Tom Schaller thinks the GOP’s party of no strategy is smart. Bruce Bartlett thinks it’s dumb.

I think they’re both right. They’re just coming from two different perspectives. The Schaller perspective is about retaking a majority. What kinds of moves by incumbent Republicans make it most likely that incumbent Democrats will lose. The Bartlett perspective is about influencing policy. By taking themselves out of the game, Republican members of congress are whiffing on a chance to influence what happens.

Traditionally in countries other than the United States, members of opposition parties operate according to the Schaller perspective, where in the USA members of the opposition have traditionally taken the Bartlett perspective. That’s because in a parliamentary system, as an individual parliamentarian there’s really only one path to influencing policy. You need to impress party leaders and be put on the front bench, and your party needs to win the election. Then you get to play a role in formulating policy. But the American system is different and affords legislators much more opportunity to change policy as individuals. Someone like George Voinovich or Judd Gregg who’s retiring and has no chance of ever leading his party still has a chance to play an important role in shaping health care or climate policy. And the same holds for people like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe who are too ideologically unreliable to ever become party leaders. Those folks have, it seems, a strong incentive to care more about their personal ability to impact the course of policy right now than about their hypothetical ability to help more Republicans get elected in the future.

Traditionally, this is the way incumbent senators have thought. They have plenty of influence right now but only if they bargain. So it makes more sense to bargain than to worry about other people’s possible future election. But congressional Republicans pioneered a different, more parliamentary approach in 1993-94 and are running the same play again. It’s a bit of a mystery, though, how they’ve managed to persuade members of the caucus, as individuals, to follow this approach.

Gallup recently did its most admired living people survey. By far the most admired man is Barack Obama (30%) followed by George W Bush (4%), Nelson Mandela (3%), Glenn Beck (2%), the Pope (2%), Bill Graham (2%), and Bill Gates (2%). On the women side, things are closer, leading USA Today to write “The close finish by Clinton, named by 16% in the open-ended survey, and Palin, named by 15%, reflects the nation’s partisan divide.”

This seems like yet another example of the press being unable to acknowledge instances where the left is just more popular than the right. If you look at the numbers it’s clear that the closeness between Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin doesn’t reflect a partisan divide at all. Rather, it reflects the fact that a lot of people admire Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey more than they admire Clinton. If you add up those three well-known progressive women, they easily outnumber the 17 percent who like Palin or Condoleezza Rice. Unless you somehow think that Michelle Obama’s fans are indifferent between Palin and Clinton, this is a portrait of a lopsided America.

I hesitate to disagree with Paul Krugman about something like this, but I think today’s column on the US/China currency imbalance would benefit from adding in a distinction he doesn’t draw.

Look at Brad DeLong’s chart of how dropping the gold standard helped countries recover from the Great Depression:

By devaluing early, Japan and Britain gave themselves a competitive advantage over Germany, France, and the United States. This was a problem for Germany, France, and the United States. But there were too different ways the imbalance could have been rectified. One would have been for Germany, France, and the United States to somehow coerce Japan and Britain into raising the value of their currencies. That would have lessened the extent of the relative disadvantage. But in a larger sense pressing Japan and Britain to return to misguided deflationary policies would have just reduced overall global output and put the whole world back into the downward spiral of depression.

The other way to restore balance was for Germany, France, and the United States to follow Japan and Britain in dropping the gold standard and snapping the deflationary spiral. That’s what eventually happened and it helped lead the world out of disaster. If it had happened faster—if Germany, France, and the United States had all joined Britain in dropping the gold standard back in 1931—then it’s possible that the world could have avoided several extra years of contraction, the rise of Hitler, etc., etc., etc.

So to return to China. When it comes to getting the US and Chinese currencies in a different alignment, it seems to me that it matters whether we’re talking about doing that through more expansion in the United States, or through more tightening in China. There’s good reason to believe that policy is too tight in the United States. Unemployment is very high. Inflation is very low. The “Taylor Rule” tradition indicates that the Fed’s normal response to this level of economic activity would be to try to achieve a -5 percent interest rate. There’s not really much reason to believe that policy is too loose in China. Growth is below the recent trend. Inflation is not accelerating.

Ayn Rand is a bad writer and a crackpot exponent of an absurd philosophical scheme. Representative Paul Ryan is, according to Representative Paul Ryan, a devotée of Ayn Rand’s bad writing and crackpot philosophical scheme. Rand’s views are so absurd that a great many conservatives and libertarians in good standing rightly regard them as ridiculous. So how is it that Representative Ryan continues to be held in high regard despite his adherence to a crackpot viewpoint.

Well, as Pejman Yousefzadeh explains in his post “How Do We Know That Paul Ryan Is An Important Political Figure?” it’s fine for Ryan to be in the grips of Rand’s philosophy because though she may be nuts, she also pissed off liberals:

Because people like Steve Benen find it necessary to waste time launching stupid, content-free attacks against him, in an effort to take Ryan down.

Ayn Rand, I should note, is most definitely not my cup of tea. I read The Fountainhead almost nine years ago, found the writing to be over the top, exceedingly poor, and heavy-handed to the point of being laughable at times. But to call someone’s interest in Rand “borderline-creepy,” and “a crackpot,” and to concur with the views of the exceedingly silly and monumentally discredited Matt Yglesias (more on Yglesias here) in saying that Ryan is–wait for it!–“a dangerous madman” simply because Ryan purportedly likes Rand, is to engage in overstatement and hyperbole worthy of Rand herself. Are we sure that Benen and Yglesias are not Randians themselves?

This kind of logic seems to account for something like 98 percent of contemporary American conservative “thinking.” We know Ryan’s a good guy because Ryan’s choice of crackpot intellectual inspirations provokes liberals into calling him a crackpot! Amazingly, after acting like this 360 days a year, every once in a while the conservative grassroots pops its head up and complains it’s (once again) been betrayed by its political leaders and launches some new paroxysms of random purging.

Nate Silver’s updated 2010 Senate outlook is worth a read. But before peering into the details, it’s worth contemplating the fact that the raw number of seats in play understates how bad the dynamic is for the Democrats. The two most likely party flips are seats in Delaware and Connecticut, both of which should be solid blue seats. Conversely, GOP-held seats in pale blue states like New Hampshire and Ohio don’t look like particularly likely pickups at the moment.

So a sober prediction at the moment is of modest net Democratic losses. But that’s happening on an electoral map that’s tilted very heavily in the Democrats’ favor. It’s particularly odd that things look bad for Democrats considering that even though congressional Democrats are unpopular, congressional Republicans are even more unpopular. Given that there are only two parties, I would expect the more popular of the two to be in a strong position.

I’m sure what you want to do on New Year’s Day is read my Daily Beast column about Yemen.