When the mid-term elections rolled around in November 2006, they watched the ones they thought were their Best And Brightest slink away in ignominy. A few like George Allen, Rick Santorum, and Frist were just the year before giddy with the delusion that they would be taking the oath come January 20, 2009.

That night was a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that rolled out of 2004 snorting the lines Karl Rove was chopping up for them about becoming a “permanent majority.” In January 2006, you couldn’t find even a handful of Republicans who would have thought twice about hiring a crew to take a reciprocating saw to their living room wall if they wanted a new picture window–never mind if they were renting. Hell, they weren’t going anywhere!

Well, long story short, besides the uptick in sales of scotch, “Your father needs to be alone right now” was probably an oft-uttered phrase in red states and districts all over America during Christmas 2006. And FOX News HR department was never busier.

Imagine the surprise of those who survived only to realize that, contrary to so much electoral history, this wasn’t a one-time bloodbath. It’s not uncommon for the majority party to suffer a mid-term battering, even the occasional bludgeoning, but Americans are notorious for their political buyer’s remorse. Chili dogs don’t roil the American intestines as quickly as their politicians.

Erstwhile Golden Boy Bill Clinton had his organs (in this case, his majority Congress) removed and handed to him in 1994, but the ink was barely dry on Newt Gingrich’s new mandate when he challenged the President to a game of fiscal chicken, and veered off into a phone pole. Whatever Clinton had done to spark the public ire was forgiven and he shellacked Bob Dole in 1996, as the Republicans lost seats in the House.

History would have suggested that the Republicans would have come back strong this year, after the Democrats took the pistol and blew off their own requisite number of toes. Even the flaccid stewardship of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, though, couldn’t bring the voters back to that much-ballyhooed Big Tent when the economy cratered and business behemoths that for years had been declaring that an unregulated marketplace was the most miraculous balancing force on God’s earth were suddenly pleading for help from big government.

Add to the mix a charismatic young black man with a gorgeous young family, the ability to draw Pope-sized crowds, an oratorical prowess not seen since Mario Cuomo, and a stump speech that assailed the effects of years of Republican politics on the lunch bucket and mini-van crowd, and the Republicans were all but propped up for another shellacking. And that was even before they selected Sarah Palin.

Put it all together and that’s a lot of carnage over a relatively short period of time. The Republican Party is in little better shape today than Beirut in 1983. Jack Abramoff is prison, Alberto Gonzalez has joined the ranks of the unemployable, Tom DeLay is out of power and off writing grumpy books, Marilyn Musgrave ended the hostage standoff over her office and is conducting her vitriol against gay marriage and stem cell research from the relatively benign of ranks of the civilian, and on and on and on.

But this is America, and we have to have a vocal minority. The opposition has to start rebuilding somewhere. Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh don’t seem to count anymore. After years of the same shtick, they’ve become caricatures. Their audiences have the same expectations as the people who go to see Gallagher smash watermelons. It’s old, they know the routine by heart, but it’s comforting and reassuring, like an old warm blanket.

So, for anyone wondering about the new face of the Republican opposition, look no further than the snarling visage of Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Twice in the last week, Vitter has stepped up and all but proclaimed himself the leader of the resistance, first calling against any allocation of the remaining TARP funds and then being the lone member of either party to vote against Hillary Clinton’s confirmation as Secretary Of State.

We’ve seen the messenger, but it’s still not clear what the message is going to be. “Government is not the answer” doesn’t even make it up the flagpole in the wake of AIG, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, etcetera. “Standing up for the working class” is just as rickety, with much of the working class seeing their former houses boarded up while watching finance executives clamoring for their $10 million bonuses. “Family values?” That one’s dead on the side of the highway in Wasilla, Alaska. Besides, given the address books his name has appeared in David Vitter won’t even visit the same time zone as that one.

It’s been suggested that Vitter is facing a primary fight in 2010 and doesn’t want to be outmaneuvered on the right, but it’ probably not worth a lot of conjecture at this point. The position exists and someone’s going to fill it. There always has to be an opposition, and over the last few decades, it’s been fashionable to be as rancorous as possible. That tone may not carry as much heft as it used to. With more than enough problems to send the delivery truck around everyone’s neighborhood twice a day, and even the rich getting ripped off, a lot of people are going to be inclined to relegate contrarian bomb-throwing to the “not helpful” category.

A healthy questioning of issues is essential for any functioning democracy, unless it’s merely surliness for its own sake. We all learned at an early age that we could do dramatic and attention-getting things with our urine and feces, but most of us learned early on that it served little purpose to do. Some have taken longer than others to learn that. Some never learn. But, if only for a brief few years in time while people are more inclined to work together to figure out how to restore solvency to the country, it’s a little safer to walk into the fray at least. Just pay no attention to the man from Louisiana.

The general election is starting in earnest and after seventeen months slugging it out in the farm leagues, Barack Obama has to show he’s ready for The Show. He’s already shot himself in the foot in his selection of his Vice Presidential selection committee. Former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson has hands dirty with favorable loans from subprime home loan cretins, Countrywide Home Loans; and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder urged the former President to pardon fugitive financier Mark Rich.

That’s not change you can believe in, but it is a discussion for another day.

Barack Obama has kicked off his 2008 general election Presidential campaign against Senator John McCain by deploying a senior staffer to man a rapid-response team to address the smears that are disseminated across the Internet

Brooks Jackson of factcheck.org says, “With Obama, it is particularly vicious…(that he is) some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate, planted by Islamic fundamentalists to betray the country and it is very widespread.”

Ah yes, God bless paranoid America. They’re still out there, and they’re still amenable to this kind of conspiratorial blather. This artful slur started making its rounds some months ago, about the same time as and aided by the put-the-dots-together reminder that his middle name was Hussein. I don’t want to disparage my West Virginia and Kentucky brothers and sisters, but given the preliminary and exit poll interviews, and the signs at some Hillary rallies, I don’t think I’m risking a lawsuit suggesting that Obama got clobbered so badly in both states because many people knew someone who knew someone who had a computer who got the email that Barack Hussein Obama was educated at a madrasah when he grew up in Indonesia.

Where they taught him to fly but not land 737s.

This is going to be a nasty campaign and it probably is a good thing that Reverend Wright, the “bitter” flap, William Ayers, and the Muslim nonsense came out in the primary, because they’re all going to come out again in the fall.

The Internuts are already online with, among other sites, exposeobama.com. The photo array on the top of the page shows Obama with Reverend Wright, Obama with Ted Kennedy, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and…Obama coming out of the surf in Hawaii shirtless??? C’mon. It’s not like he’s got Man-maries or something. He looks better shirtless than most men his age. It’s not John Kerry windsurfing, and it’s not Michael Dukakis in the tank. I really don’t get it. A picture of a shirtless black man–maybe it’s a “me doth protest too much” latent homosexual expression, but they’re not talking, so I can only be left with my conjecture.

Don’t turn away at this, though. If you do, you’ll miss the story of Michelle Obama’s “Kill Whitey” thesis when she was at Princeton in 1985. The text is creatively edited and context is left in a pile on the desk with the discarded paperclips. They also note with race-baiting subtlety that “it was written under her maiden name, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson”, as if her parents chose her name from an Afro-American Studies class taught by Malcolm X’s little brother, Trent.

I have to give them extra points for running the story under a photo of a contemporary Michelle at the lectern raising a fist Black Panther-style, again with the context disposed of as an inconvenience.

Save the Aryan pride, though. Anyone who saw the alabaster John McCain against the key lime backdrop last week has to concede that White isn’t always Right.

It’s February 26, a full eight months and change before the general election, and given the no-holds-barred last four days in the 2008 Democratic smackdown, I second that emotion.

If the allegations that today’s photo of Barack Obama appearing in traditional African (read: Muslim) garb on a 2006 visit to Wajir in Northeastern Kenya was circulated by Hillary’s staff, the Clinton campaign has apparently decided that if they can’t beat Obama in caucuses, then they’ll beat him with Dukakises.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to be hiding your eyes in embarrassment in 1988 as Michael Dukakis took the worst campaign advice ever and attempted to blunt charges that his diminutive, Democrat, Massachusetts self was weak on defense. So?…They put him in a tank.

It was a horrible decision–you’re not going to make a wan, diminutive Greek man look like George Patton–and the reason that Susan Estrich hasn’t made her bones managing a campaign since then. It wasn’t just a chink in the armor; it was an open, sucking chest wound. And it was replayed again and again and again, alternated between fake Willie Horton walking through the revolving bars.

The Republicans played it again to great effect in 2004 when John Kerry thought it was a good idea to don day-glo neoprene and go windsurfing in Oregon. When you’re already dodging a patrician image with your sloping, distended  chin, Massachusetts pedigree and condiment heiress wife, the last thing you need for your image is to be seen partaking in a sport usually associated with trust-fund vagabonds and the summering well-to-do. You just as well be sipping Sea Breezes on a yacht with a sweater tied around your neck.

And this year, the Democrats are going to try and put John McCain in his own tank with his awkward, practically-nuzzling 2004 hug of George Bush. This is more than fair game. The Democrats are running against the Bush legacy, and they’re running against John McCain, and with that one turn-your-head-and-look-away embarrassing moment at the last GOP convention, McCain has graciously given the Democrats one degree of separation between the two. It doesn’t hurt that this loving embrace came after AmBush & Company beat McCain like Rodney King in South Carolina in 2000. When I saw The Hug coming, I was sure it was all a ploy and that McCain was going to use the opportunity to finally snap Bush’s arm. Instead…please.

When I first heard about the Obama picture on the radio yesterday morning, when they said “traditional tribal garb”, all I could imagine was the Senator in a dashiki and carrying a spear, or a breechcloth with a string of chicken bones around his neck. When I saw the picture, though, it was an “Oh, duh!” smack to my forehead. Of course: Barack Hussein Osama, the madrasas nonsense again, Al Qaeda’s Manchurian candidate.

Where did it come from? Well, I did have to consider the source. After all, if I heard from Matt Drudge that a fall from a ten-story building could kill you, I’d probably seek two or three corroborating opinions.  After her performance of the last several days I wouldn’t be terrifically surprised if Hillary played the terror card. That dog-eared notepad sticking out of her pantsuit pocket the last several days looks suspiciously like the Carl Rove Playbook.

She’s starting to behave like a wounded animal, and speaking only for myself, I wouldn’t want to be within three counties of an enraged Hillary fighting for her life. If the Clinton Campaign didn’t circulate the photos as Drudge charged, then there were many high-fives in the Clinton War Room that someone else did it before they had to.  William Kristol opined this weekend the Clinton could do well playing “the politics of fear”. Not that she’s quite at the point where she’d be taking counsel from someone like Kristol…well, I don’t know. Maybe she is.

This doesn’t seem like a card the Republicans would play yet. I know they want Hillary as the nominee, but though you wouldn’t suspect it by listening to some of their talk show hosts, I think they’re probably capable at basic math. They know that Obama is probably going to be the nominee, so why not wait until the fall to play this card?

We’ll see how much ugly Hillary brings tonight, but if the current trajectory holds, a handful of boxknife and hijacking metaphors wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility.

In just a few shorts weeks, the Democrats have gone from “The Politics of Hope” to “The Politics of ‘I Hope You Die in a House Fire’”.

Thank heaven no one watches CNN any more lest their children have wandered in and seen this deplorable internecine eye-scratching and groin-punching. Hillary and Obama were like controlled apes, stopping just short of shrieking and tossing their feces at one another, but not by much, and probably only because they were on national television. It was all John Edwards could do not to pop a beer and sit back and watch the animals in their cage match, and just hope none of it got on his suit.

“Senator Clinton, I’m not going to stand here and let you characterize my opposition to a flawed sexual victims rights bill as advocating full employment on demand for child-molesting gym teachers. I would no sooner stand for that than I would accuse you of using your position on the board at Wal-Mart to sentence millions of Chinese six-year-olds to  80-h0ur-a-week jobs at prisoner’s wages just so you can buy cheap pantsuits. No, I won’t go there.

“And let’s set the record straight on another matter: When I was speaking with the Reno Gazette editorial board, I only acknowledged that Ronald Reagan brought ideas to a country and a Republican party that was clamoring for a new direction, and changed the trajectory of American politics. I never said that I admired his firm buttocks and broad shoulders as I watched him chop wood at his California ranch when I was a young man growing up watching CNN.”

For a campaign where both sides have been trotting out the Gipper, virtually none has invoked his 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Or Democrat. The recurring refrain throughout this once somewhat civil campaign was that the Dems had their best chance in a generation to take back the White House (only a mid-season entry by Ross Perot in 1992 cleared the way for Bill Clinton to beat Bush, Sr.) and that should keep to the high road and save their vitriol for the fall race, no matter which of their very able and capable selves should win the nomination.

That’s all very easy to say when the campaign is early or when you’re only in the race to jockey for a cabinet position. When you’ve tasted the adulation and been so close to being the Anointed One, as both Hillary and Barack have been in the last few weeks, magnanimity is just another five-syllable word you’ll put aside for another day.

Meanwhile, expect the bloodbath to continue, and to play right into the Dems’ history of destroying themselves. With a Republican slate as feeble as it is this year, they may yet win in spite of themselves, especially if Hillary and Barack can hold their noses, regardless of which of them wins, and put their names together on the bumper stickers this fall, put their differences aside, and hit the road to peel Romney-Huckabee apart like an onion, or to play the “heartbeat away” card to the aging McCain and his running mate, Governor Huckabee. In the meantime, keep your poncho handy, and don’t tune in until you’ve poured a drink and put the kids to bed.

New Hampshire has always been notorious for its above-board, issues-oriented primary tete-a-tetes (yawn), and for a brief shining moment it was refreshing to see an end to this annoying feedback loop of war and the economy and affordable healthcare and a sane and progressive energy policy, and to finally see the focus back on the things that get me and most Americans out of bed in the morning: Barack Obama’s cocaine usage, Hillary Clinton’s fitness to do anything outside the kitchen besides curling up on her couch in her Tigger pajamas eating cookie dough and bawling at a Lifetime Movie-Of-The-Week, and whether or not John Edwards was drilling one of his nineteen-year-old interns while his cancer-striken wife had to drive herself to her oncologist appointment.

I’ve seen so many campaigns in my lifetime and far too often it just seems like the easy thing for candidates to trot out these shopworn phrases like “respectful disagreement”, “my honorable and capable opponent”, “with all due respect” and “the politics of hope” to justify their interminable and often embarrassing discussions about our soldiers dying overseas, the balance of world power, fuel standards, good jobs at good wages, affordable health care, and a higher standard of living for myself and my children. Whatever. Like I care.

I had hoped they wouldn’t try and play that card this year, but right out of the gate the Democratic race degenerated into a donnybrook of civility. It took one brave soul to bring the election’s focus back to where it should be by standing up and yelling at Hillary, “Iron my shirt!” (even though that brave soul was probably a paid Hillary staffer who thought this “politics of hope” insanity had gone on long enough).

I had high hopes as they left the Granite State behind and moved onto Nevada. There’s a lot of hokum about the plight of the working poor in the Nevada service industry, but at its core the state’s rank-and-file are all about nitrous oxide parties and cocaine inhaled off of bare female midriffs. This is almost certainly an area where Senator Obama would need to defend his record. Come debate night, though, not a word. It was all Kumbaya and backrubs.

Fortunately, with the election moving into the less-genteel political climes of South Carolina, the Republican field at least is coming to its senses. No one understands the dynamic of Palmetto State politics better than John McCain, whose body and spirit came out of Hanoi in better shape than his dignity and reputation came out of South Carolina after the 2000 primary. That’s where he roared in from a dominating New Hampshire victory with his silly “Straight Talk” nonsense, and George Bush and his posse played their Illegitimate Brown Baby card (that would have been McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget, from Mother Theresa’s orphanage) and carved McCain up like an Easter ham.

After a contentious, debate-driven primary campaign that is producing no clear front-runner, the Republican contenders began to find common ground during the last New Hampshire debate and coalesced around the idea of campaigning on matters of substance to the American people, rather than on the issues.

Mitt Romney was the first to suggest a new direction for the candidates during a response to a question from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani about Romney’s plans for implementing shipping container security at the nation’s ports to thwart another possible terrorist attack, this time at one of our country’s most vulnerable points. Romney responded, “Mr. Mayor, you had access to the Governor on this issue during your two terms in office, but you were obviously more interested in the state of your mistresses’ ‘containers’.”

Giuliani countered that, while he would have no problem managing many more than one container at a time, he preferred to legally commit himself to only one–unlike some close friends and advisers of at least one of his fellow candidates. And, he noted, none of his containers were ever blood relations or young enough to be in 4-H. Not that he was alluding directly to any of his competitors, he was quick to point out.

Before Romney responded to that backhanded slap at his Mormon faith, he stepped off-topic to address his fellow candidates. It was a show-stopping, YouTube-worthy moment of unity in the name of disunity. “I appreciate that, Mr. Mayor, and I’ll get back to your serial philandering in just a second, but I’d like to take a moment to bring attention to what we’re doing here.” Romney noted that the men of the Grand Old Party were finally united as one, righting the party’s ship and getting back to the brand of discourse that won them the White House in 1988, 2000, and 2004.

“We win and America wins”, he said, “not when we’re talking about my economic policy or your homeland security policy or Senator McCain’s immigration policy. We win and America wins when we keep the focus on the whoring you did on the taxpayers’ dime, on Senator McCain selling out his commanders and fellow POWs in exchange for a plate of barbecued ribs, on Governor Huckabee paying the State Police to cover up his own ‘foot-tapping’ incident in an Arkansas rest stop men’s room. That’s why I’ll be the first to take the pledge, and I hope you’ll join me, to keep the rest of this campaign on the things that really matter, and to not let the discourse descend into the morass of issues, policy, and constructive engagement.”

To my astonishment and delight, every one of the candidates agreed, it was game on again, and Governor Romney ignored Giuliani’s metaphorical polygamy charge and accused the Mayor of having nearly 3,000 people murdered by placing the Emergency Command Center in the World Trade Center (“Why didn’t you just put a bullseye on Windows of the World, with an arrow and a message, ‘Insert hijacked airliner here.’???”)

I won’t necessarily vote Republican this year, but it’s refreshing to see them talking again about the topics that matter most in my America–whether Barack Obama was educated in a madrasah, Fred Thompson’s undocumented domestic help, whether Mitt Romney has ever had more than one wife, if Hillary really did have Vince Foster murdered, etc. It’s a long way to the election, but if this trend continues and the Democrats can get back on board, then we have a real chance of winding up with the America that we deserve.