The Day After: Advice for Obama and the Democrats

E. J. Dionne offers excellent advice to the Democrats on how to handle the Republican tsunami, in today's Washington Post, starting with some Reagonomics: revenue sharing for the states.

This is the best post election article I've seen, a step by step argument for the best way to move the country forward and to make the Republicans put up or shut up.

Some of Dionne's points:

Obama should take up the old Republican idea of revenue-sharing by offering states large-scale assistance to prevent layoffs and tax increases. This would be welcomed by the many new Republican governors.

... push forward with an infrastructure bank, which has bipartisan support. There is no better time to rebuild our nation's crumbling public facilities than when borrowing is cheap. And he should address the decline of American manufacturing, a prime cause of the discontent that roils the Midwest.

... make a full-disclosure law the first order of business in the lame-duck congressional session, and come back to it again and again if the bill is blocked.

Republicans need to be pressed to put specifics behind their anti-spending, anti-deficit rhetoric. They should be confronted with budget cuts that force them to face their constituencies. Farm subsidies are not sacred, nor is spending for weapons systems the Pentagon says it doesn't need, nor are hundreds of millions in tax expenditures and preferences. And if Republicans continue to insist on tax cuts for the wealthy, they should have to identify spending cuts to cover the costs.

On immigration, the president should make plain that no solution is possible absent bipartisan agreement.

... press on with reforms to the bureaucracy and to the ways the federal government hires people, buys things and responds to citizens.