I did a post yesterday on Larry Bartels’ observation that in Depression-afflicted countries “the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased [in the mid-30s] dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter” even though in different countries this meant all kinds of different political parties. A good example of this phenomenon at play is by comparing the United States, where the bursting of a housing bubble and a growing recession is crippling the incumbent Republicans and boosting the Democrats, with the United Kingdom, where the bursting of a housing bubble and a growing recession is crippling the incumbent Labour Party and boosting the Tories.

On its own terms, though this can sometimes produce unfair outcomes (like Jimmy Carter getting booted for problems that were far beyond his capacity to control) I think swing voters’ habit of punishing incumbents for poor performance is an okay satisficing strategy. It’s part of the reason why democracy manages to work despite massive voter ignorance. The electorate may be composed of people who don’t understand the issues or where the candidates stand on them, but the people running the government have an incentive to try to implement policies that work out okay in order to avoid “throw the bums out” sentiment. The trouble is that Bartels’ study of American elections, at least, suggests massive myopia on the part of voters. Economic performance in an election year has a big impact on election outcomes, but economic performance in other years doesn’t get you anywhere. If that carries over to the UK (and, indeed, it seems to) that means that Labour won’t get any credit from voters for the fact that current problems were preceded by a long and impressive string of growth. And by the same token, voters don’t understand comparative issues — the fact that your country is doing better than most other countries amidst a global downturn won’t get you any credit.

Okay, here’s a new one. This time the financial crisis isn’t the fault of the Community Reinvestment Act or Fannie Mae, instead “smart growth” is the problem. This argument depends on two ideas. One is that regulatory supply restrictions on housing were the main cause of the housing bubble, and the other is that smart growth is primarily about imposing new regulatory supply restrictions on housing. But as Ryan Avent observes, neither of those things is true. The first point is fairly obvious — look at Las Vegas and elsewhere and you’ll see that we had bubbles in all kinds of places.

The second point, however, is worth elaborating on. The idea of smart growth is that we shouldn’t have endless sprawl. That means that we should have less restrictions on housing supply in some places, but more restrictions in other places. For example, in the Washington DC area the dictates of smart growth indicate that we should let people build more densely in the places that are already developed. In particular we should be building much more densely within walking distance from our Metro, MARC, and VRE stations as well as creating new transit lines to serve currently developed areas that lack transit services. Then those areas, too, can become denser. But with greater density in our transit corridors, we won’t need to geographically expand the “built-up” portion of the area — allowing the fringe to remain full of farms and forests and what have you. Simply preventing people from adding to the housing supply anywhere would, clearly, create problems. But the idea is that instead of building new roads through currently undeveloped areas in order to turn the landscape into suburbs, we should focus more on developing the currently-developed parts of the country more intensively (and “smarter”). And one way or the other, the crux of our current predicament is that too many houses have been built, not too few.

The Frank/Dodd modification to the Paulson Plan opened up the possibility that it could be implemented as something much more like a Swedish-style (or, now, UK-style) partial nationalization. But most observers assumed that since Paulson would be in charge of implementing it that we wouldn’t go in that direction at least until January. But Justin Fox says that at his press conference today, Paulson seemed to be changing his tune and hinting at a Sweden/UK-style implementation. Krugman says that’s what we ought to be doing.

As I was saying yesterday, I think the conservative effort to demonize Bill Ayers as somehow the greatest monster of American history is absurd. He was involved in violent extremism amidst an era of extremism in American politics and plenty of his contemporaries did worse stuff in the name of upholding white supremacy or prosecuting the Vietnam War than anything Ayers did in opposition to it. That said, my former boss Mike Tomasky is sure right to call BS on this statement in support of Ayers:

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—”unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Martin Luther King, Jr. participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements. And yet he never set bombs anywhere, nor advocated that anyone else set bombs anywhere. Ayers did. Was Ayers more passionate than King? No. Was Ayers more violent than King? Yes. And King was right and Ayers was wrong — that’s really all there is to it. Now and again you do see a strand of thought on the left that equates willingness to engage in violence with one’s level of passion and commitment. That was the Weather Underground in its day, and it also I think represents the thinking of some of the so-called “liberal hawks” of the 21st century. But the notion that passionate commitment to the cause of justice is best exemplified by killing people — and especially by a “tough-minded” willingness to contemplate killing innocent people — is ludicrous.

The “unrepentant terrorist” thing is a bit complicated. One thing you can say in Ayers’ defense is that it’s perfectly clear from his present-day conduct that he, in fact, realizes that unleashing a podunk domestic terrorism campaign would be a stupid and immoral thing to do. He could be going around setting off bombs. Instead, he’s a professor and a community activist. On the other hand, he seems sufficiently entrenched in egomania and self-righteousness that he can’t bring himself to actually admit that. And until he does admit that he was wrong, he’s hard to defend.