That's exactly what President Obama chided House Republicans for at their retreat in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. "A lot of you have gone to appear at ribbon cuttings for the same projects that you voted against," Obama told them. Now the Democratic campaign apparatus in Washington is determined to remind voters -- and Republican lawmakers -- that the stimulus doesn't look so bad after all when it's delivering cash to their own area.

"Not only have nearly 70 House Republicans been caught trying to take credit for recovery funding that's brought the economy back from the brink of collapse, but now it's come to light some were writing private letters lobbying for projects in their districts while trashing the Recovery package publicly," Ryan Rudominer, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wrote reporters Tuesday morning. The Democratic National Committee also sent the Times story around, as did some progressive interest groups allied with the administration.

Aides to Republicans whose letters the Times turned up told the paper they were just trying to make local lemonade out of the stimulus' lemons. "If the funds are there, Senator Grassley's going to help Iowa, rather than some other state, get its share," a spokeswoman for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who voted against the stimulus, told the paper. Still, the discovery could take some of the political punch out of GOP attacks on the "wasteful" stimulus bill -- not to mention irritate some of the most driven tea party activists in the Republican base. Expect Democrats to keep pushing this storyline as long as they can.

Palin says that declaring war on Iran or showing stronger support for Israel might convince voters that Obama is tougher than they think on national security and doing all he can to protect the U.S. Otherwise, according to Palin, Obama won't be re-elected if he continues on his current path. 

As if.

As if the Obama administration were not escalating the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, who aided and abetted the al-Qaida attacks on the U.S., while continuing the war in Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

As if invading two countries that did not attack the U.S., Iran and Iraq, would be more statesmanlike than merely invading and occupying one.

As if the public, sickened by the cost of the Iraq war in American dead and maimed and trillions of dollars in the long run, had not turned against wingnut militarism and tossed Palin's party out of Congress back in 2006.

As if singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" helped Palin's running mate John McCain win the White House in 2008.

As if swing voters were concerned, not about the highest levels of unemployment since the Great Depression, but about what they considered to be too few American military deaths abroad.

But the contemporary right's claim to intellectual dynamism is not limited to Sarah Palin's suggestion that another unnecessary, unprovoked war in the Middle East might be good policy as well as a a good idea. In domestic policy, Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, recently unveiled an alternative budget that would deal with the long-term deficit problem (about half of which was caused by Bush's and the Republican Congress's wars and tax cuts) by privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher system.

As Michael Myers' Doctor Evil might say: .......R....r......r.....right.

That's what Americans are demanding, Rep. Ryan. Millions of Americans are not content to have lost much or all of their 401K and other private retirement savings in the stock market in the last decade, with nothing but Social Security remaining to rescue them in their retirement years. No, Americans are angry because they weren't allowed to lose all of their Social Security money, as well, in the stock market. Clearly they are angry because Wall Street brokers aren't able to rake in commissions from middle-class and working-class retirees by flipping stocks bought with diverted Social Security funds. The bailouts to Wall Street were not enough. We need to give the rent-seeking bankers the vast funds of Social Security as well and let them charge us fees for "managing" it with the legendary expertise we all know and admire.

Bomb Iran and privatize Social Security now! There's a chant for the tea partiers.

These ideas are not going to bring the Republican Party back to power in Congress in 2011 or into the White House in 2013. Which is not to say that the Republicans can't come back to power. In a two-party system, frustrated voters could vote the out party back in, while ignoring the out party's message, even if the message is as crazy as "Bomb Iran and privatize Social Security."

If they came back in, would the Republicans bomb Iran and privatize Social Security? Almost certainly not. Bush talked tough about Iran but didn't do anything. (Correction: He accidentally promoted a major goal of Iranian foreign policy, by deposing the minority Iraqi Sunnis detested by Iran and bringing the Iran-supported Shia to power in Iraq. Oops).

Nor are the Republicans likely to privatize Social Security. A few years back, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House and a freshly reelected Republican president made partial Social Security privatization a major part of his second-term agenda. Result? The very idea of channeling Social Security savings into the stock market was so unpopular with Republican voters -- forget Democrats -- that the central domestic policy initiative of the conservative movement for the last 30 years was not even brought to a vote in either house.

So there is little or no chance that even under a Republican president the U.S. will declare war on Iran or privatize Social Security. These are not serious policy proposals. They are just lollipops for the Limbaugh listeners. Boob bait for Bubba.

The Republicans have specialized for a generation now in running as radical right-wing revolutionaries and then, once in power, governing on behalf of their K Street lobbyist friends, until the next election, when, for a few weeks, they are leading the American Revolution or World War II all over again until Election Day.

Eric Hoffer observed that movements tend to turn first into businesses and then into rackets. The racket side of the Republican machine is illustrated by a New York Times story about Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Cornyn visits New York twice a month to take advantage of Wall Street's "buyers' remorse."

Buyer's remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait -- which party are we talking about here?

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.

"We spend a couple million dollars on irritable bowel syndrome, and we spend a couple of million dollars on an ad in the Super Bowl Sunday, and we continue the practices that infuriate our citizenry because they're hurting so badly," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren on Thursday. "They're having to tighten their belts. This is what feeds the tea parties. This is what feeds the anti-incumbency mood that's out there, an out-of-touch Congress and an out-of-touch administration." Smelling budget blood in the political water, other Republicans chimed in, as well. "Given the difficult economic times our nation is facing, I am very concerned with the amount of money spent by the Census Bureau for the production and airing of these commercials," Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., wrote Census officials last week, demanding a detailed explanation of just how much money the ad would be wasting and whether a similar campaign during the 2000 Census yielded any improvement in response rates.

As it happens, the Census Bureau had all that information ready to go by kickoff. "Facing a three-decade decline in the national mail response rates 10 years ago in the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau launched its first ever paid advertising campaign to increase public awareness levels about the once-a-decade and Constitutionally mandated population count," Census officials said in a press release Sunday. "The end result was a 2000 Census that turned around the three-decade decline in response rates and exceeded the 1990 Census mail response rate of 65 percent... Because of the higher response rate the Census Bureau saved at least $305 million and returned that money to Congress following the census. The advertising campaign in the 2000 Census cost about $100 million, a $205 million return on investment."

In case anyone didn't get that message during the game, the Census also posted some math on its Twitter feed in the middle of the second half. "If 1% of folks watching #SB44 change mind and mail back #2010Census form, taxpayers save $25 million in follow up costs," officials wrote. That would be a 10-fold return on the $2.5 million the ad cost -- which, even using Republican arithmetic, is a pretty good government savings.

Watch the ad here:

As usual with this administration, the working strategy seems to be to give a little bit to everybody. Obama announced yesterday that he would call for a televised half-day bipartisan meeting at the White House to try to reach a breakthrough on healthcare. Echoing his State of the Union address and his "question time" with the House Republican caucus, the president said, "I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward."

It’s not, of course, actually likely that the White House and congressional Democratic majorities are going to hear some revelatory and brilliant new proposal from the GOP -- especially when the Republicans, as a relatively tiny legislative minority, are insisting the president and majority meet their demands. Says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., "We know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."

If the last eight months have shown anything systematically, it’s that there isn’t really any ground on which the parties can meet for compromise. Republicans are uninterested in letting Democrats pass a bill and claim success. McConnell’s point is clearly Republican orthodoxy; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, tells the New York Times almost exactly the same thing as his Senate counterpart. "The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access."

For its part, the White House clearly has no intention of scrapping the bill and rebooting negotiations, not after watching Max Baucus and his "Gang of Six" fritter away a half a year in fruitless talks.

Clearly, this televised session idea would be some kind of kabuki theater. What’s happening here is a part of the administration’s ongoing effort to claim the center. The idea is that another on-air, face-to-face encounter will help the president to hold Republicans accountable with the public for abdicating shared responsibility for governing. They’ll be revealed for the do-nothing obstructionists they are.

But you have to think the GOP probably isn’t going to get caught off guard as it did with Obama’s "question time." Republican negotiators won’t just show up unprepared. They’ll do their homework, and they’ll have lots of proposals. You can bet that they will have ideas that sound perfectly good to the layperson but are actually completely infeasible in any compromise, for fairly complicated and wonky reasons. They won't suggest these ideas because they want the president to actually enact them; they'll just try to make him the one saying "no."

Obama and the Democrats want to go on TV to reveal the opposition as uninterested in genuine compromise. But really, it’s not hard to imagine how Republicans maneuver the Democrats into spending this half-day televised session rejecting all of the minority’s ideas. It sounds something like a replay, in miniature and on-air, of the whole painful process so far.

I know, I know. That's what they think, is all I'm saying.

House Republicans shouldn't have allowed the encounter to be televised. But then believing their own disinformation is basically what makes them Republicans.

So anyway, up jumps freshman Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

"You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy? That's the question, Mr. President."

Hensarling appeared to think he'd posed a real zinger. Obama's runaway spending is an article of faith among the Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck crowd. Karl Rove, Bush's cynical political guru, pushes it the way Lenin pushed "the withering away of the state."

Obama jumped on it. "With all due respect," he said, "I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign ...

"The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. So when you say that suddenly I've got ... a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true.

"And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is, we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.

"(That) had nothing to do with anything that we had done. It had to do with the fact that in 2000, when there was a budget surplus of $200 billion, you had a Republican administration and a Republican Congress, and we had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, you had a prescription drug plan -- the biggest entitlement plan, by the way, in several decades -- that was passed, without it being paid for, you had two wars that were done through supplementals [i.e., off-budget appropriations] and then you had $3 trillion projected because of the lost revenue of this recession."

Read it and weep, because those are the facts. Two weeks before Obama was inaugurated, the Congressional Budget Office projected the 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion, adding that due to the economic crisis the new administration also inherited, "collections from corporate income taxes are anticipated to decline by 27 percent and individual income taxes by 8 percent; in normal economic conditions, they would both grow." Mandated spending on unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc., increased.

A year later, little had changed. A December 2009 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the Bush administration's fiscal legacy "explain(s) virtually the entire deficit over the next 10 years."

Economic stimulus and all, new spending by the Obama administration amounts to roughly 10 percent of this year's deficit.

The GOP response to these incontrovertible facts amounts to boo-hoo-hoo. Republicans who stayed focused on Bill Clinton's zipper from 1998 until Bush's failures made necessary the promulgation of a new rule of Washington etiquette, now whine that decent people simply don't resort to arithmetic. The world began anew last January.

Obama promised miracles, they say, and he hasn't delivered. My view is that in pursuit of illusory bipartisanship, he's let congressional Republicans pout like children too long. Fiscally speaking, the GOP keeps promising voters an excursion to Big Rock Candy Mountain: lower taxes, higher revenue, prosperity all around.

Except it never happens. Multimillionaires get tax cuts, we get the bill. Virtually the entire national debt was run up by President Reagan and the two Bushes. Meanwhile, job creation under George W. Bush was the lowest since World War II. Then when Democrats take office, they style themselves "deficit hawks," and caterwaul about runaway spending.

It's like a carnival sideshow act. Except that it plays. Many readers know these things. Obama's political challenge, however, is that millions of ordinary voters don't have a clue. So he's got to find ways to tell them over and over again until they do. Republicans seem unlikely to furnish him another platform.

© 2010, Gene Lyons. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.