Washington Post

Liberal Democrats know what they're for: a second stimulus to create more investment and jobs at a time when the economy is still dangerously weak. Republicans ("conservative Republicans" is redundant) know what they're against: anything the Democrats are for. That leaves the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who don't really know what they're for or what they're against.

Earlier this year the Blue Dogs, and many other Democrats, were saying they would welcome an end to the debate over health-care reform so they could turn their attention to jobs, jobs, jobs. But now that President Obama and Democratic legislative leaders have done that, the Blue Dogs have largely turned skittish.

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The workers are rising in the workers' republic. In China's south coastal provinces, which long ago supplanted the American Midwest as the world's premier manufacturing belt, employees have gone on strike at a series of factories. Nobody knows how many plants have been threatened with shutdowns or have ground to a halt; one American attorney who's spent a good deal of time with such workers estimates that it may be close to 1,000.

The cause of the unrest is no mystery. China's rise to industrial preeminence (in a quantitative if not qualitative sense) has come on the backs of workers whose wages the government has, until recently, suppressed to keep the price of exports artificially low. The official Communist Party-dominated All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is not really a union. Workers do not choose its leaders, who most frequently come from management. "The union," says the attorney, "is less state-dominated than employer-dominated." That is a logical consequence of two party priorities: to build an industrial sector that dominates global markets through low prices; and to prohibit the existence of any organizations that could eventually challenge party control.

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The good news for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina here in California was that they won their Republican primaries. The bad news was that they had to run in Republican primaries.

Whitman, now the GOP nominee for governor, and Fiorina, the GOP nominee for senator, dispatched their nearest primary rivals by margins of better than 2 to 1. Each spent a queen's ransom to do so -- in Whitman's case, close to $80 million of her own money -- but both former CEOs have plenty left over to take on their Democratic opponents this fall: in Whitman's case, Jerry Brown, the once and, he hopes, future governor; in Fiorina's case, incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer.

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For American Jews, Israel's catastrophic misadventure on the high seas this weekend has only deepened the chasm that increasingly splits them into two camps. On the Web site of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which represents this nation's aging Jewish establishment, the story on the deadly encounter is headlined "Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers." The deaths of nine people protesting Israel's blockade of Gaza don't even rate a sub-headline.

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Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don't really believe we're still in recession. Or maybe, they just don't care.

How else to explain the continual harping on the deficit by editorialists, centrist think tanks and the like when the nation is still enmeshed in the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? How else to understand the growing opposition to the jobs bills Congress is set to vote on this week, particularly when nobody has identified any future engine of American economic growth save countercyclical public investment?

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The Senate is poised to vote this week on amendments to the financial reform bill that will determine whether Wall Street's banks will serve the American economy or whether the American economy will continue to serve Wall Street's banks.

As they prepare to vote, senators might look at the latest report from the Congressional Oversight Panel on the TARP, chaired by Elizabeth Warren. Last week, the panel released a study of how America's banks used TARP funds to provide loans to small businesses. Lending by the biggest banks -- those with assets of more than $100 billion, which received 81 percent of government bailout funds -- declined, while lending to small businesses from medium-size banks, with assets of $10 billion to $100 billion, which received 11.4 percent of the bailout, increased.

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