The Infernal Storm

If the polls and pundits are right--the many that claim an increasing likelihood than Democrats and President Obama will be repudiated with one or even both houses of Congress becoming majority Republican--the outlines of the perfect and perfectly infernal oncoming storm are all too clear.

There's the separate but related phenomena noted before: the increasingly blatant theocratic Christian right, the increasingly bold racism, and the increasingly confident Bush Redux pols, all trafficking in Big Lies. That the Bushcorpse agenda is once again front and center, less than two years removed from its greatest disaster, is in itself a measure of the insanity.

There's the big money secretly fueling the so-called grassroots revolt, and the powerful anger of the rich.

There's the new media environment that (as previously noted) no longer restrains extremism or covers it in proportion, but amplifies it. From E. J. Dionne:But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There's congressional Democrats and even the White House doing itself no favors in terms of generating voter enthusiasm by not forcing a vote on renewing the budget-busting Bush tax cuts for millionaires, and opposing enforcement of a judge's decision to end Don't Ask Don't Tell.

There's whiny progressives apparently willing to pull a Nader because they didn't get everything they wanted, lacking all historical memory when they point to the contrast with the great days of JFK, FDR and even Bill Clinton, all of whom were castigated by the progressives of their day for not doing enough, just as they were all castigated by conservatives for doing too much. Obama eloquently addressed this tendency, in a speech which I saw covered only by a newspaper in England. "This is not some academic exercise," President Obama said of the coming election. " Don't compare us to the Almighty; compare us to the alternative."

Though measuring the fault and the factors is more than I can calibrate, the reality is that the Obama record has not been clear to the country, and now the President is barely being heard by anyone, it seems. The GOPers are controlling the debate, or in any case, defining the noise. (For one thing, asks E.J. Dionne in a different column, why is everyone talking about the Bush tax cuts and not about extending the Obama tax cuts for the middle class, which are also about to expire?)

But the most important supposition is that voters aren't thinking beyond punishing Democrats for the slow pace of economic recovery. In their fury and effectively their stupidity, they will choose extremists making the same promises that the Bushcorpse either broke or broke the country with. And extremists without the sagacity or even the intent to serve as responsible members of government, which is what they're running for. Some of whom are on record as racists and theocrats, and some of whom are on record as suggesting armed insurrection if they don't get elected.

Against all this noise, there is some counter-evidence. Dionne gathered some to suggest that the Tea Party in particular represents a tiny minority, with electoral victories representing a very small number of votes. There are studies and polls that suggest the country is not moving into Rabid Right Suicideland. But all of that will be cold comfort if this infernal storm combines voting extremists with sullen stay-at-home moderates and progressives, and ends up with elected officials and ballot propositions that stop the change, and throw us into furious battles just to keep from making things worse. It's hard enough repairing the damage from the Bushcorpse years, slowly turning the ship of state in a positive direction. But that's what the infernal storm threatens: next stop Hell.