I do think that this whole approach of slowing everything down, in many ways I think it’s so that, they don’t want a jobs bill because they don’t want people to get jobs before the election. It’s a harsh thing to say, and I don’t want to impugn the motives of my colleagues, but I don’t get what they’re doing otherwise.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said as much in a press call including TWI:

It is very clear that the Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail. They see that things are beginning to turn around. You know the numbers. When this president took office, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month. … Now we are gaining jobs. … Unfortunately, and cynically [on their part], in cynical political terms, it doesn’t serve them in terms of their elections if things are beginning to turn around.

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post complicates that argument — saying that Republicans want to cast doubt on the idea of stimulus as effective at saving jobs.

The larger Republican strategy — explained to me privately by Republican aides — is rooted in the fact that they believe dragging out any discussion of unemployment helps the GOP in the long run.

Republicans privately admit that the standoff over joblessness may help Dems in the short term, by allowing them to scream about how heartless Republicans are. But their larger strategy is all about casting doubt on the efficacy of the stimulus in particular and on the failure of the Dems’ big-spending ways in general. [...]

This isn’t about Republicans banking on mass economic suffering to help them at the polls. Rather, they’re dragging out the discussion of unemployment in the belief that the public will conclude that Dem policies have failed — and that Dems have their heads in the sand about how much money they wasted on their pie-in-the-sky liberal dream schemes.

Of course, Democrats cannot realistically demonstrate the alternate scenarios that most economists project — that a smaller stimulus would have led to more job loss, and that a larger stimulus would have led to more job growth. That means that Democrats will need to focus on the meager, but present, gains in employment and the Republican stranglehold on Medicaid funding, state aid and expanded unemployment insurance.

Draper, who recently published in the New York TImes Magazine the definitive account of the campaign’s struggle to find a message, marks his blogging debut with an entry that unloads some of the too-hot material on the McCain-Palin rift that he collected in the course of writing the piece. A sample:

I’m sympathetic to [McCain advisers Toby] Eskew and [Nicolle] Wallace, and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me — namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.”

It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you’re Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn’t the care and feeding of Sarah Palin’s ego; it’s the furtherance of John McCain’s quest for the presidency.

We’ll have to wait and see if Draper’s blog turns into a daily dish-fest. If it does, Draper may open himself up to criticism for dumping gasoline on a fire that already has the potential to destroy what’s left of the McCain campaign. But few reporters were granted anywhere near the access Draper had to the highest levels of the campaign, and the rest of us can be forgiven for bookmarking his blog in eager anticipation of what juicy details will come next.

(Via Politico’s Jonathan Martin)