Time for a Fair and Balanced look (to borrow the self-congratulatory motto of a cable network down here) at how America's two big parties promise to govern after voters decide in four weeks' time who'll run the next Congress.

The Republicans, known nowadays as "the party of No," evidently think blocking anything the Democrats propose is their best hope for regaining not just control of the House and Senate on Nov. 2, but the White House in 2012.

The party's number one priority: Stopping any tax increases, debt or no debt.

Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator who is rapidly becoming the Republicans' ideological whip, set the tone recently in an interview with Bloomberg's Businessweek.com.

"I've been told by businesses," he said, "that if we would stop the tax increases the best thing that could happen for business after that is complete gridlock. At least gridlock is predictable."

What Obama is up against: Frank Wallace, who has been unemployed since May of 2009 is seen during a rally organized by the Philadelphia Unemployment Project in June 2010. (Matt Rourke/Associated Press)

Not that the Democrats intend to put forward much in the way of economic remedies, anyway. They certainly haven't articulated anything resembling a coherent strategy.

They've shot their bolt. And for most Americans, it doesn't appear to have done much good.

The official unemployment rate is around 10 per cent, and has been stuck there for 16 straight months. The real rate, once you account for all the people who have given up looking for jobs, is much higher.

That single statistic dominates everything here; it will shout out loud to voters next month.

Hamstrung

"The reality is that with a 9.6 per cent unemployment rate, nothing else matters," Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told me this week. "You could have saved the world and it wouldn't really matter."

Zandi, for the record, thinks that Congress under Barack Obama, as well as the previous one under George W. Bush, did indeed save the world with their multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts and stimulus spending.

But even he acknowledges that this view is open to debate. Other serious economists say it would have been better to let the market take its pitiless course.

Whatever the case, the Democrats received no political credit for the outlay and probably couldn't do more even if they wanted to. Which they don't, given the level of public disgust here with solutions involving more government spending.

"They are now hamstrung," says Zandi. "Because they did so much, they used all the policy tools at their disposal, they used all their resources, it would be very difficult for them to do much more to make a difference at this point."

The one issue

Still, candidates have to say something. No issue — not the environment, not the Global Struggle Against Extremism, not abortion, not gay marriage, not the nation's health — has the same thermonuclear political power as the economy does right now.

Politicians who govern during economic misery pay for it. Politicians who preside over booms are praised and fondly remembered, linked in the public mind to happy days and the accumulation of personal wealth.

It's irrational, of course. A politician taking credit for an economic boom is, as the saying goes, like a rooster taking credit for sunrise.

Economic cycles are a law of nature and economies, like oceans, decide their own flow and ebb. Clearly, though, the public believes otherwise.

As always during a downturn, voters are telling reporters and pollsters in overwhelming numbers that the economy is the issue that matters most to them and that they want to know, specifically, how politicians would lead them back to the sunshine.

Many candidates try to answer, some perhaps even believing they actually can bring back prosperity.

Mourning in America

Ronald Reagan first campaigned for the presidency in the tough times of 1980, offering a flag-draped optimism. Once in office, he took a rightist, tax-cutting approach.

Ronald Reagan, taking the oath of office in January 1981, didn't do very well in his first midterms either. (Associated Press)

The economy stayed sour and his party was walloped in the midterm elections in '82. By 1984, though, prosperity was returning — "Morning in America" was his triumphant re-election slogan — and Reagan's era is regarded as a golden age.

Eight years later, Bill Clinton felt everyone's economic pain and said so. He took the center-left path and raised taxes. Same basic result: things stayed bad for a time and his party was creamed in the midterms. Then the boom happened and Clinton, like Reagan, lucked out.

In 2008, as the economy imploded, Barack Obama told people to hope, never explaining how exactly that would pay the mortgage.

Once in office, he pushed through massive public spending in an effort to blunt the recession, basically continuing the late-term policies of George W. Bush, who had begun the unprecedented Wall Street bailout a few months earlier.

It remains uncertain whether this economy will reverse course soon enough to shine a golden historical light on Obama. But it's probably too late for the Democrats up for election next month. They may even lose their House and Senate majorities.

Desperately, Democrats are now going on and on about how they'll somehow persuade the nation's banks to lend more money to small business. But the banks aren't playing and everyone knows it.

The banks don't want to increase their lending until the economy improves, and the economy won't improve until the housing market recovers, and the housing market won't recover until the waves of foreclosures peter out. And the Democrats simply cannot make that happen on their own.

Obama's efforts to curb foreclosures have failed miserably.

The Republicans have feasted on that, but their economic strategy is even less specific. They talk mostly about taxes, and how Americans, the lowest taxed people in the Western world, are taxed too heavily.

Some Republicans — the Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint disciples — want to cut taxes even further.

Some of them still repeat the universally discredited notion, even among conservative economists, that tax cuts inevitably provoke growth and create jobs.

But once you do a Fair and Balanced decoding of the parties' messages, their plans are essentially the same: Do nothing, or close to nothing, and let the economy take its course.

Which it will. Inevitably. The only question is, who will get the undeserved credit, and who will suffer the undeserved blame?