongdoing to Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

This new complaint makes the connection to Walker’s current spokesman Cullen Werwie, who has requested immunity in the John Doe probe. The private e-mail network in the county executive’s office was aiding both Walker’s campaign and the campaign of a Walker ally, Brett Davis, who was running for lieutenant governor. Werwie was Davis’s campaign spokesman. (In addition to Werwie, Davis is now a top Walker appointee.)

The complaint features reference to an e-mail from Walker showing at least some knowledge of problems with politicking in the office. He is primarily concerned that there are no media stories about political operations being run out of the county executive’s office—following the revelation in 2010 that one of the aides charged Thursday, Wink, was doing political work on county time. “We cannot afford another story like this one,” reads the e-mail, which was included in the complaint. “No one can give them any reason to do another story.” The governor even counsels the aide about the use of laptops and websites during the workday.

That e-mail is one Walker is going to be questioned about as he tours Wisconsin following his State of the State speech.

The complaint released Thursday is the most detailed and serious yet directed at the official and political activities on behalf of Walker.

And few will debate that these charges are the most serious to arise thus far from the John Doe probe. They bring the investigation dramatically closer to the governor.

This does not mean that the governor is going to be indicted, or that he is guilty of wrongdoing.

But it does raise the classic question from the Watergate era inquiries into the misdeeds of aides to then-President Richard Nixon.

Of Nixon it was asked: “What did he know and when did he know it?”

With the latest charges and the fresh complaint, it is now entirely reasonable to say with regard to Scott Walker: “What did he know and when did he know it?”