You see, to the permanent beltway elite, what politicians actually do once elected is irrelevant, for which reason they studiously never bother to find out what that might be.  All that matters is how the spin and flim-flam are playing in their imagined Peoria of the polls, nudging befuddled voters this way and that, since everyone knows that nothing will change, no matter how the little people cast their votes, if they even bother.  In the mirrors into which they constantly gaze, all this democracy business is nothing but a game, theater of the absurd put on because, well, surely no politician cares any more about his fellow Americans than does, say, David Gregory or Joe Lieberman, but TV News is still big business, and they can’t just run a test pattern and be done with it.

The “consensus,” which like all others, is as unanimous as it is absurd, floats above reality; since politics to them is both nothing and everything, a cardboard simulacrum to lull the rabble into thinking they matter when they don’t, motives must be conjured out of thin air to explain the fickle nature of the great unwashed.  Poll results are cited that show that Democrats are unmotivated and Republicans are writhing in fervor, and such tea leaves are read to mean Obama is pushing the country “too far to the left.” This is something Bush was never accused of as he pushed the country further to the right than ever imagined, and a patent absurdity that nonetheless leads the powdered and pampered denizens of the green room to declare, natch, that people like them must never be taxed to pay for the wars they champion, the lower orders must be in need of more suffering, and not enough brown people abroad and at home are being tortured, killed or tossed onto the streets.  Their guests, whether CEO’s, religious charlatans, racists, or war profiteers, not unexpectedly nod eagerly in agreement.

Of course, no one ever explores the glaringly obvious reasons for such shifts in public opinion since 2006, namely, that the Democrats have systematically abandoned every principle they ever held since at least 1900, and the Republicans have co-opted the media and relentlessly assaulted the lately defeated right with unadulterated fiction for thirty years, creating one party whose voters actually expect results, and another whose addled followers can be satisfied by whatever spews out of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh all the way to the bread lines, even when no bread is offered.  President Kennedy once fretted that, at some point, personal comfort and prosperity would drive a Democrat in the hands of the Republicans,  Democrats have since ably fixed that annoying problem by impoverishing everyone equally, so no one has a reason to be a Democrat in the first place.

Now, Democrats have come up with a neat idea for 2010, really the only one left after summarily tossing out the New Deal coalition of unions, minorities, educated people, and the poor that carried them for nearly a century, and it’s as pathetic as it is revealing: At Least We’re Not Bush.  Though they’ve embraced his militarism, his coddling of the superrich, his disdain for labor, and indifference if not hostility to gays and other minorities, they really don’t have anything else concrete to offer, so it’s worth a try, I guess.

Harry Truman, who was lucky enough to have a political career before the advent of Fox News and the infection it caused within the elite media, probably put it best, “when people are given a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who acts like one, they’ll choose the Republican every time.”  Today, those are the only choices.  Good luck, Democrats.