Gene Taylor (4-MS) this week became the first House democrat to sign the Repeal Obamacare petition.

Democrats in larger numbers are deserting Obama and calling for tax cuts for all Americans.

A.B. Stoddart, at the Hill, observes that you don’t have to wait for November to tell that the tide has turned, the Tea Party has already stopped Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid’s leftist offensive. The war will continue, but the initiative has changed sides.

Even before Christine O’Donnell handily defeated Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) in an epic upset Tuesday night, the Tea Parties, all of them, had already won. No matter what happens in the midterm elections on Nov. 2, the Tea Party has moved the Democrats to the right and the Republicans even more so, and President Obama’s agenda is dead. ...

As of last week, before the House and Senate even reconvened, it was clear there were enough Senate Democrats joining Republicans seeking an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest earners that the Democrats don’t have the votes to pass President Obama’s permanent extension of the middle-class tax cuts without passing cuts for the top two tax brackets as well.

When Obama introduced his latest economic proposals earlier this month, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), an ally of the Obama White House, immediately put out a statement not only criticizing Obama’s newest infrastructure plan but knocking the original stimulus as well. “I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package. Any new transportation initiatives can be funded through the Recovery Act, which still contains unused funds,” Bennet said.

Obama won’t get his infrastructure plan through the Congress, and he knows it. Next year, when he is running for reelection, tax and budget reform will be the only issues he could realistically work on with a GOP majority or a razor-thin Democratic majority. In other words, the Tea Party agenda.

The Tea Party candidates themselves — like O’Donnell, whom Karl Rove called “nutty,” — matter little. Only a few will actually get elected this fall. Yet the Tea Party has won without them. There are no tea leaves left to read. Democrats have been spooked and Republicans threatened, cajoled or cleansed. The results are already in.

“Obama has underestimated the frustration in the country and the power of the Tea Party movement, which gives the prevailing disillusionment a platform and a voice. It is by far the most vibrant political force in America. Obama’s left-of-center coalition, which got young people and intellectuals involved and which appealed to a majority of women, blacks and Latinos, has evaporated into nothing. ...

The new right, though, is on the rise. It sets the agenda. America is facing a shift to the right. The Republicans have already marched in this direction of their own accord, regardless how many Tea Party reactionaries get a seat and a voice in Congress in November. The Democrats and the president have been put totally on the defensive. From now on they will only be able to react, rather than act.

Willem-Adolphe Bouguereau, Liberal Democrat Pursued By the Furies, 1862, Chrysler Museum of Art

Rich Lowery explains how the democrat minority lucked into control of both electoral branches of government and then proceeded to self destruct.

The frustrations of minority status can drive a political party batty.

The temptation is to substitute belligerence for thought, insist on a self-destructive purity, lash out at the American public and question the wisdom and viability of the country’s institutions. Indulging in these tendencies almost always makes a party’s position worse rather than better.

The Obama Democrats may be the first party to engage in this self-defeating behavior—borne of a frustrated desperation—while holding the presidency and both houses of Congress by substantial margins.

Through an accident of timing (a national election coinciding with a financial crisis) and the exhaustion of the Bush-DeLay Republicans (who lost power almost by default), liberals took the commanding heights of the federal government while remaining a minority disposition in our national life. In short, they became a rump majority.

Through President Obama’s alchemy, these temporarily enlarged congressional numbers were supposed to be transformed into a permanent realignment. It hasn’t worked out, obviously.

In the last 20 months, Democrats have had the power to do almost everything they want, except command the allegiance of the public. That has made them and their allies feel embattled, isolated and perpetually aggrieved. They act like a forlorn minority at the same time they control every lever of elective power in Washington.

The ultimate source of the Democrats’ discontent is quite simple: They’ve lost independents. In 1994, in taking Congress, Republicans won independents by 14 percentage points. In 2006, in taking it back, Democrats won independents by 18 points. In the latest Gallup survey, Republicans lead among independents by 11 points. ...

The pollster.com average of Obama’s approval rating among independents is a dismal 37.9 percent. This meltdown should have launched a thousand agonized liberal op-eds, conferences and strategy papers on how to win back the center. If, that is, liberalism had any realistic sense of its limits.

In the midst of a catastrophic loss of the middle, Obama’s supporters exhort him to get more angry, insistent and ambitiously liberal. Having already pushed for a bridge too far, they want to go farther still. When they can’t, they conclude it’s a damning indictment of Obama’s failure of nerve and the nation’s ungovernablility.

There’s little acknowledgment that the country is in a different place than they are. To the extent there is, so much worse for the country, which is condemned for its backwardness and intolerance. The majority is not just wrong on immigration enforcement and the Ground Zero mosque, it’s contemptible. Who knew that the American public would get accused of bigotry more often after electing an African-American president than before?

As former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner writes, liberals “are expressing deepening alienation from our nation and turning on the American people with a vengeance.” They thought they had a mandate from heaven in 2008 and can’t bear the thought that they deluded themselves. They’ve gone from triumphalism to a petulant and uncomprehending tantrum in less than two years. The rump majority looks more exhausted by the day.

Rep. Melissa Bean, democratic incumbent of the 8th-IL congressional district (Phil Crane’s old district) turns in a remarkably unresponsive performance at a town meeting held at the Round Lake, Illinois Public Library on August 12. The congresswoman was accompanied by a large male who loomed threateningly over persons daring to ask questions.

This 6:30 video is clearly edited with partisan intent, but it shows enough that is obviously real to be disturbing.

Any bets on whether Rep. Bean will be returning to Washington next year?

Hat tip to Jim Hoft.

70 House democrats (really 69, since Robert Wexler, 19-FL, resigned in January in order to accept a lucrative position heading up a marvelously well-funded, pro-Palestinian Jewish organization) belong to the Democratic Socialists of America. “Democratic Socialist” is a term of art for you-know-what. (Hint: Begins with “C.”) They’ll soon be short two more, once ethics problems end the careers of Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel. (Gateway Pundit)

Fox News interviews Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell on the results of a Democracy Corps poll indicating that 64% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

5:59 video

The democratic party is fracturing… the democratic party has essentially been hijacked by an educated… over-educated, elite group who basically don’t care about the people who constitute the democratic party. ... It is a much graver constitutional crisis. We have a situation where we have 21% of the people who believe that the government is operating with the consent of the governed, from the Declaration of Independence. 21! 68% say no. 57% of the people in a CNN poll said a few months ago said they believe the federal government is becoming a direct and immediate threat to their own freedom. Now, I’m telling you, that is pre-revolutionary. What’s happening is, this sense of pushing people. We’re going to shove this down your throat. We’re going to shove this. We know better. The issue is very simple: who is sovereign in this country? the people or the political class? ... We are heading for a tidal wave kin November, the likes of which I don’t even know the dimensions yet. It’s still forming.

Hat tip to Ace via Bird Dog.

The Washington Examiner says it’s time for democrats in Washington to quit kidding themselves. Their economic policies don’t work.

[T]he stimulus bill has proven to be an extraordinary waste of borrowed money that has failed to create jobs, generate economic growth or do much of anything other than line the pockets of White House political allies. That and give $308 million in subsidies to BP before the Gulf oil spill disaster, and subsidize a study on what happens when monkeys snort coke.

As [Christina] Romer [chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, who retired on Friday] fades back to her teaching post at Berkeley, Obama is adding to the economic misery by creating an environment of regulatory uncertainty. The Wall Street reform law Obama recently signed potentially requires 533 new regulations, 60 studies and 93 reports, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has 29 active rulemakings, and there are 100 new rules on the Labor Department’s agenda and 26 at the Transportation Department.

Add Obama’s determination to raise everybody’s taxes by allowing the Bush cuts from 2001 and 2003 to expire Jan. 1, 2011, and it’s easy to why banks, businesses and consumers are hoarding trillions of dollars that could otherwise spur economic growth. And we haven’t even addressed the destructive effect on economic growth of Obama’s nationalization of major portions of the economy, including the banks, health care and the auto industry.

The economy is stalling, unemployment seems stuck at European levels of idleness, the federal deficit and the national debt are at historic highs, public confidence in Congress is at its lowest-ever level and big majorities of Mainstream Americans say Obama has the country on the wrong path. Obamanomics has failed miserably and it’s time for everybody in this town to admit it so we can move on.

While The Plum Line reports:

In another sign that House Dem leaders are eager to silence talk about them losing the House, top Democrats are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill that lays out a detailed case for why Republicans will come up short this fall.

Daniel Foster puts it slightly differently:

[Y]ou’re seeing the DCCC telling their members that the House majority is going to a beautiful farm upstate where it can run freely and play with other Democratic majorities.

4:49 video

Our leaders in Washington in action and thought.

2:59 video

Hat tip to Ronald Nadel.

Charlie Cook, in the National Journal, issues a hurricane warning for democrats. “Make no mistake about it: There is a wave out there, and for Democrats, the House is, at best, teetering on the edge.”

Among the registered voters in the [latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll], Republicans led by 2 points on the generic congressional ballot test, 45 percent to 43 percent. This may not sound like a lot, given that Democrats now hold 59 percent of House seats. When this same poll was taken in June 2008, however, Democrats led by 19 points, 52 percent to 33 percent.

That drop-off should be enough to sober Democrats up, but the next set of data was even more chilling. First, keep in mind that all registered voters don’t vote even in presidential years, and that in midterm elections the turnout is about one-third less. In an attempt to ascertain who really is most likely to vote, pollsters asked registered voters, on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested they were in the November elections. Those who said either 9 or 10 added up to just over half of the registered voters, coming in at 51 percent.

Hart and McInturff then looked at the change among the most-interested voters from the same survey in 2008. Although 2010 is a “down-shifting” election, from a high-turnout presidential year to a lower-turnout midterm year, one group was more interested in November than it was in 2008: those who had voted for Republican John McCain for president. And the groups that showed the largest decline in interest? Those who voted for Barack Obama—liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age. These are the “Holy Mackerel” numbers.

Among all voters, there has been a significant swing since 2008 when Democrats took their new majority won in 2006 to an even higher level. But when you home in on those people in this survey who are most likely to vote, the numbers are devastating. The NBC/WSJ survey, when combined with a previously released NPR study of likely voters in 70 competitive House districts by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger, point to an outcome for Democrats that is as serious as a heart attack. Make no mistake about it: There is a wave out there, and for Democrats, the House is, at best, teetering on the edge.

To be sure, things could change in the four months between now and November 2. The GOP’s failure to get Republicans to vote in the May 18 special election in Pennsylvania’s 12th District underscores that the party can’t just sit back and await spontaneous combustion in terms of turnout. Still, the potential is here for a result that is proportional to some of the bigger postwar midterm wave elections. These kinds of waves are often ragged; almost always some candidates who looked dead somehow survive and others who were deemed safe get sucked down in the undertow. That’s the nature of these beasts. But the recent numbers confirm that trends first spotted late last summer have fully developed into at least a Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

Given how many House seats were newly won by Democrats in 2008 in GOP districts, and given that this election is leading into an all-important redistricting year, this reversal of fortune couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Democrats.

Bill Hobbs:

Son said, “Dad, what’s a Democrat?” I explained Dems like to take your money and spend it themselves. He’s a Republican now and forever.

John Hinderaker puts it even better:

A simple way to think about the Democratic Party is, you’re the human being, they’re the tapeworm. Yet they claim a weird sort of parasite’s moral superiority over you: if you point out that they have their hand in your pocket, you’re a “smartass.” The Democratic Party needs to be torn, root and branch, from our public life.

George Will observes that the spectre of real world consequences is haunting Barack Obama and his democrat allies.

Concerning the job numbers from May, one can almost echo Henry James’s exclamation after examining letters pertaining to Lord Byron’s incest: “Nauseating perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.” Except that the May numbers’ significance can be expressed: A theory is being nibbled to death by facts.

Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May.

The Progressive attempt to change America into a European-style Socialist Welfare State in the midst of an economic crisis has, it is increasingly becoming clear, prevented the recovery that should now be well underway, and deepened the misery.

Americans are experiencing hard times, wholesale bank and business failures, joblessness, and home foreclosures in a fashion not seen since the Great Depression.

All this coincides with state government bankruptcies and a European crisis caused by exactly the same policies. Governments everywhere are discovering the truth of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “the problem with Socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.

Democrats are going to be annihilated in next November’s elections.

A century ago, they could come here legally.

Michael Gerson discusses how Republicans are committing political suicide, attempting to apply the precise same strategy that cost the GOP its political competitiveness in California nationally.

According to a 2008 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 49 percent of Hispanics said that Democrats had more concern for people of their background; 7 percent believed this was true of Republicans. Since the Arizona controversy, this gap can only have grown. In a matter of months, Hispanic voters in Arizona have gone from being among the most pro-GOP in the nation to being among the most hostile.

Immigration issues are emotional and complex. But this must be recognized for what it is: political suicide. Consider that Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.

Even describing this reality invites scorn from those who regard immigration as a matter of principle instead of politics. But this represents a deep misunderstanding of politics itself. In America, political ideals are carried by parties. Republicans who are pro-business and pro-life, support a strong national defense and oppose deficit spending depend on one another to achieve influence. Each of these convictions alienates someone—pro-choice voters, economic liberals, pacifists. But Republican activists who alienate not an issue-group but an influential, growing ethnic group are a threat to every other constituency. The vocal faction of anti-immigrant Republicans is not merely part of a coalition; it will eventually make it impossible for anyone else in that coalition to succeed at the national level.

The good news for Republicans is that Hispanics tend to be entrepreneurial and socially conservative. While the general image Hispanics hold of the GOP is poor, individual Republican candidates can make significant inroads. In presidential elections, Hispanic support can swing widely. In 1996, Bill Clinton got 72 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, John Kerry’s support was in the 50s. And Republicans do not need to win a majority of the Latino vote to compete nationally, just a competitive minority of that vote.

But even this modest goal is impossible if Hispanic voters feel targeted rather than courted.

The history of the left in this country is a history of division. Whatever conflict was current—labor vs. management, class vs. class, race vs. race—there you’d find the left, stirring things up in order to derive as much political benefit as possible. A workable democratic system demands a willingness to seek consensus and engage in compromise. The left prefers Balkanization and permanent conflict.

For some years now, it has appeared that the Leftist formula had reached the end of its string. The corrupt and crime-ridden unions were on their last legs, hemorrhaging members even as they drove jobs overseas. Blacks were steadily moving into the middle class and becoming less susceptible to separatist rhetoric. An attempt to transform the university student body into a permanent revolutionary phalanx on the Peronist model had only partial success—students were willing to play while actually on campus, but after graduation they went on to more interesting pursuits.

So how to keep the pot boiling? The answer was to go find a new millet—or rather, to take advantage of the one next door, of the desperate people fleeing a serial kleptocracy, an uneducated, ignorant, and frightened mass open to all forms of manipulation.

This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn’t challenge a six-year-old, are executed so half-heartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent “virtual fence”). It explains the irrational response to Arizona’s effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law—Arizona’s statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness, or practicality, or any of the other reasons offered by “reform” advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.

The left wishes to use the illegals as a battering ram against the American polity, the same as they used labor, and blacks, and every other group they ever encountered. Illegals will become a new protected class, with privileges and entitlements denied the rest of the populace (including, ironically, current members of previous such classes). They will be discouraged from learning English, as occurs today under the doctrine of “bilingualism”, to assure that they remain a separate presence. A vast bureaucracy will arise to “assist” the new citizenry, funded with billions—oh hell, make that trillions, this is the Obama era—and staffed with sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, and other disciplines unimagined today. All will be of the same political persuasion. A permanent crisis atmosphere will be generated around the new class. The “Amnestee” question will lead to endless problems and ramifications and act as a permanent indictment of the country and its policies. The native population (not to mention legal immigrants) will grow increasingly embittered and angered. The former illegals will be rendered even more miserable than they are today.

The solution is obvious. There must be no amnesty. Such an action would simply drop a permanent inassimilable presence in the midst of American society. Current law must be executed to the fullest, and where necessary (as in all the border states) reinforced with new state laws. Illegals now in the country must be encouraged to regularize themselves according to recognized procedure. They must not be allowed, for their sakes and ours, to become clients of the left-wing establishment. The immigrant problem must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, according to individual circumstances. The notion that there is an acceptable mass solution is pure fantasy.

While this may involve some hardship—and will certainly give rise to cries of “unfairness”—it is in the long run the best solution for all concerned. Even the illegals will be better off. Becoming a member of a left-wing client class may not be the worst possible fate, but it’s not far from the bottom either, as generations of welfare families can attest. American leftists did nothing for this country’s workers once the union vote-getting machines were established. The same can be said of blacks in the inner cities once the political machines were in action there. The goal of power is simply to perpetuate itself. Actually solving problems might interfere with that process.

When Republicans are doing bad things, you can count on democrats to offer to go them one better.

The Hill:

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal. ...

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.

“People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin added. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”

Ezra Klein offers details of the democrat plan, and actually identifies the important irony. Note that all this does not give the ephebe Ezra any particular problem personally.

The Democrats’ immigration-reform proposal (pdf) is 26 pages long. Pages 8 through 18 are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.” I don’t think the Democrats are going to like me calling this a biometric national ID card, as they go to great lengths to say that it is not a national ID card, and make it “unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.”

But it’s still a biometric national ID card. It’s handed out by the Social Security Administration and employers are required to check it when hiring new employees. Essentially, if you want to participate in the American economy, you need this card. “Within five (5) years of the date of enactment, the fraud-proof social security card will serve as the sole acceptable document to be produced by an employee to an employer for employment verification purposes,” the bill says. “This requirement will exist even if the employer does not yet possess the capability to electronically verify the employee by scanning the card through a card reader.”

The theory here is simple: Illegal immigration is a problem because illegal immigrants can get jobs. As the bill says, “in order to prevent future waves of illegal immigration, this proposal recognizes that no matter what we do on the border, our ports of entry, and in the interior, we will not be completely effective unless we can prevent the hiring, recruitment, or referral of unauthorized aliens in America’s workplaces. Jobs are what draw illegal immigrants to the United States.” ...

The oddity of this strategy, of course, is that anti-immigration sentiments run highest among the same communities that are most opposed to national ID cards. Now, it’s also the case that if you’re going to support citizenship searches for people with Hispanic-looking shoes, it’s a bit odd to worry about an ID card to verify employment. But even so, without Republicans on the bill to give this strategy cover, it’ll be interesting to see whether the anti-immigrant right embraces the ID card as a way of staunching the flow of illegal immigrants or assails Democrats for trying to create a biometric police state.

Frank Luntz debunks the democrats’ supposed financial “reform” at Huffington Post of all places. This editorial would fit just fine on any conservative blog site.

The New York Times’ headline said it all: “Off Wall St., Worries About Financial Bill”. The Democrats in Washington may think it’s a slam dunk, but the rest of America doesn’t agree.

Look, those who are on the side of significant financial reform are fighting on the side of the angels—and with broad public support. We are fed up with Wall Street abuses and arrogance that makes life for the rest of us on Main Street more difficult. Let’s hold people and businesses more accountable and responsible for what they do and how they do it.

But that doesn’t suddenly equate to support for the legislation now being considered by the Senate. In exactly the same way that the public wanted healthcare reform, just not Obama’s healthcare reform, they want something done to punish the perpetrators of the financial meltdown, but not at the expense of their own checking accounts—or American economic freedom.

The dirty secret of the Senate financial reform bill is that some of its biggest supporters work on Wall Street. Recipients of taxpayer bailout money have no concerns about the bill—in fact, the CEOs of Citi and Goldman Sachs have publicly endorsed it, and several of the other big banks have expressed support. It keeps the “too big to fail” guarantees in place for another generation of financial services companies.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. The Democrats supporting the current legislation have assured an anxious electorate that whatever funds are used to create whatever regulatory scheme created will come from the banks, not the taxpayers. Let me emphasize that so that even casual readers will catch it: the Democrats promise that you won’t pay for their legislation, banks will.

Really?

Since when have corporations ever paid taxes, fees or penalties? Employees end up paying in the form of lower salaries and benefits. Customers end up paying in the form of higher costs.

And in this case, every account holder will be forced to pay higher fees on their checking account and savings account. That’s you, my friendly reader. Can you say “checkbook tax”? I can, and I think lots of candidates will be saying it come November. Is that what you really want to do to your constituents, Senator Lincoln? Is that what you really want to explain on the campaign trail, Senator Bennett?

But it goes deeper than just taxation and regulation. Wall Street can pass it all onto consumers. Main Street cannot. And that’s because Wall Street firms have all those pesky well-connected, nicely dressed lobbyists to ensure that whatever is passed strengthens their hand at the expense of the little guy.

Regardless of what side you’re on, the financial reform bill is special interest heaven—a bill written by lobbyists, for lobbyists, and will probably be implemented by lobbyists. The Dodd bill has carve-outs right from the get-go. Real estate agents, title companies, the Farm Credit system, even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae are exempt from its onerous and costly provisions. And for everyone else, it’s been a special interest feeding frenzy.

More than 130 companies have publicly hired lobbyists seeking their own loophole. Mars Candy wants to continue to use derivatives to hedge against price hikes in sugar and chocolate, so they’ve hired a lobbyist. Harley Davidson wants to protect dealer financing of their bikes, so they’ve hired a lobbyist. And eBay wants to not harm its subsidiary, PayPal, so they’ve hired … well … a team of lobbyists.

But most average Americans—the ones who bailed Wall Street out in the first place—cannot afford lobbyists, and won’t be exempted from the legislation.

There’s a reason why American trust in government is at an all-time low. Voters believe legislation like this is passed not for the public interest, but for special interests. And that is certainly the case with the Dodd bill.