DSCC chair: You know, we could extend those top-bracket tax rates

And so we come to the final two days of the midterm elections, and it appears that Democrats have finally figured out that tax-hiking class warfare may not be selling as well as it did in 2008.  Senator Robert Menendez, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and is currently working to avoid losing a 10-seat swing and control of the upper chamber, said yesterday on ABC’s This Week that Senate Democrats might consider a temporary extension of the top-bracket tax rates while the economy stagnates:

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said Sunday that Democrats are open to temporarily extending the Bush-era tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year, which are set to expire at the end of this year.

“I certainly believe that there may be some opportunity for a temporary approval of some of these cuts,” Menendez, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “But we’ll have to see what can be worked out.”

Menendez made clear that Democratic leaders were completely closed to the idea that the tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000 be made permanent, citing the $4 trillion impact on the national deficit.

Of course, this is something akin to a deathbed conversion.  If Democrats wanted to seriously offer that compromise, they had all the time in the world before Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi rushed to adjourn Congress six weeks before the election.  There was no doubt that such a proposal would have easily passed, removing a significant amount of uncertainty from the economy and allow businesses to properly plan for next year.

The same Democratic leadership to which Menendez belongs deliberately blocked that possibility by adjourning Congress, and it was no accident.  They wanted to campaign this year in the same way that Democrats did in 2006 and 2008, by playing class warfare and painting the GOP as the party of the rich.  Only now do Menendez and the rest of Democratic leadership realize just how badly they miscalculated their midterm strategy and how sick people are of  hearing soak-the-rich policies that just mean capital won’t get put to work in creating jobs and economic expansion.

Now Menendez wants to sell Democrats as reasonable on tax-rate extensions, but they’ve already made their class-warfare pitch.  This is far too little, far too late, and altogether far too transparently self-serving for anyone to take seriously.