For the first time in a generation, a competitive congressional race is brewing in my Ventura County, CA district. This series explores the local, statewide and national implications of a campaign that was born of voter discontent and might just wind up transforming Congress, and our politics in general. I outlined the parameters of the race here; a few weeks ago I interviewed the independent candidate, Linda Parks, who is starting to gain national attention for her quixotic quest; and last week I covered the single debate that will feature all six candidates in advance of the June 5 primary, exploring the ways in which such events bring out the best and worst in our politicians, and in our politics in general.

Like a lot of Americans, I never know what to do with political mailers. They’re printed in color on glossy paper, and cut in unusual sizes and shapes designed to make sure we pay attention to them. Occasionally they feature pleasant images of a candidate with her family, or with constituents who symbolize the campaign’s priorities (teachers, firefighters, veterans, nurses, minorities, generalized white people, etc.), and they feature upbeat messages like “Family First” or “Championing Education.” More often, though, they feature menacing or cartoonish images of an opponent, along with phrases intended to sow doubt or disgust – “Not Who She Says She Is,” or “We Just Can’t Trust Her.” Many times, it’s difficult to tell exactly who has sent a particular mailer – it’s amazing how tiny the print can get on a return address or a disclaimer. Always, these mailers are sent in hopes of changing somebody’s mind – if not in my household, then somewhere on my street or in my ZIP code.

Every time, though, I find myself asking the same question many Americans ask when such a mailer appears in the post: Does it belong in the wastebasket, or the recycling bin?

Campaign mailers have become a daily fact of life for registered Democrats in California’s brand-new 26^th congressional district … my district in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles. Republicans are enjoying a mild spring here, with seasonal temperatures and a low volume of postal deliveries – primarily because there’s only one of them running for our open seat, a down-the-line conservative named Tony Strickland, and he’s expected to sail through the June 5 primary and into the general election. Democrats, on the other hand, are in a tizzy at the moment. Four of them are on the primary ballot, but the greatest concern for the party establishment is not that the wrong one might win a chance to oppose Strickland come November. It’s that none of them might get that opportunity.

The reason for that is California’s new open-primary system, which awards slots on the general-election ballot to the top two finishers in the primary, regardless of party. There is no guaranteed “Democratic” or “Republican” slot in November – and to complicate matters further, as I’ve noted throughout this series, the primary race in the 26^th features an independent candidate, county supervisor Linda Parks, who has an excellent chance of surpassing all the Democratic candidates next month and taking that second slot. Last week she even received a high-profile endorsement from the Los Angeles Times, an event that reportedly sent the Democratic establishment reeling.

If Parks reaches the general, the national Democratic Party’s chances of retaking the House in November will take a serious dip. The party’s electoral advantages in California are at a peak this year, thanks to a nonpartisan redistricting that eliminated a number of safe GOP seats – including this one, which now leans Democratic for the first time in, well, forever – and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is counting on the state to spearhead its nationwide effort to close the gap on the Republicans’ 25-seat advantage in the House. Electoral margins this fall are expected to be razor-thin at every level of government, so unless the 26^th district turns from “Red to Blue,” as the DCCC’s nationwide campaign calls itself, Congress probably won’t, either.

This confluence of circumstances explains why attack ads (and paper cuts) have mounted to absurd levels across the county over the last three weeks. (Two of them appeared in my mailbox on Tuesday alone.) Most of these hatchet jobs are the product of more than $800,000 in outside expenditures by Democratic-affiliated groups, according to columnist Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star. They’re coming from the DCCC (more than $150,000 to date), the House Majority PAC (about $417,000), the League of Conservation Voters (about $100,000), and a committee called Women Vote! (about $25,000), as well as from the well-heeled campaign of the leading Democratic candidate, Julia Brownley.

That total – for a primary! – is not just a record for our little pocket of suburbia, which sent the same congressman to Washington for a quarter-century. It also places the district among the 10 nationwide with the highest PAC and party spending so far in 2012. And the vast majority of that money is being spent with a single goal – to convince the county’s Democrats and left-leaning independents to reject Parks and pull the lever for somebody, anybody, with a “D” beside her or his name on June 5.

Their strategy centers on one key fact about Parks: Before she changed her voter registration to “No Party Preference” this February, she was a registered Republican, and had been since she first ran for office in 1994. That fact – and the year that she changed her registration, the year of the Contract With America – has allowed national and local Democrats to link Parks to every Republican villain of the last two decades, from Newt Gingrich to George Bush and Dick Cheney to Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. The most effective of these mailers arrived on Tuesday, referring to Parks’ candidacy as “the elephant in the room” (get it?) and reprinting her voter registration card from 1996, with its checkmark next to the word “Republican.” (Never mind that another part of that form notes that Parks previously was registered as a Democrat – she changed her party ID in order to boost her chances of winning election in the conservative city of Thousand Oaks.)

That was a clever strategy on Parks’ part back then, but the Democrats are using it as a bludgeon against her now. All these ads play to a concern that I stated in my earlier column about Parks, which is that in our current hyper-partisan environment, a Democratic voter must worry that a self-identified independent candidate who’s not explicitly with the party will (at least occasionally) act against it, even if she claims to be neutral and nonpartisan. In the zero-sum political game Washington has been playing the last few years, isn’t an independent as much an enemy as a member of the other party?

So, yes, there’s a clever and even vaguely truthful strategy behind the $800,000-plus in Democratic attack mailers. But the devil, as always, is in the details – and the problems with the Dems’ strategy begin with the fact that while Parks used to self-identify as a Republican, she rarely has acted like one. Her elected positions, on the Thousand Oaks city council and the county board of supervisors, have been nonpartisan ones – and her most prominent achievements while in office have focused on the sorts of environmental and land-use issues that are dear to liberal hearts and anathema to the pro-development types who embody conservatism at the local level. Parks has long served as a bête noire for those folks … and she returned their enmity by endorsing the Democrat in the most recent local election for the state senate, a race in which the successful Republican candidate was – wait for it – her current GOP opponent, Tony Strickland.

To put it mildly, local Republicans loathe Parks, and she has very little in common with the standard-issue conservative bogeymen – two facts well known to any Ventura County voter who has been paying the slightest attention to local politics over the last decade. But the Democratic Party and PACs’ mailers aren’t targeted to those who pay attention. They’re targeted to low-information voters who tune in only for competitive races at the federal level, and who generally have slept through the GOP’s dominance of local politics over the last decades. It is with those voters – who also tend to be the most likely to consider a moderate independent candidate with high name recognition – that the Dems have the best chance of tarnishing Parks’ reputation and driving down her numbers in the primary.

The broad brush being used to accomplish that tarnishing is Parks’ supposed support for the House GOP agenda, and for the Tea Party. The operative implication is that if Parks was ever a registered Republican, she must wholeheartedly endorse the party’s current policies. “While Washington Republicans are driving Medicare into the ground, Linda Parks is riding shotgun,” says one mailer that places Parks in a convertible with Bush, Cheney and Palin – with Limbaugh at the wheel. “A vote for Linda Parks and the national Republicans is a vote for the Tea Party,” says another. (Conversely, an ad from House Majority PAC, this one aimed at independents, accuses “Politician Linda Parks” (horrors!) of profligate, “Washington-style spending” – and, more important, of elitism – for supporting an equestrian center in a county that includes a whole lot of horse country.)

Parks is on the record, repeatedly, as opposing any major revamping of Medicare and as supporting women’s reproductive rights without exception, so the substance of the Democrats’ attacks is disingenuous at best. But it’s pretty much the only chance they’ve got to deflate her local popularity and boost Brownley, a state assemblywoman from Santa Monica who faces charges of carpetbagging because she established residency inside the district just in time to launch her candidacy. Brownley has received the endorsements of most traditionally Democratic special-interest groups, from teachers to environmentalists to Planned Parenthood – yet pro-Brownley advertising is just a minor undertaking to date, compared to the avalanche of attacks on Parks.

Such a ratio of negative to positive ads might be smart strategy in a normal campaign – but national Democrats must have heard by now that Parks has a history of turning such high-expenditure attacks to her own advantage. Two years ago she did just that while defending her (nonpartisan) Board of Supervisors seat against a well-financed, nasty, and highly partisan challenge from Tony Strickland’s wife and political shadow, Audra. That campaign pummeled Parks from the right, but with language remarkably similar to that currently being used to pound her from the left.

Parks, in response, chastised Audra for waging a partisan campaign, cast herself as a martyr in the face of a tidal wave of GOP party and PAC money – and won re-election in a 21-point landslide. She has assumed the same posture this spring, holding up copies of the attack mailers during every debate and public appearance while asking her supporters to make history by rejecting the influence of special-interest money, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work for her again next month. Even if a significant number of individual voters reject Parks because of these ads, Brownley’s association with these distasteful mailers (and with the outside groups that will spend nearly $1 million on them by early June) may well wind up backfiring, and costing her at least as many votes as Parks stands to lose. For example, I’m not entirely sure for whom I’ll be voting on June 5, but I know it won’t be for Brownley.

And what if these attacks on Brownley’s behalf do wind up sinking her own candidacy, rather than Parks’? Here is another sense in which the Democrats’ strategy seems less than completely sound, for if Parks achieves top-two status on June 5 and goes on to face Strickland in November, the party’s options for influencing (or benefiting from) the general election seem rather more bleak than if they had laid off. It would seem that county Democrats’ natural inclination will be to support Parks over Strickland; he will mount the same sort of deep-pocketed, slash-and-burn campaign against her that the Dems are waging now, and if he wins election he’ll indubitably march in lockstep with John Boehner, Paul Ryan et al. Yet the Dems’ current blitzkrieg is no doubt poisoning the well among liberal partisans, many of whom may refuse to pull a lever for Parks in November even if the alternative is much, much worse. And nationally, the deep-pocketed DCCC and liberal-leaning PACs likely will be forced to sit out a general-election race that, even if there’s no Democrat on the ballot, might still prove decisive in determining whether Republicans keep their House majority.

And if Parks manages to win in November, how long will she remember the wrongs being inflicted upon her right now by the Democratic establishment? She told me last month that, should she decide she needs to caucus with one party or the other on Capitol Hill, she’ll base her decision on which party seems more intent upon working across the aisle and dealing honestly with the opposition. It’s hard to imagine that the Democrats’ current behavior will reflect well on them if she finds herself in a position to make such a call.

Still, the die has been cast, at least through June 5. In the meantime, Parks has been surprised with a bit of (unsolicited) outside spending on her own behalf. A group called icPurple, founded by Gateway, Inc.  co-founder Ted Waitt and dedicated to promoting independent candidates, has created a 30-second web ad touting Parks that may yet receive television airplay as well. Its message is simple, effective, and more than a bit naive.

Sure, mixing red and blue into purple is a nice concept – in the fantasyland of bipartisan compromise, it would happen every day. But in a real world (or, at least, a real congressional district) in which the blue team is walloping the purple with a deluge of paintballs, it’s becoming difficult to see how the spirit of bipartisanship will avoid fading once again to black.

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For the first time in a generation, a competitive congressional race is percolating in my Ventura County, CA district. This series explores the local, statewide and national implications of a campaign that was born of voter discontent and might just wind up transforming Congress, and our politics in general. I outlined the parameters of the race here, and a couple weeks ago I interviewed the independent candidate, Linda Parks, who is starting to gain national attention for her quixotic quest.

An overflow audience crowded every inch of sitting and standing room at a local conference hall last Monday night, craning their necks and getting their partisan hackles raised even before the 26th congressional district’s six candidates had entered the room. The scene was a debate – the first and perhaps only one to feature all of those six competitors on the same stage in advance of the June 5 open primary, which will send the top two vote-getters to the general election regardless of party affiliation. Expectations were sky-high amongst the onlookers for a partisan slugfest with a twist … that twist being the presence of a well-known independent candidate who has based her candidacy on pointing out every instance of her rivals’ partisan slugging.

Events pretty much played out as advertised – a steady diet of ideological back-and-forth, simmered with accusations of malfeasance and lack of qualification – and spiced with disrespectful rejoinders from the conservatives in the audience, who at times threatened to turn the proceedings into a 2009-style “town hall” debacle. The one Republican on the stage, state senator Tony Strickland, behaved like the confident and well-funded frontrunner he is, while the leading Democrat in the race, state assemblywoman Julia Brownley, spent the evening firing off round after caustic round at the liberal bull’s-eye of 2012, the Paul Ryan budget. The independent, Linda Parks, turned every answer into a critique of the two-party system and the disquieting influence of special interests on both Strickland and Brownley’s campaigns. Left sucking for oxygen were two lesser Democratic candidates whose presence can only be described as vanity affairs, while a Hispanic harbor commissioner named Jess Herrera spent the debate struggling valiantly to raise his profile above potential-spoiler status.

It was an unusually fiery debate, for these parts – one befitting the national focus that has been placed on this race by the major parties and their PAC cohorts, which are threatening to break previous records for spending by outside entities in a primary for a House seat. But while it accomplished much by allowing the principal candidates to mark their respective partisan (or non-partisan) territories, it didn’t offer voters much reason to like any of them. Strickland, Brownley and Parks walked into that room as ideological archetypes rather than captivating personalities; sadly, while all of them stuck the landings on their talking points, not one of them emerged looking any more attractive as individuals.

Sixteen years ago a documentary film titled A Perfect Candidate offered a sobering look at the malaise that has swamped contemporary politics – as embodied by the squalid and uninspiring “leaders” who are driven to compete for money and votes, as well as the uninformed and belligerent voters who elect or reject them. The film was a blow-by-blow account of the 1994 U.S. Senate race in Virginia, which featured two candidates who had entered the race with considerable (if questionably earned) star power: the incumbent, the LBJ in-law and former governor Chuck Robb, and the challenger, the Iran-Contra hero/criminal Oliver North. That election year featured a GOP electorate practically as exuberant in their irrationality as the Tea Partiers of 2010 — and Ollie’s turn as the uniformed, loyal-to-a-fault (and I do mean fault) Reaganite sent conservative activists and funders screaming to the barricades in an effort to get him into the Senate. But the resulting campaign was ugly and desultory, and disillusioning for both sides. The documentary portrayed two out-of-their-depth candidates who were clueless about how to translate expectations into ideas, or how to mobilize their bases for positive action rather than merely to fear and loathe the other side.

Unfortunately, a similar dynamic threatens to take hold here in CA-26 this year, because none of the top contenders seems to boast the combination of charisma and inspirational messaging that will send voters streaming to the polls to vote for something, rather than against something else. There is no lefty heroine like Elizabeth Warren in this race, no macho man like Arnold Schwarzenegger to fire conservatives’ loins – not even a Jesse Ventura to mix a spoonful of populist sugar into the medicine of anti-partisan moderation. That dynamic may change after June 5, depending on who’s left standing and how much money is poured into negative advertising. But for now, the three-week race to the primary seems a contest to see which candidate voters will find least compelling at the finish line.

Strickland, for example, is the type of frat-boy conservative – cool and confident in his demeanor, doctrinaire in his ideology, and situational in his ethics when it comes to attracting corporate donors and doling out the quid pro quo – that soothes what’s left of the GOP base while enraging liberals (who call him “Phony Tony”) and lulling moderates to sleep. The message behind every word he spoke so pleasantly and almost robotically during the debate, is: I am a Republican. If you’re a Republican, I believe what you believe, but let’s not talk about it right now. It’s all the message he needs, for the moment, since he’s all but guaranteed a top-two finish in the primary and a smooth transition toward the general election. He’ll get there with his ideas unchallenged and his moneybags bursting with special-interest cash.

Brownley, on the other hand, came into the debate with a more complicated mission. A highly regarded state assemblywoman from Santa Monica who recently moved into Ventura County to establish a semblance of local bona fides, she spent a bit of her debate time kicking playfully at the three fellow Democrats nipping at her heels – but mostly she focused on arguing that she, and not the moderate Parks, has the best chance of vanquishing the dreaded Strickland in November. She did so by taking the most pugnacious stance among the candidates, at times railing against the Ryan budget and GOP policies on immigration and women’s issues with a vitriol that must work nicely in front of highly partisan audiences at rallies and fundraisers. Unfortunately for her, this audience was tilted rightward by the presence of several dozen Strickland volunteers – who felt no compunction about yelling “Liar!” and “Nonsense!” when Brownley hyperbolized GOP positions on contraception (no, they don’t really want to take away women’s right to use it) and Social Security (in fact, it’s the one area on which the Ryan budget mostly wimps out).

Interestingly, though, it wasn’t only the ruder members of the audience who called Brownley on her more grandiosely partisan moments. It was Parks, who – for all her flaws as a candidate, which will be discussed in a moment – is serving as the conscience of this race. In the presence of an independent, PAC-money-free candidate with a real shot at winning, Brownley’s over-the-top attacks on Republican policies made her seem smaller, not larger. Strickland, to his credit, recognized this – and even joined Parks in condemning the falsehoods in a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee mailer that had been sent the previous week. Every other candidate on the stage joined him in that criticism, save one – Brownley. She couldn’t, as it turns out, because she had another hit job on Parks at the printer under her own name, which arrived in my mailbox late last week.

Brownley did manage one effective moment — her closing statement, when she turned the tables on Parks’ pox-on-both-your-houses stance. “This is not about partisan bickering,” Brownley said. “This is about two very different visions and sets of values for our country. I am not going to run away from my party’s principles. I’m proud to be a Democrat!” Unfortunately, a Democrat is all Brownley seems to be at this point – like Strickland on the other side, she seems a walking, talking embodiment of major-party talking points, with little to recommend her apart from her guarantee to vote a particular way on every issue that arises.

For her own part, Parks’ debate performance reinforced the odd cocktail of schoolmarmishness and blow-up-the-system anarchy that characterized our interview a couple weeks ago. She has a healthy, if perhaps elevated, understanding of what a victory would mean — both for herself, as a Capitol Hill embodiment of Kevin Costner in that awful movie Swing Vote, and for our district, which she frequently urges to “make history” by pulling the lever for her. Unfortunately, as it is with Strickland and Brownley, Parks as a candidate so far works better in theory than in practice.

When an independent – even one like Parks, who has won every (nonpartisan) election she’s ever entered — launches a campaign without a natural ideological constituency, it behooves her to ladle out a hefty dollop of the common touch. A person in her position really needs to be able to ask voters, “Don’t you wish there were more people like me in Congress?” and get an enthusiastic response in the affirmative. But Parks is humorless, and something of a scold, as she delivers her critiques of Washington partisanship and corruption. “I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money,” she says at least six times an hour – but even when the next line out of her mouth is about doing the people’s work, the next line people take away seems to be, “… and doesn’t that make me better than everybody else, nyah nyah nyah.” Walking back toward my car, I must have heard at least three people say some version of, “I just don’t like that Linda Parks.”

Personally, I don’t know if I’d go that far – after all,  I do admire what Parks is trying to accomplish, and I have plenty of friends who are rather humorless (you probably don’t know who you are). But her above-it-all attitude (complete with occasional, Al Gore-style eye rolls) several times had me looking at the three “minor” candidates in the debate and wishing one of them would say, “Yeah, well, Linda, I’m not taking any special-interest or PAC money, either – mostly because nobody’s offering it to me.”

As onlookers frequently wind up doing at these crowded-stage debates, I found my mind wandering from the frontrunners and looking to those “minor” candidates for inspiration. I discovered it in Jess Herrera. Unlike Brownley, who is a modern, keep-the-coalition-together Democrat who feels compelled to hit every liberal touchstone while trolling for female/ethnic/gay/older/younger/tree-hugging votes, Herrera is an old-school, New Deal Democrat. He found his calling among his fellow military grunts as a young man, and on the docks among his fellow longshoremen in the years that followed. Eventually he came to represent them on the Oxnard Harbor Commission – and he spent much of his debate time introducing voters to his background and offering concrete examples of the ways in which he has brought individuals, industry and government together to solve actual problems in a way that benefited each party.

His story was refreshing, his rhetoric honest and inspiring … his defense of his qualifications a withering rejection of the received wisdom about what type of person should go to Congress … and yet, of course, he has no chance of getting past the primary to the general election. He is, at best, a niche candidate – likely to appeal to Hispanics in the western part of the county, but to few others who make up the contemporary Democratic coalition. His best chance to keep his name in the news past June 6 is if he siphons off enough of the Hispanic vote to boost Parks past Brownley into the general election – and if that happens, as far as local and national Democrats are concerned, his name in the news will be “Mud.”

Brownley’s best chance of avoiding that fate is to barrage potential Parks supporters with negative information about her – an ugly task that she and the national Democratic Party have embraced whole- (if cold-) heartedly, resulting in a deluge of attack mailers that have been stacking up on my desk for the last two weeks. The next column in this series will discuss those mailers, the strategies and risks behind them, and the astonishing – and perhaps unprecedented, at least during a primary campaign — antagonism that has developed between Democrats and an independent who, when push comes to shove, shares most of their views.

For now, though, the race continues forward from the benchmark moment of last week’s debate. It’s certainly a race to watch – more than $1 million of national PAC money already attests to that – but I wish it was a race to love watching. It speaks volumes about the state of our politics that, in our county’s first-in-a-generation competitive congressional campaign, those few of us who are paying close attention have already felt our enthusiasm meters plummeting toward zero.

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President Obama has just made some history that’s perhaps as significant as the legislation that emerged from his first two years in office … perhaps more significant, really. For the first time in history, a president of the United States has stated, publicly and unequivocally, his support for the fullest possible extent of gay rights. No matter how he got here — the years of fumbling around on the issue, the pressure created by Vice President Biden over the weekend as well as North Carolina’s despicable move yesterday, the odd timing of the statement in advance of what promises to be the most lucrative fundraiser in history at George Clooney’s house this week — there’s no denying that it took a whole lot of courage for Obama to make this statement, on television, during an election year.

And now we’ll see how both the left and right choose to push the electorate’s buttons on this issue. Will the Romney campaign allow itself (or be forced) to pull off its economic message in order to engage on a social issue that doesn’t cut clearly in any particular direction? How will the Obama campaign balance its desire to re-ignite the political passions of younger (and more-evolved, as this issue is concerned) voters with its need to hold ground with independents in swing states with anti-gay marriage amendments in their constitutions, such as Virginia, Ohio, and now North Carolina? And — let’s face it, this is the most entertaining question — how ugly will this debate get over the next six months, and will conservatives go over the edge here the way they have on immigration and women’s reproductive rights over the last six months?

Of course, Obama’s statement today doesn’t erase bigotry from 32 state constitutions; it won’t necessarily influence the court cases that are proceeding (too slowly) toward resolution; it won’t even change administration policy, which already has jettisoned support for the Defense of Marriage Act and has (again, too slowly) pushed forward on increasing partnership and spousal rights for gay couples in government. What’s most likely, at least over the next six months, is that public opinion on gay marriage (most recent Gallup polling: 50% approve, 48% disapprove, with independents leaning 57-40 in favor) will stratify along party lines the same way every other issue already has, from Medicare to climate change. Republicans will calcify in their vociferous opposition to gay rights, as long as Obama supports them; Democrats will attempt to use the issue to mobilize progressive voters who have been disheartened, or lulled to sleep, by the partisan warfare and snail-like progress of the last three years.  The big question is, who will be more motivated to go to the polls by this announcement — those who want to move forward, or backward?

It wouldn’t be surprising for election-day polling on the issue to mirror the presidential vote almost precisely. It’s next year, and the years after that, when Obama’s (long-time-coming) courage will make a real and lasting impact on Americans’ view of marriage rights. Everybody — and I mean everybody, left, right and center — knows that marriage equality is coming. There’s no stopping it, merely delaying it through efforts like North Carolina’s. Placing gay marriage, or civil rights in general, on the ballot is profoundly wrong for all sorts of reasons; to do so during a low-interest, low-information election when the only the opponents of those rights are driven to the polls for other reasons (like, say, a nominating contest) is a chump move, pure and simple. (See Newark mayor Cory Booker’s recent statement on allowing the public to vote on minority rights for a lesson in on-the-spot erudition.) North Carolina will pay for that move the same way Arizona is paying for its stupidity on immigration and Planned Parenthood, and the same way Florida is beginning to pay for its insane gun laws, through lower tourism and convention income. And someday very soon, the North Carolinians who voted for that amendment are going to feel foolish and ashamed of themselves.

I have written extensively about gay marriage before, here and here and here and here and elsewhere. Here’s the gist of what I’ve argued before: The basic question surrounding gay marriage is a constitutional one: Will the religious beliefs of one segment of our society – no matter how large or small – be allowed to dictate the laws of a diverse nation? Based on the First Amendment, the simple answer is “no” … but when it comes to politics and religion, things are never that simple. So here’s the longer answer:

The founding fathers, despite their acceptance of 18th-century societal “norms” regarding slavery and the rights of women, set up America’s civil society with the ideal of recognizing each individual’s rights equally. As the centuries have passed, our nation and its laws have advanced inexorably closer and closer to that ideal. As it pertains to gay marriage, however, our basic problem is the fact that our modern definition of marriage is really a two-part equation.

It’s a religious tradition – a practically universal one among faiths worldwide – that conforms to formal strictures beginning with a “sacrament” and continuing with a variety of moral boundaries (no adultery, “til death do us part” and all that). Of course, the sacrament of marriage long ago stopped depending exclusively upon religion for legitimacy; any Vegas wedding-chapel Elvis can tell you that.

However, marriage is at the same time a state-sanctioned (indeed, state-licensed) union that entitles those who enter into it to more than 1,000 federally recognized benefits, in addition to those offered by banks, insurers, and other private and public institutions. And currently, in 44 states at least, marriage is a right that is granted to people of one sexual orientation but not to the other, thereby excluding gays from all those benefits.

From a civil-libertarian standpoint, this situation is untenable. The state simply cannot bestow rights upon one group of citizens that it does not give to all. It’s discrimination, pure and simple, and contradicts the values of liberty and prosperity upon which the nation was founded.

So what we have here is the very definition of a church-state contradiction. Churches cannot and should not be forced to bless or recognize the marriage of anyone they choose to exclude; they’re not public institutions with legal obligations (as long as we ignore that pesky matter of tax exemptions and the responsibilities they confer), and they’re entitled to exclude anyone they want. If members of a particular church can live with their beliefs and practices, then so be it.

However, the federal government cannot be exclusionary in the same way, even if it is acting on behalf of millions of citizens who hold such beliefs. The principles of equality and freedom are right there in the Constitution, and as we move closer to a “more perfect union,” the laws and policies that institutionalize old prejudices must inevitably fall away. If they don’t, we’ll eventually reach a point at which our “American experiment” has reached its logical conclusion, and we’ll remember it as a near-miss in mankind’s attempt to achieve equality for all.

So, then, what’s the solution to the church-state conundrum? Must the state, in the name of equality, give up the power to license and recognize “marriages,” settling instead for recognizing “unions” for both gays and straights? If we do that, then is “marriage” a status reserved for church members, thus excluding from the institution not only the fraction of the population that is gay, but also the growing percentage of married couples (like my wife and myself) who were not married in a church and/or are generally “unchurched”? And what, in that circumstance, would define a “church”? Would Elvis wedding chapels qualify?

I don’t think any of that is necessary. It is entirely appropriate for the state to define marriage broadly, while various religious faiths define it however narrowly they want; after all, the Catholic church (for one) already forbids some things that the government not only supports, but funds (family planning, for instance, at least for the moment). As for individual beliefs … well, there’s no law against bigotry, and there can’t be. So, must all those who stand against gay marriage on moral grounds (or just because they find it distasteful) change their position? No. Must they, as citizens of a free society, stand aside and allow their fellow citizens to exert their inalienable rights as freely as they themselves can? Yes.

Obama has finally admitted, publicly, that he has reached a similar conclusion. He probably did it a long time before he was willing to tell us about it, but whatever. It’s out there now. And know this: No matter how Obama’s declaration redounds during this election year, gay marriage is going to become a reality in all 50 states. Soon. And when it does, the history books will give him “a whole lot of credit” (as Mitt Romney says, hilariously, on another issue) — and eventually the 48 percent of the public that hasn’t yet evolved to the extent he has will wonder what they were fighting about. Or at least their kids will wonder, and they’ll wonder why their parents didn’t have the same courage (or common sense) that their president had in 2012.

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For the first time in a generation, a competitive race is percolating in my congressional district in Ventura County, California. Our state cherishes its reputation as a laboratory for American democracy, but in this district, in this election, our most recent experiments are proving quite combustible indeed – thanks to a representative’s retirement, a nonpartisan redistricting, and California’s first-time shift to an open primary system. The major parties, special-interest PACS, and other outside groups are preparing to flood our district with campaign cash, and with good reason – the outcome here may have profound ramifications for control of the next Congress, and even the future of our elections process. The first column in this series outlined the broad parameters of the race; over the next few weeks I’ll be profiling the candidates and covering the run-up to the June 5 open primary.

There’s a low-key rebellion underway in California – a challenge to the two-party system, with the potential to change the way Americans elect their leaders – and Linda Parks is leading the charge. The three-term county supervisor and onetime mayor of Thousand Oaks is one of more than 30 declared congressional candidates statewide whose ballot lines will read not “Democrat,” not “Republican,” but “No Party Preference.” And among them all, Parks has (by far) the best chance of withstanding the impending flood of major-party and PAC funds, and making her way to Washington in the fall.

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call has already profiled her, and last week in the Daily Beast, Bush strategist-turned-paragon of moderation Mark McKinnon praised her as a “fighter” who has “seen the enemy within … the two-party system.” Parks herself is well aware of what she’s up against – and she’s got a strong sense of her possible impact. “This is historic,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It’s game-changing, at a time when Congress is broken and less popular than ever. People are ready for the hyper-partisanship and the special-interest influence to get fixed, and they have a great opportunity to do something about it right here. The open primary and the redistricting that have happened in California have made it possible for a moderate like me to get elected.

“This is not just a congressional campaign. It’s a statement, a movement against partisanship and against special-interest money. I never aspired to run for Congress. It’s the state of the nation, not personal ambition, that’s driving me. And if I’m successful, getting elected as a moderate without support from the special interests, there will be others who follow in my wake.”

Heady stuff, to be sure. Then again, Parks told me all of this not in some flag-festooned office or ballroom somewhere, but in between smoothie sips outside a strip-mall Jamba Juice. And she did so after responding to an interview request I had left on an answering machine whose outgoing message intoned, “You’ve reached the Parks family … and Linda Parks for Congress.”

Clearly, this isn’t a conventional campaign for federal office. And it’s particularly unconventional that  a candidate who has pledged not to take special-interest or PAC funds in a race certain to be deluged with them, who refuses to say whether she’ll vote for John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi as speaker if she makes it to Capitol Hill — and who, to be honest, seemed to go unrecognized by her own constituents during our half-hour conversation at Jamba Juice — must nonetheless be considered a front-runner in the upcoming primary.

She may not be a rock-star candidate, or even the most charismatic figure in her own race. But Parks boasts sky-high name recognition and popularity within the state’s newly drawn 26th Congressional District, and she has already proven she can withstand an onslaught of major-party money and mud while campaigning on a shoestring. Two years ago she cemented her local stature, and captured the attention of underdog rooters nationwide, while turning back an exhorbitantly funded, and surprisingly nasty, challenge for her Board of Supervisors seat from the wife of her current Republican opponent, state senator Tony Strickland.

“I haven’t run a congressional campaign before, but this is the way I run campaigns – very grass-roots,” she says. To that end, she is relying for advice (and yard-sign-planting muscle) on a devoted network of friends and neighbors – some of whom happen to be handy with video equipment. It was while putting their (unpaid) skills to use that Parks hit upon an idea that created some major buzz locally: a television ad that aired on cable systems for two weeks, and ended with her looking into the camera and saying, “I’m Linda Parks, I’m running for Congress, and I approved this message … and my favorite flavor of ice cream is Rocky Road.”

That oddball mashup of the personal and political has provoked responses ranging from quizzical to dismissive to delighted. One Ventura Republican wrote to the local paper that it “borders on insulting that this is how she plans to win favor.” But Parks says the more typical reception has been more of the Reagan-and-jelly-beans variety. “Wherever I go now, people are telling me what their favorite ice cream is. I’ve been attending a lot of coffees around the district, and people are starting to serve Rocky Road for me.

“You can’t take yourself too seriously,” she adds. “The issues are serious, of course, but I think it’s important to show a personal side. So many politicians are out there trying to be slick, and this ad resulted in separating me from the pack. I don’t see any negatives about it.”

Creating a bit of well-defined space for herself – particularly before the clearly panicking Democrats succeed in defining her negatively — is vital to Parks’ prospects. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the Democrats’ struggle to settle on a candidate, and the emerging likelihood that Parks will deny the party a slot in the general election (and an opportunity for a key pickup in its effort to recapture the House). The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has responded by launching an unusual (and unseemly) line of attack against Parks – dumping a 50-page dossier of material about her personal and professional life onto the internet. Gleaned from a blanket Public Information request, the DCCC’s spreadsheet covers everything from her family’s mortgage history to her husband’s business interests to the lawsuits against which she, along with other members of the Thousand Oaks City Council or county Board of Supervisors, have been required to defend themselves in the normal course of government business.

It’s the raw material for a sophisticated opposition-research effort, uploaded for public consumption. At first glance there appears to be nothing remotely disqualifying in the document dump, but it is precisely by piecing together innocuous details into somehow-squalid themes that oppo-research professionals earn their keep – whether they work for opposing campaigns or special-interest Super-PACs. (Never mind the potential for mischief – robbery, identity theft, etc. – created by the publication of a candidate’s address and other personal information on the internet.)

“There’s an incredible amount of positive information in there, actually,” Parks says with a laugh of annoyance, as much as irony. “How I was the thriftiest supervisor of all, the fact that I returned the most money to the general fund out of my [city council] office. But they’re not going to pick the good stuff. There’s also a lot of raw footage of me out there on the internet, filmed at the [early-April] Latino Forum and other events. It’s not just footage of me talking – it’s of me just standing there, while other candidates are talking. And the reason why it’s all there is so the parties and the PACs can use their money and that research to attack me.”

For her own part, Parks has remained positive in both her TV spots to date, but quickly bristles when asked what she thinks of Strickland (who, as the only Republican in the race, is expected to advance to the general election in a well-financed cakewalk). “I think of him as the opposite of me,” she says. “He takes special-interest money, and he does what they want him to do. You can always tell how he’s going to vote by whichever industry has paid him. He takes from industries that are not the most wholesome ones – from tobacco, big oil, the health-insurance companies. And these interests are getting loopholes created just for them, which leaves the public out in the cold.”

Perhaps anticipating her need to attract significant support from moderate Democrats in the primary, Parks seems intent on playing more nicely with her four Democratic competitors on the ballot. She’s even reluctant to go after the woman generally considered her toughest challenger for a spot in the general election, a state assemblywoman from Santa Monica named Julia Brownley who moved into the district to compete for the seat. Other opponents have called Brownley a “carpetbagger” with “Santa Monica values,” but this is as far as Parks will go: “I think she’s done a good job representing Santa Monica and their interests, but I don’t think their interests coincide with Ventura County’s. Her record speaks for itself. I’m not going to criticize her.”

As the Democrats and, sooner rather than later, Republicans gear up their attacks against Parks, their most powerful arguments probably will focus on opportunism and uncertainty. Parks changed her voter registration from Democratic to Republican back in the 1990s, when she first ran for the city council in conservative Thousand Oaks. Seats on both the council and the county Board of Supervisors are nonpartisan positions, but her GOP registration no doubt helped sustain her popularity among voters – even as she frequently asserted moderate-to-liberal positions on environmental and other issues, and occasionally endorsed Democratic candidates (including Strickland’s opponent in his 2008 state-senate race). Parks trumpeted her iconoclasm, if not necessarily her “independence,” while decimating Strickland’s wife, Audra, by a 62-39 margin to retain her supervisor seat two years ago. And when she threw her hat in the congressional ring this past winter, she teased the electorate for a month before announcing that she would change her voter registration once again, this time to “Decline to State,” and run as an independent.

Thousands of local Republicans are unlikely to forgive her apostasy – even though, as she notes, “I’d never get the GOP’s endorsement, not after they spent half a million dollars attacking me in 2010. But I have support from a lot of both conservative and moderate Republicans — particularly those who are frustrated with the partisanship. A lot of them are feeling disenfranchised — they don’t recognize their party anymore, and I was really feeling that. The extremists have just taken that party off the deep end.”

On the other hand, however, thousands of local Democrats (including, admittedly, myself) inevitably will look at her shifting party registrations and wonder exactly who Parks is, and what she might do once in office. Will she campaign as a moderate independent because it broadens her electoral base against Strickland, then join the GOP caucus? What if the House is evenly split after November, and she becomes responsible for perpetuating the Republican majority? And can a House member who refuses to embed herself within either party effectively bring home the bacon for her district?

“I’ve never been attacked by the Democratic Party before — that’s something new for me,” Parks says. “Some Democrats have asked, ‘Why couldn’t you have run as a Democrat? We could have supported you!’ But that says more about party loyalty, rather than voting for the best candidate – and that’s part of what this campaign is trying to change.”

Besides, she notes, some experts believe that in an environment as closely divided and poisonous as Capitol Hill, a truly independent freshman may actually be more effective than a partisan back-bencher. “Compared to a Democrat or Republican walking in the door, I believe I’ll have a lot more influence because [my presence] will be a mandate against hyper-partisanship. The nation’s going to be watching. The press is going to be watching. And they’ll be looking to see, ‘How are they going to play with Linda?’

“I’ll be open to any legislator who has a good bill, and I think that will engender a little respect. When it comes down to it, [the parties] need votes, and they’ll see they can get my vote if they have a good bill. And if it comes down to my vote being the one that determines who the speaker of the House is, I’ll take that to the bank. I’ll see what I can parlay that into for our country, and for my district. I’ll want to talk with the party leaderships and see who is more interested in bipartisanship, in working together, and not playing to the extremes. And I’ll want to see who is more interested in the things I’m interested in, such as trying to reduce the special interests’ influence in Congress.”

Before she can do any of that, of course, she’ll have to face down those exact interests between now and November. The kind of party and PAC spending expected this year is unheard-of in congressional races around these parts – primarily because retiring GOP stalwart Elton Gallegly was never at serious risk during any of his 13 campaigns dating back to 1987. It’s unclear, as yet, how all that money will be spent; conventional wisdom holds that the most effective method for reaching local voters is the mass mailer, not the purchase of pricier TV or radio time – which made Parks’ first-on-the-air “Rocky Road” ad buy (estimated at $45,000) even more eye-raising.

So far, even though the DCCC has laid down a marker with that dossier, Strickland, the four Democratic challengers, and their well-heeled supporters have mostly kept their powder dry and their moneybags stowed. That should change in the coming week or two, particularly in the wake of next Monday’s (May 7) debate – the only one of the primary campaign expected to feature all six candidates. “In the background, I keep hearing the roar of those planes that are about to fly over and bomb our poor little county,” Parks says. “We’re going to be inundated.”

Between now and early June, she adds, “my strategy is just to keep standing. That was my strategy when Audra Strickland spent three-quarters of a million dollars to try and beat me in 2010, and it’ll be my strategy now. The Democrats are going to hit me with everything they’ve got – slime me, slander me, libel me, whatever they can do to see that I don’t advance to the general. All the candidates on that side who want to be in the general are going have to knock down Linda. Not just the candidates, but the PACS and the Super-PACS, are going to spend millions of dollars on both sides, and it’s mostly going to be aimed at me.

“I just have to keep standing.”

A few minutes after she said that, her cell phone rang and she quickly picked up her smoothie and excused herself. During our interview I had gone to some length to explain why, despite my fascination with her candidacy and my shared passion for curbing special-interest influence in Washington, I was pretty sure I would have to vote for a Democrat in the primary. For me, denying the Republicans a continued majority is a higher priority than sending an iconoclast to Congress, and I would be unable to forgive myself if my vote for Parks kept the Tea Party in power.

Despite these protestations, a couple minutes after Parks departed my phone dinged with a fresh text message: “Want to come unload some yard signs?” Parks texted over the address, and off I went. Of course I went. I may not (yet) be able to wrap my head around voting for her next month, but how could I refuse the opportunity to lend an iconoclast some unpaid muscle?

Next week’s column will feature details from the May 7 debate, and discuss the Democrats’ self-made dilemma as the June primary approaches.

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When you’re a politics junkie like I am, but live in a state as resolutely blue as California, it’s easy to envy folks in other states who spend their leap years on the front lines of presidential campaigns that I’m doomed to watch from afar. Compounding my covetousness is the fact that I’ve lived for the last nine years in conservative Ventura County, in a congressional and state-assembly district that has long been exquisitely gerrymandered to keep electing Republicans in races that weren’t even vaguely competitive.

Happily, though, this year we V.C. suburbanites – thanks to the mad genius of California’s notoriously fickle voters – find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of one of the nation’s most captivating congressional races. It’s a campaign that promises to be a real humdinger, bringing together many of the discordant, corrupting, frustrating and fascinating linchpins of contemporary political combat: voter initiatives and their consequences, a game-changing redistricting, an open seat, an influx of party and PAC money, a grudge match between longtime rivals, special-interest jockeying … and even a well-liked independent with an excellent chance of winning, who plans to spend the campaign blasting the partisan logjams in both Washington and Sacramento.

There are plenty of races around the country that are being transformed by redistricting and retirements, or merely by the voters’ shifting moods. But this  campaign, here in my home district, is so intriguing for so many reasons that — at least until the June 10 primary, and hopefully right through November – I can’t imagine a better use for this space than to delve into the intricacies of the candidates’ positioning on issues, and in relation to one another; the strategic and financial maneuverings of the local and national parties, as well as the outside groups that currently are plotting to plow money into the race; and the electorate, locally and statewide, that (brilliantly or foolishly) created the scenario that’s playing out. Sure, it’s a local race for one congressional seat — but it’s also a laboratory for trends that are shaking up politics nationwide. And with control of Congress very much up in the air this fall, every competitive race comes with very high stakes.

First, let’s explore how the race got to its current point:

In 2008 and 2010, Californians passed a pair of ballot initiatives taking the process of drawing new legislative districts out of the hands of Sacramento politicians, who had perfected the art of creating airtight partisan lines to ensure their own survival. Voters instead entrusted the task to a non-partisan commission made up of everyday citizens. Meanwhile, a third initiative ditched the state’s traditional primary-election system in favor of open primaries — in which all candidates for a particular office appear on the same initial ballot, with the top two vote-getters (regardless of party affiliation) moving on to the general election.

These changes were pitched as fixes for California’s dysfunctional political cesspool – and trust me, our cesspool is more fetid than your cesspool, wherever you are (unless you’re in Louisiana, maybe). The redistricting commission seems to have done its job with precisely the unblinking neutrality intended, eliminating many of the more preposterous gerrymanders and creating districts across the state that, for the first time in years, are forcing incumbents of both parties to actually work to defend their seats…

…or else decide not to defend them at all. As it’s turned out, so many members of California’s congressional delegation are retiring this year that state leaders of both parties (most prominently Nancy Pelosi) have begun lamenting our impending loss of seniority (and influence) in the Capitol. Among those heading for the exits is Ventura County’s 13-term Republican congressman, the immigration-obsessed and thoroughly undistinguished Elton Gallegly, who previously tried to retire in 2006 before Karl Rove personally bullied him into remaining on the ballot. His departure leaves an open seat in a district that has shifted this year from a 15-point GOP edge among registered voters to a 6-point advantage for Democrats. Even more telling, the new district split by a single percentage point in the last gubernatorial election.

Rushing in to fill the void on the Republican side, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was state senator Tony Strickland – half of a husband-and-wife tag team that has long sought to dominate local politics. He served in the state assembly from 1999-2004, and when he was term-limited out of the post, his wife Audra took his place. But when Audra herself completed her last term two years ago, a funny thing happened on the way to Strickland ubiquity – she chose to challenge a popular, independent-minded incumbent county supervisor, ran a nasty and partisan campaign for a job that is, by law, nonpartisan … and ended up losing badly.

The woman who beat her was former Thousand Oaks mayor Linda Parks – and wouldn’t you know it, now Parks has set her sights on taking down another Strickland, and moving to Washington herself. What’s most compelling about Parks’ candidacy isn’t the promise of an ugly and personal battle with the Stricklands — it’s the route she’s taking to reach that battle. The moderate Parks has been a registered Republican for years, ever since she first ran for city council in conservative Thousand Oaks. But when she announced her candidacy for Congress this winter, she spent a month teasing the electorate – would she challenge Strickland for Republican supremacy? would she revert to her long-ago status as a Democrat? – before finally choosing to run as an independent.

There’s been plenty of speculation since then about whether Parks’ move was made with (non)ideological sincerity, or with cool electoral calculation. Typically, of course, independents have difficulty battling the party-endorsed candidates’ financial and organizational resources. But Parks has higher name recognition than most of her opponents, not to mention a history of using non-partisanship to her advantage. And in an open primary she may, in fact, be more likely to make the top two in a traditionally GOP-leaning district by splitting the difference, rather than by becoming a Democrat. In any case, since her announcement the unshackled Parks has worn her independence as a badge of honor, sweetly savaging rivals on both sides for their special-interest ties and – most controversially – refusing to state which party she’ll caucus with, or whether she’ll vote for John Boehner or Pelosi as Speaker of the House, should she be elected. I’ll have plenty more to say about all of that in my next column.

As if Parks’ unusual stance, and her blood feud with the Stricklands, were not enough to keep the campaign cauldron at a boil, her prospects for success in the open primary have received a boost from the muddled and contentious state of affairs among local Democrats. Several stepped up for the race, then dropped out, before and after Gallegly’s retirement – including a colleague of Parks’ on the Board of Supervisors who was considered the party favorite until he quit last month. The local party, perhaps unprepared to deal with the first campaign in years in which it actually has a fighting chance, has been unable to settle on an endorsement – leaving no fewer than four Democrats on the primary ballot, most of them representing constituencies potentially big enough to split the progressive vote, propel Strickland and Parks into a Dem-free general election … and, if November plays out as closely as projected across the nation, possibly even deny the Democrats an opportunity to retake the House.

The closest thing to a Democratic-establishment favorite is Julia Brownley, a state assemblywoman with an impressive record, lots of friends in high places, and just one problem: Until very recently, she lived in Santa Monica. She is a viable candidate in the redrawn congressional district because it includes towns she has served in the assembly. Still, despite her move into the district this winter, she faces inevitable charges of carpetbagging – and, in an area as politically conservative as Ventura County, she is already being pilloried for her “Santa Monica values.” (Even Santa Monica’s own residents cheerfully call their town “the People’s Republic.”)

Brownley is racking up endorsements from key party leaders — who, some have complained, also have begun pressuring her competitors to bow out of the race. For now, at least, she faces competition for key constituencies from two intraparty rivals. Jess Herrera, a district commissioner from heavily Hispanic Oxnard, recently won a landslide victory in a straw poll held after a forum for Hispanic voters. David Cruz Thayne, a small-business owner (he’s a tennis coach) and the son of a Uruguayan immigrant, is emphasizing Hispanic issues as well, but is also playing up his business background in an attempt to appeal to more moderate voters. (A fourth Democrat, real estate broker Al Goldberg, so far has exhibited neither a serious grasp of issues nor sufficient organizational skills to make his candidacy viable – he was shut out of the Hispanic forum because, he said, he sent his confirmation email to the wrong address.)

Goldberg’s bumbling exemplifies the key element that’s missing from this race so far: a candidate with enough “star power” to match the stakes in the race. Perhaps sensing the need to break out of a relatively faceless pack, Parks called attention to herself on Wednesday by launching the campaign’s first TV ad – which she concludes by stating, “I approved this message … and my favorite ice cream is Rocky Road.”

Not exactly a star-making television debut, perhaps. But this race features such a compelling narrative that local voters and politicos nationwide have no choice but to stay tuned. Next week I’ll have more analysis of Parks’ unorthodox candidacy, and her chances of winning (and shaking up the system if she does).

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It’s a damn fascinating time for the social art of protest. We’re living in an era when coordinated protest is arguably more effective than it has ever been. Even in cases much smaller and less drastic than the instantly legendary Arab Spring, the speed and power of mass demonstration is pretty staggering. Consider the outcry over the proposed debit card fees the likes of Bank of America attempted to institute toward the end of 2011. The protest was so quick, so well coordinated and so plugged into the media stream that it actually compelled change almost immediately. The mass exodus of customers to credit unions and small, local banks helped, but even that direct action wouldn’t have been as vast without the mass communication available to the millions of little guys and girls affected by the fees.

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act is a similar, though not identical, case. Those two pieces of legislation have been fuel to the fire of Internet activism from the moment they hit newsfeeds, but the blaze burned especially hot this week as the debates in the Senate and House over the bills drew near. It wasn’t just the little folks protesting a perceived injustice this time. Big organizations like Wikipedia, WordPress and Google made sure to put their displeasure in the headlines, some with more drastic action than others. The end result? Both bills have been shelved.

That’s great for the opponents of SOPA and PIPA, but it’s not the end and they know it. The protests aren’t ending because the bills haven’t been killed yet. The few supporters they still have in Congress may try to revive them when the furor has died down. Of course, that’s assuming it will die down.

This gets at the core of why SOPA and PIPA are poorly constructed bits of legislation. The people who wrote and sponsored them simply don’t understand the Internet. Folks on the Web don’t… let things go very easily. It’s not like the mainstream news cycle. Trending stories, however ephemeral they seem, don’t vanish from the docket when they’re no longer fresh. Websites stay live, forums keep fomenting debate and the protest stays active, if even in a semi-dormant form. Right now the lion’s share of the independent video games industry (the fastest growing segment of the games industry as a whole) is coordinating a boycott of E3, the most important and profitable gaming convention of the year. They’re doing so because the lobbyists for most AAA game publishers haven’t withdrawn their support for the now torpid copyright bills. They’re keeping the discussion rolling, which is all it takes to launch an entirely new campaign of protest should SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation rise again.

Even as the federal government cracks down symbolically on Megaupload, one of countless streaming services on the Internet, there’s a sense that the interests behind Internet censorship are fighting a force that’s too large and well organized to overcome. In America, our legislators don’t know how the deepest parts of Internet culture work, so they don’t anticipate the backlash they’ll receive whenever a corporate body tries to make bank on a new set of laws to the detriment of everything the current Internet stands for. Since it’s not likely the politicians who hop aboard the bad-ideas-on-wheels that are SOPA, PIPA and other such misinformed bills are going to become more Web-savvy any time soon, it seems like we’ll be stuck in the cycle of lobbying and protest for the foreseeable future. The protesters certainly aren’t hanging up their hats yet, or possibly ever.

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Finally, some voting! (Well, some caucusing, really, but it’s practically the same thing.) Tuesday’s evening of Republican politicking in Iowa told us little to nothing we didn’t already know about the GOP field, but it did leave a distinct impression about the party’s base – a distinct odor, really. It’s the whiff of desperation, the stench of a mob that has worked itself into a sweat railing against all the stuff it doesn’t want … but can’t begin to agree on what it does want.

And how is a party that can’t answer a simple question – what, exactly, are you for? – supposed to run a country?

The issues that divided the Iowans who voted variously for Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are not small ones, and my guess is that they won’t be resolved quickly or easily. That’s not to say the GOP nominating contest will drag on terribly long, or be particularly suspenseful; my guess is that Romney, coming out of next week’s big win in New Hampshire, will simply out-organize and outspend the poorly funded (and that’s being generous) Santorum into submission by the end of the month. Romney may not win South Carolina – who will win it is anybody’s guess, and doesn’t really matter — but once Floridians vote in late January Romney will be able to coast into the summer, with Paul serving as little more than the belligerent schnauzer nipping at his heels.

That’s the way Republicans do things, organizationally speaking – they coalesce early, and move on to the bigger fight. But that’s the easy part – the establishment settling on a frontrunner and clearing his path. The trouble is that the frontrunner isn’t really the man for his moment. Has there ever been such a disconnect between the obvious passions of a party’s base and the wishy-washy lethargy of its likely standard-bearer? Even John Kerry had more of a purchase on his party’s ideals than does poor Mitt — who, according to a healthy majority of Republicans, may as well be John Kerry.

Iowa did the party no favors by spending six months sifting through one non-Mitt after another before finding a wingnut who couldn’t be grounded before caucus night. Really, it’s just Santorum’s dumb luck that he was the last bit of fetid, right-wing cream to rise to the top after Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich had all been skimmed. (What other metaphors can I offer – musical chairs, perhaps?) It’s not that Santorum is any more electable than the others¸ or less anachronistic in linking tired and failed ideas to bizarre bellicosity. It’s just that Iowans ran out of time while he was taking his turn atop the leader board. My guess is that Santorum’s social-conservative extremism won’t survive a week of media scrutiny or super-PAC bludgeoning – not that it matters, since Santorum is practically penniless and couldn’t begin to staff up in time to take advantage of his moment in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul sits atop his bizarre human pyramid of cranks and contrarians, assured of a steady 20 percent of the GOP electorate … but with no hope of expanding on that rabid base to become a real factor in the national race. Paul is attracting, in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, the kind of devotion that President Obama did back in 2008 – becoming a magnet for young people and anti-establishment types who are (in many cases) simply looking for an alternative to the people and ideas that have been spoon-fed to them. Of course, that’s where the similarities end between Obama’s appeal and Paul’s – not least because, while the power of Obama’s charisma and the mainstream appeal of his ideas enabled him to build a level of support that could beat Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, Paul has all the personal appeal of a dungeness crab, not to mention foreign-policy ideas that are only attractive until one spends five seconds considering their consequences. And then, of course, there’s Paul’s history of racism and the other enormous character flaws that those 20 percent of Republicans can choose to ignore, but no one else will. (Not that Randian selfishness isn’t a character flaw in itself, but I digress.)

Still, Paul’s staunch libertarianism – aside from his hypocritical stance on abortion – represents the id of contemporary wild-eyed conservatism, at least in terms of his domestic-policy ideas. End the Fed! Slash a trillion from the budget indiscriminately on Day One! Delete all regulations from the books! And you can bet that for every Republican who does support him, there are two or three who would love to do so, if only he would throttle back the isolationism and cheer up a little. (Or shave 20 years off his age, or grow a head of hair like Mitt’s, or lose that screech-owl voice. The racism, they can live with.)

As for Senator Holier-Than-Thou, it’s actually surprising that Iowa’s multitudinous social conservatives took so long to come around to him – or at least it’s surprising that they bothered kicking the tires on Cain and Gingrich for four months instead of moving directly from Perry to Santorum as the anti-Romney. Once Perry disqualified himself with his cowboy-Mr. Magoo act during the debates, Santorum became the obvious heir to Mike Huckabee – except, of course, for the fact that Santorum is a far less charismatic (though far more doctrinaire) bearer of the Falwell flame than the Huck was in ’08.

The person for whom I feel the most sympathy this week is, surprisingly, Bachmann, who saw the writing on the wall Wednesday morning and dropped out. Alone among the discarded anti-Mitts, the winner of the August straw poll didn’t really do anything to render herself unelectable (among Republicans, I mean – she’s horrifyingly unelectable in the real world). She merely was rendered an afterthought when the Perry campaign supernova’d, and she never regained her footing. She was perhaps the only candidate who might have found the sweet spot between Paul and Santorum’s constituencies, but this may not be the year when that particular twain shall meet.

So instead we have Paul inspiring the rabidly anti-government, Remember-Waco! set, and we have Santorum (for now) clutching the barely-beating hearts of his fellow fundamentalist scolds. Where does that leave Romney? The last two “movement conservatives” to win the White House, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, succeeded in tying the GOP’s small-government and social-conservative wings into a tidy bow of shared support – but so far in 2012 both those wings eye Mitt with the sort of suspicion and distaste with which a cotton farmer regards the season’s first boll weevil. As I said earlier, it seems pretty clear that Romney will be able to super-PAC his way to the nomination with little more messaging than “I alone can beat Obama.” But that will leave a key question for the general election: Can a man who inspires no passion – and who instead instills a sort of dread among those who should be a Republican nominee’s most ardent followers – actually pull enough voters to the polls to defeat an incumbent president?

Under fairly similar circumstances – facing presidents who were broadly loathed by the opposition’s base – both Bob Dole (in 1996) and Romney’s Democratic doppelganger, Kerry, discovered that the answer was “no.” (Of course, neither Bill Clinton nor W. was facing the kind of economic doldrums Obama faces, but that’s a topic for another day.) As for this column, I have one more tortured metaphor to offer: As Republicans have finally begun casting ballots this winter, Romney finds himself in the position of an animal trainer at the circus, locked in the ring with a pair of ravenous tigers just captured from the wild. One of two things is going to happen by November: Either Romney is going to figure out how to ride those tigers, or they’re going to eat him alive. At the moment I wouldn’t bet on either outcome, but it would help if Romney had a whip.

One more bit of information worth noting: In a year in which Republicans are supposed to be ginned up beyond belief to flock to the polls and swamp Obama, turnout on Tuesday was very close to what it was for Republicans in 2008 — which was about half the size of the Democratic turnout that year. Is that a reflection on the candidates, or evidence that Republicans are simply far louder than they are numerous?

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Last weekend I had dinner with a friend who recently has been surprised to find the ideological ground shifting beneath his feet. A libertarian at heart – fiscally conservative, socially liberal, somewhat obsessed with “freedom” (whatever that is) – he has voted Republican far more often than Democratic. Two years ago he became enamored of the burgeoning tea-party movement because he reviled President Obama and Congress’s plans to spend untold billions on stimulus and healthcare, and especially because he loathed the collusion between politicians and the banks that had tanked the economy in 2008.

More recently, though, he has watched as the tea party’s initial focus has been diluted by religious-right social activism and endless I-hate-Obama partisanship, and as its objectives have been co-opted by the business interests that dominate the Republican Party. While Ron Paul remains his favorite Republican candidate, he finds that his biggest complaint about Obama these days is that the president is too much of a “corporatist” to rise to our current challenges – language that belongs more to Ralph Nader than to the eyebrow-enhanced Paul. And, perhaps most surprising, over the last few weeks he has become an ardent cheerleader for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He likes its focus on corporate misbehavior, an emphasis he wishes the tea party hadn’t abandoned, and says he hopes OWS might somehow break business’ stranglehold over policymaking.

My friend, in all his mixed-up glory, is on to something. When you listen to the mainstream media, you don’t hear much sympathy from tea party supporters for Occupy Wall Street, or vice versa. But ever since OWS began a month ago as a few dozen people refusing to leave a downtown park, I’ve found myself wondering, why not? Might these two groups find areas of common interest on which they can work together? And if they could do that, how much might they accomplish that neither side can hope to achieve alone?

On the surface, the goals of the tea party (such as they have become) and Occupy Wall Street (amorphous as they remain) couldn’t be more different. Tea partiers, after sublimating their early anti-bailouts focus, have targeted their furor in a more traditional, anti-Washington direction — albeit with newfangled “constitutional” trappings and an amped-up concern for deficits and debt. OWS, on the other hand, is chiefly concerned with those Americans (middle class and otherwise) who are left out of the tea party’s calculus: The millions whose ambitions and earning potential are being thwarted by a system that demands a smarter workforce, but doesn’t create enough (or good-enough) jobs to enable college graduates to pay off their student loans. The homeowners who were pushed into suspect mortgages during the go-go ’00s, then weren’t bailed out when the banks were. And the millions whose livelihoods have been threatened by corporations that enrich executives and shareholders while cutting “head count” and benefits, sending jobs overseas, and gaming the government to minimize their tax burdens and avoid accountability for their screw-ups.

The vague outcomes sought by OWS – a more equitable carving up of the economic pie, and a society that values the well-being of the 99 as well as the 1 – would doubtless require a slew of new taxes on the wealthy, new spending to alleviate poverty, new policies aimed at improving the lots of everyone from illegal immigrants to folks whose mortgages are under water, and new regulations that limit corporations’ ability to (generally speaking) forsake the public interest in pursuit of grotesque profits. All of which are anathema to the tea party, of course.

Let’s face one important fact: In the previous two paragraphs, you could replace every instance of the phrases “tea party” and “Occupy Wall Street” with the words “conservative” and “liberal,” and you’d have a fair summation of the ideological chasm that has driven American debate since 1932. Considering the polarization that bogs down our politics, and the near death of compromise as an acceptable policy outcome, it’s difficult to imagine that a tea party-OWS coalition might agree on solutions to the policy issues that vex us.

However, there’s one key trait that links the two movements – one that just might extract us from our corporate/banking/political quagmire — and that is their anti-establishment roots. Tea partiers haven’t been afraid to challenge moderate politicians favored by the GOP poobahs, and tea party congressmen have been giving John Boehner fits all year. Meanwhile, OWS has emerged from the populist left, and the Obama administration has no clue how to harness it – not after turning healthcare reform into an insurance-lobby giveaway, turning the SEC and Justice Department’s attention away from dozens of Wall Street criminals, and giving away most of the store on Dodd-Frank in order to appease the banking interests who funded Obama in ’08. (New York Fed alum Timothy Geithner doesn’t have a populist bone in his body, anyway.)

The GOP establishment may have succeeded recently in distracting tea partiers’ ire away from the banks, but that movement’s “big bang” remains the TARP legislation of 2008, which revealed the unholy alliance between the government and financial institutions – a cesspool of lobbying and shady deals, with execs lining up to pass through an incestuous revolving door linking Wall Street, K Street, and the Treasury Department. The bank bust and TARP — plus three years of watching Congress fail to make economic progress with its lame half-measures, watching business rake in record profits while refusing to re-invest, and watching the nation’s income disparity grow more and more obscene – have now served as the “big bang” for OWS, as well.

The root of all those evils – and the issue on which the anti-establishment twain just might meet – is the confluence of money and politics. It’s time to recognize that the damage done to American democracy by our pay-to-play system of campaign financing and interest-group lobbying, which first exploded during Watergate, is at a similar crisis point now – exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s absurd, plutocratic decision in the Citizens United case. We actually may be in an even worse place than Watergate, because it’s not simply an administration that’s on the verge of going down. It’s our entire economy.

We The People occasionally rise up on Election Day and believe we have overturned the political order — in fact, it’s happened twice in the last five years — but then we watch helplessly as our politicians and business leaders resume their mutual lap dance. It’s an arrangement that benefits incumbents in both parties who have elections to win, sweetheart deals and earmarks to offer, and little time to make up their own minds on the issues of the day … much less write their own bills to police the financial and industrial sectors. It benefits the banking and corporate elites – and occasionally, depending on who holds power, the labor unions and various interest groups — who have money to burn on campaign contributions and lobbyists, and who are constantly in search of ways to leverage that cash to manipulate lawmakers. And it benefits … just about nobody else. Not the working class, certainly. And, these days, not even the middle-class families once so fetishized by politicians from Reagan to Clinton.

Just as, two years ago, the more conservative among those middle-class voters gravitated toward the tea party, right now the more progressive ones are getting ginned up over OWS. Each group wants a profoundly different outcome – but neither is going to get anywhere near it as long as Washington and Wall Street continue to 69 on the other side of a very pricey peephole.

Considering the current Supreme Court’s antagonism toward middle-class interests, even a broad-based alliance between tea partiers and OWS types is unlikely to forge real campaign-finance reform – at least not without a constitutional amendment that bans large donations and institutes strict public-financing rules. (As anyone who watched Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary knows, fomenting support for such an amendment from the grass roots is possible, but can require decades of struggle.) In the meantime, though, both sides working together might use their populist strength – and the power of the primary election — to force lawmakers into implementing outright bans on gifts, junkets, plane rides and other goodies provided by lobbyists, and also into disbanding their own political action committees and unilaterally rejecting campaign funds from corporations and special-interest PACS, if not big checks entirely.

Getting big money out of politics certainly appeals to OWS activists, who seek to deny corporations their current kung-fu grip over our legislative process. It should also appeal to tea partiers, who repeatedly express interest in curbing the power of incumbency and who insist that politicians “listen to the American people.” If these two groups could recognize this shared interest, perhaps their joined forces could remake American campaigns and governance, and restore a modicum of political power to the masses. Then they could go back to ideological war, and let the most convincing arguments (rather than the most cash-infused candidates) win.

Will it ever happen? Probably not. Too many Americans have their ideological blinders too firmly attached to find common ground on even this one issue. And asking the voting multitudes to see through the Matrix of money and power in Washington is like asking the entire nation to subscribe to the Utne Reader. It’s one thing for the tea party base to push back so instinctively against the corporatist Mitt Romney that even Herman Cain can lead the polls; it’s another thing to imagine them joining forces with folks they’re currently mocking with calls to “put down the bongo drums and get a job.” And those crowds in Lower Manhattan might relocate en masse to Denmark before they’d make a deal with that rabble who get off on depicting their president with a bone through his nose.

What’s more likely is that, just as the tea party is slowly but surely being subsumed within the GOP, Occupy Wall Street eventually will become the activist arm of the Democratic Party. Lawmakers will pay increased lip service to the populism on both sides, while continuing to rake in dollars and watered-down drinks from the corporations, banks and special interests who really control our politics. In exchange, we’ll continue to get watered-down domestic legislation that can’t break a filibuster, and wouldn’t really change anything if it did. And the rich will get richer, and the middle class will shrivel like Barry Bonds’ balls.

Somebody, please, prove me wrong.

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I’m not going to launch into an elaborate introduction about Steve Jobs’ death. You know it happened; you can consume facts and opinion about it, and share your own thoughts, here at Popdose and all over every communications medium around the globe. What I’m interested in, for the purpose of this column, is: Why have we invested so much (figuratively, though also literally) in this guy? And why does his loss resonate so deeply among us?

The easy answer is, because he made our lives better. Here was a guy who basically invented personal computing as we know it, then 15 years later transformed the way we listen to music — and then, within a decade after that, gave us a pair of devices whose functions expand infinitely upon those two previous innovations, and whose implications we’re only beginning to figure out. (Of course, he also practically invented “planned obsolescence,” but that’s another story.)

OK, simple enough. But some questions remain: Why have we attached such importance to the loss of this one individual, when we know that Apple will continue as a multinational conglomerate that dominates the field of hand-held communication and personal entertainment? Why, at a time when Americans’ default position is to suspect the worst of practically every prominent institution and powerful person, do we lionize Jobs to the degree that we do? And why does the timing of his death only seem to magnify the profound meaning of his life?

The cynical, yet indubitably correct, answer to the first two questions is: marketing. Steve Jobs was Apple, in the public’s mind – and that’s precisely the way he and Apple’s marketers planned it, over more than a quarter century of invention, manufacturing and selling. Intuitively, we all know that Jobs didn’t spend his days donning that white spacesuit folks wear when they head into the clean room to play around with computer chips. Yet, thanks in large part to a cadre of marketing geniuses (and his willingness to attach his own face and reputation to his products), he will go down in history with the greatest of American inventors, with Benjamin Franklin and Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Nobody knows the names of the R&D guys at Sony who invented the Walkman or the Trinitron; Bill Gates, household name though he is, has an altogether more complicated legacy. But Jobs will live on in our hearts, as well as our earbuds.

As for that third question … I find it profoundly interesting that at the moment of Jobs’ death, the news media are abuzz over a nascent movement that is calling into serious question the efficacy, and indeed the morality, of American business. Sure, Occupy Wall Street is primarily about the banks and bankers who have enriched themselves through risky and fraudulent ventures while bringing the economy to the brink of ruin. And it’s about the politicians who have allowed this to happen, through deregulation and fiscal policies that for three decades have benefited the few at the expense of the many.

But it’s also about every large, faceless corporation that has spent the last decade downsizing, moving jobs overseas, slashing worker benefits, and otherwise gearing its operations to enrich shareholders and top executives rather than to keep American employees working and thriving. It’s about every corporation that’s currently hoarding giant wads of cash that it should be investing in new plants and equipment, and new hires that might help get this nation’s economy moving rather than stagnating. It’s about overpaid CEOs whining about “uncertainty,” which is code for “we’re holding the economy hostage until somebody in Washington guts our industries’ regulations and guarantees our taxes won’t go up, ever.”

Occupy Wall Street somehow doesn’t feel like it’s about Apple, though, and it isn’t about Steve Jobs. (It is about Gates and Microsoft, and our long memories of that company’s attempts to monopolize the market for operating systems and internet browsers, and otherwise thwart competition in the Silicon Valley.) No one has ever gained much traction painting Apple as a poster child for bad corporate behavior. We have tended to forget, or ignore, the fact that iPods and iPhones and iPads are made in China, just like so many other all-American products. We ignore the reports of terrible conditions at the factory that manufactures those gadgets – workers earning 51 cents an hour, even below normal Chinese standards, and guards carrying machine guns. Those conditions are so bad that last year more than a dozen workers took their own lives by jumping off the roof. (So many others attempted to do so that management strung netting between buildings to catch the jumpers.) Now the company is planning to put all those malcontents out of work … and move its plant to another part of China where employees will accept even less than 51 cents.

We largely ignored Teamsters president James Hoffa, just last month, when he noted that Apple has been sitting on cash reserves of $76 billion while investing practically nothing in the U.S. (those sleek and absurdly busy stores in every major shopping mall notwithstanding). And we certainly didn’t begrudge Jobs his personal fortune of $6 billion or so, which will now be distributed by his estate – rather little of it to the government through “death taxes,” no doubt.

Somehow it seems painful, blasphemous, disrespectful of the dead, just to mention this stuff. Nevertheless, it’s all there in the public record. But we won’t pay much mind to it as we memorialize Steve Jobs in the coming days. Perhaps Apple’s long standing as the underdog in the computing industry, with sales lagging far behind PCs even as everybody acknowledged the higher quality of Apple’s products, inoculated the company against the ill will we’re happy to heap upon Microsoft. (Or upon Dell and Hewlett Packard, which share that Chinese factory complex with Apple.) Perhaps Jobs’ long and public illness gave him a halo that extended to his entire company.

More likely, we’ll forgive Jobs his sins – heck, we don’t have to forgive them; we’ve rarely even noticed them – because he gave us what we want. Every year or so, we could count on him strolling out on a stage and introducing some new (or newly revamped) gadget that would become our national obsession, and that would conquer all competitors via its intuitive design and sheer ease of use. He did this better than anyone else ever has, really – and, more than we do with any other product on the market, we have associated our enjoyment of (and increasing reliance on) our Apple toys with Jobs himself. Because of him, Apple has not been a faceless corporation whose Up in the Air outsourcing we impugn or whose anonymous machinations we suspect; because we are so devoted to the products of his invention, we’ve never been inclined to look our (pricey) gifts in the mouth anyway.

So what do we do with ourselves now? It’s somehow fitting that, the day before Jobs’ death, Apple executed a product rollout that seemed anticlimactic, if not disappointing. Who wants an iPhone 4S for Christmas when we all thought an iPhone 5 was coming? Perhaps Jobs might have put it across more effectively, if he rather than some other guy had strolled out onstage to introduce it Tuesday afternoon. But now that Jobs is gone, we have already begun to suspect that Apple’s innovation is bound to lag – and if our fears prove correct, perhaps the time will come to look into that Chinese factory and $76 billion bank account a bit more closely.

For now, though, rest in peace, Steve. From this day forward, I dedicate my every game of Angry Birds to your memory.

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One of the most common tropes in the action-adventure film – particularly the comic actioner – is the car (or train, or bus) that careens toward the cliff/riverbank/unfinished bridge and screeches to a stop just before it’s too late. As the vehicle dangles on the precipice, the passengers scramble out the back to safety, then turn around to contemplate the disaster that might have been. Sometimes their ride home stays put … and sometimes it tumbles into the abyss.

Teafoxlicans were gambling on that first outcome this summer as they played out their scenario over the debt ceiling, putting the pedal to the metal on the nation’s financial well-being and demanding a ransom in the trillions (spending cuts only!) before they would hit the brakes and avoid a devastating default. Early last week they finally got their deal, left the car teetering on the brink, and climbed out the back, fully expecting that they’d be able to drive home later. Instead, it now seems clear that the car has gone over the cliff – with your 401k and mine inside.

Of course, there are other action-pic metaphors I could have chosen – the bitter climax of the atrocious Perfect Storm, perhaps, when the sun comes out briefly but then disappears, and Clooney turns to Wahlberg and grimly intones, “She’s not gonna let us out.” (Those of us peering into the bleak future might quote John C. Reilly’s so-bad-they’re-horrible final words before being swallowed up by the drink: “This is gonna be hard on my little boy.”)

Right wingers have lashed out in fury this past week at those who have taken to calling them “hostage takers” and “economic terrorists.” Still, to beat the action-flick metaphor just a bit more firmly into the ground, I might suggest that when GOP leaders famously showed their House colleagues a clip from The Town to gird them for the final debt-ceiling battle, they might have been better off showing the climax of The Dark Knight. After all, the Joker’s amoral brilliance in pitting two ferryboats against one another, and daring each to blow up the other before he sends both to oblivion, is a nice metaphor for the Teafoxlicans’ play here: pitting the full faith and credit of the United States against recovery-killing spending cuts.

Sadly, in this case, it seems that both boats have now exploded. But I can guarantee you that Democrats will never stoop to creating Photoshop images that morph John Boehner or Eric Cantor’s face with the Joker’s. That’s not how progressives roll; frankly, we don’t have the balls.

OK, so I stand corrected. Anyway … and I promise I’m finished with the film references … one can’t help but wish that a middle-of-the-road alternative had been found to this latest fiasco. Imagine that cooler heads had prevailed all the way around, and that in a couple years — after the 2012 election, and after an economist-approved second effort at stimulus that focused on job-creating measures such as infrastructure banks and/or Tom Friedman’s pipe dream of green-tech manufacturing – Democrats and Republicans had agreed to implement a debt-reduction plan modeled on Simpson-Bowles. That plan might have bent the entitlement cost curve via retirement-age adjustments, means testing and an end to caps on payroll taxes, while also bringing spending down from its current historic highs (25 percent of GDP) and taxes up from their current historic lows (just over 15 percent of GDP), to an equivalent share of GDP set at approximately 19 percent. There’s no guarantee that the economy would have sprung back to life under such a scenario – we had all better get used to the likelihood that times will never again be as good, nor the help-wanted listings ever again as voluminous, as they were in the late 1990s – but at least the world’s political and financial systems would have more confidence in our nation’s ability to solve problems than we currently deserve.

Unfortunately, the politics and the economics of our current fiscal meltdown are nowadays so intertwined that they cannot be analyzed separately, even by Standard & Poor’s or our creditors in China. It has already been documented that the Tea Party Caucus and the House GOP leadership spent at least eight months strategizing how they were going to use brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as a catalyst for their agenda. You would think that in all that time they might have, at some point, entertained the possibility that acting like lunatics right up to the last minute might somehow shake the confidence of both Wall Street and the multitudinous Main Streets in the U.S. and abroad. Apparently not – and instead they did such a bang-up job carrying out their half-assed plan that they’ve exposed themselves as entirely too irrational to participate in governing a country. What’s more – and what’s worse – they’ve managed to convince the markets, our creditors, and at least one rating agency that any government with Teafoxlicans grasping one of the reins of power cannot be trusted to maintain even a minimum baseline of economic stability. Even Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolutionaries didn’t screw the pooch this badly, or this quickly in their brief reign of (t)error.

It didn’t have to be this way. There has rightfully been a lot of discussion the last few weeks about the lost art of compromise, in the wake of the Tea Partiers’ utter recalcitrance in refusing a “grand bargain” on debt reduction. They had the opportunity, weeks before the deadline was reached, to accept a deal that would have enacted big spending cuts, and even instituted entitlement reform, in exchange for a minimal amount in “revenue enhancements” – i.e., tax hikes on the rich, or even (eventually, as Democrats did their best to negotiate away the store) merely a few loophole closures. They might have been able to portray themselves as shrewd bargainers who took a very small hit to their own anti-tax “values” in order to achieve a major push forward for their agenda, all while keeping the markets calm and our creditors happy.

But, of course, the House GOP blew it. They had to hew to their no-new-taxes orthodoxy, and they had to drive all the way to the edge of that cliff to see how much booty they could extort before they slammed on the brakes. And what did they wind up with? A smaller deal than they could have gotten otherwise, a “super-committee” with practically no chance of success, and a “trigger” mechanism likely to blow gaping, and indiscriminate, holes in both the entitlement and defense budgets. Not to mention a resounding no-confidence vote from Wall Street and the Chinese that seems to have put us right back where we were in September 2008, with hundreds of billions of dollars of lost wealth in the marketplace and millions more Americans losing job opportunities, postponing retirements yet again, or otherwise being forced once more to adjust their standards of living downward.

But this time, of course, there will be no attempt to stimulate the economy from Washington. Another key element of Teafoxlican orthodoxy holds that the half-hearted, nearly half-tax-cuts 2009 stimulus “didn’t work,” and that job-creating investments in infrastructure, clean-energy manufacturing, or new technologies represent foolish attempts to “spend our way out of recession.” Government must be shrunk further and further, the “thinking” goes, no matter what the circumstances or the impact on the broader economy. Never mind the historical precedent of 1937, when a contraction of government spending turned a recovery into a double-dip depression. And never mind the opinion shared by every smart economist that now is the time for government to fill the role abdicated by a business community that simply will not hire, not to pull the rug (or, rather, the safety net) out from under tens of millions who are in danger of falling into poverty if they have not already done so. That argument is rarely heard anymore, consumed in a conflagration of Teafoxlican harping on debts and deficits.

That harping represents their one clear success – their ability to transform the political narrative from what it should be (a slow-but-steady effort to clean up the financial and political messes of the last decade, and make sure they won’t be repeated) to what they want it to be (an endless rant about debts that supposedly have only spiraled out of control over the past 2½ years). The right wing have moved the entire conversation in their desired direction, thanks in part to the loudness of their voices and in part to the fact that they, and they alone, were willing to put a gun to the nation’s head and threaten to shoot.

Please note that nowhere in the above sentence did I write “because they have a point.” They don’t. Yes, deficits will need to be brought under control eventually, and yes, both discretionary spending cuts and entitlement reform (along with tax increases) are absolutely necessary to put our financial house in order. But putting a stopper on government spending shouldn’t have happened now, in the midst of a continuing recession marked by a singular unwillingness of the nation’s businesses to contribute to recovery. And deficit reduction should never have been attached to a game of Russian Roulette with the debt ceiling.

The refusal to make these points, and to fight valiantly for some measure of sanity over the last seven months, is the signature failure of Barack Obama’s presidency. On Sunday the author and psych professor Drew Weston detailed, in a brilliant New York Times op-ed, the ways in which Obama – who had been, up until the day before his inauguration, the new century’s greatest orator – failed to use his prodigious skills to create a narrative for his presidency that might have withstood the Teafoxlican revolt. By identifying (early and specifically) the sources of the nation’s troubles, by describing how he was going to act to bring those responsible to account and how he was going to repair our broken financial and political systems – and then by making every one of his initiatives (healthcare included) fit within that narrative – Obama could, and should, have driven the public dialogue the way Ronald Reagan did, no matter how effective the Gipper’s zig-zagging policies turned out to be.

Instead, Obama has turned too much policy-making over to the congressional sausage-grinder, and his far-too-frequent abdication of the bully pulpit has allowed right-wing nutjobs to fill the vacuum created by his silence. Too often, as well, he has pursued bipartisanship in the face of unrelenting evidence that he had no partner in his efforts at conciliation – most recently in his willingness to give up tax hikes far too early in the debt-ceiling negotiations, and in his unwillingness to use the 14th amendment to defuse the Teafoxlicans’ threats to plunge the nation into default.

While watching Obama give away entirely too much of the store in recent months, I have often thought of the deal Jackie Robinson cut with Branch Rickey back in 1945: Robinson would turn the other cheek in the face of insults and intolerance for three seasons in the majors, but would be turned loose to fight back and retaliate after that. Is it possible, now that this utter disaster has exposed the Teafoxlicans’ inability to participate rationally in our governance, that Obama will finally take off the kid gloves and destroy them rhetorically the way he should have two summers ago? Will he now, at long last, grab the reins of leadership fully and finally from a Congress that is universally distrusted and clearly at its wit’s end? Is Obama even capable of being that kind of guy? Does he want to be?

If not, we need to find a leader who does. And here’s where I break my earlier promise, and conclude with one more film reference – paraphrasing a line delivered repeatedly by Dan Hedaya’s character in the lackluster Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano. We know Obama was impressive enough to get the job. We know he’ll probably be able to keep the job. But can he do the job? The jury’s still out on that one, and unless he proves himself up to the task of truly seizing control of this mess, America may still have a way to go before we hit bottom.

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