The President will have some strong arguments — and large constituencies, which are very much more useful — on his side. Americans don’t by and large like budget deficits very much, but they are quite fond of entitlement programs. Think of the 19th century, when populist pressure led the government to reduce the price of federal lands until the Homestead Act allowed any American who wanted one to get a free farm. Bad for the budget deficit — especially after the Civil War when the national debt reached astronomical levels — but that had little impact on the voting habits of Americans who wanted free land.

The incumbents will also have a solid majority of the chattering classes and the intelligentsia on their side. Intellectuals (and I suppose that also includes low lifes like bloggers) had a special role in the progressive state. Social scientists and credentialed experts were empowered on the basis of “objective research” to provide policy guidance for the state. The growing federal government hired a lot of white collar college graduates, and even today Washington DC and its suburbs are unusually rich and the median educational level there is unusually high. There will be no shortage of thumb-suckers and chin strokers backing up the president’s talking points and demolishing Romney’s.

There are other constituencies with a stake in the status quo. African-Americans benefit from both government hiring and government spending. There will be farmers who look at Paul Ryan as a possible enemy of the farm subsidies they love so well. There are a significant number of Wall Street interests linked to the state and municipal bond market, to the state pension funds, and to other economic interests that benefit from the entitlement state.

The selection of Paul Ryan unifies the many constituencies of the Democratic Party, and allows its standard bearers to run against what they will portray as a threat to middle class prosperity, economic fairness, racial minorities and both science and reason. On the Democratic side, this is going to be a corker of a campaign: all the tribes will march and all the flags will fly.

And that leads me to this brief observation.

In selecting Ryan as his running mate, Romney has most probably ceded the election to Obama. I say that not because it is my preferred outcome but in recognition of the vast reach of the Democratic Party’s constituency as described by Mead. No longer do the Democrats need to pin a label of entitlement cutter on Romney, he has obligingly self-identified himself as such with his choice of Ryan and as Mead notes, American’s do love their entitlements.

If the travails of Europe should have taught us anything by now, it is that Western democracies in the 21st Century do not easily surrender to fiscal probity. Crisis seems to be the only agent able to reverse unsustainable government and, so far at least, resistance even in the face of the obvious leads to the conclusion that full scale collapse might well triumph over reasoned reform. To assume that American voters are somehow more enlightened or less self-serving than the citizens of Club Med is to deny human nature. With luck we might witness the inevitable evisceration of the European economy before our time comes and get a bit of religion, but interminable muddling through might as well be the outcome over there and so allow us to indulge further self-delusion. Crisis will most likely be the driver of any reform here and it will most likely have to be severe.

Perhaps it is a symptom of getting older but these times remind me a bit of 1976 and more of 1980. There was in ’76 a sense that all wasn’t well but the reluctance to break from the familiar was too strong and so the status quo was the preferred outcome. By 1980 it was blisteringly clear that the path wasn’t acceptable and thus, Reagan. The level of discomfort about is not yet where it must be to   adopt a different model and thus, Obama.