Thirteen days and counting...

Well, it doesn't look good for the Democratic Party with thirteen days remaining in the 2010 election campaign. I have been an observer of dozens of these in my lifetime, and I have never seen one that is this pathetic. The New York Times, which now houses Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.org, has the GOP picking up 59 seats in the House. Today's paper claims that spending for GOP candidates is running 7 to 1 against the Dems. The race for Senate in NV is considered a toss-up, though the news today is that Sharon Anngle will no longer speak to the press and she told a group of latino students Monday that they looked like Asians to her! Sarah Palin twitted last night that Pennsylvannians should be sure to vote for Raese even though Raese is a Senate candidate in West Virginia. Christine O'Donnell cannot identify a single Supreme Court case she objects to, even though she lambasts "judicial activists" for making law from the bench. As if this is not depressing enough, the Democrats are running away from Obama and Pelosi as if they are leppers. Neither party is running on a coherent strategy for dealing with the economy. Even Carly Fiorina, who trails Barbara Boxer by 4 points in CA, cannot name a single program she'd cut to erase the deficit while preserving the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Kids in my first-year classes can tell you about Bret Favre's alledged self-photo sent via text message, but they can't tell you who Michelle Bachmann or Carl Paladino or Meg Whitman is. This is supposed to be the time we call upon our inner Aristotles and celebrate democracy by debating our collective future, but as best as I can tell, the vast majority of Americans are walking a very thin line with sanity on one side and deep, dark psychopathology on the other. The Tea Party is the big story, but honestly, what's the story? You have an unknown number of upset people, very white and of decent means, screaming like plucked chickens at a government and president who inherited a huge mess from the party which stands to gain the most from this blind animosity. What's more, those who stand to gain the most from this state of affairs are the super-rich, those whose minions brought us the meltdown in our economy in the first place. If anyone can make the slightest sense of this state of affairs short of a clinical political-psychological portrait, I'm all ears (as Ross Perot used to say).