Arre We A Nation Off Our Meds?

Perhaps some peace could be gained if pollsters stopped polling for a while, or the media ceased reporting their endless tabulations of a national mental breakdown; but then again, without these clinical surveys, how would we know just how goofy we actually are?

Of course we can also add a but to that but: Sure, polls collectively guage our goofiness level, but if we are in fact exceptionally goofy, just what is it that a nation populated by so many dense airheads is capable of doing about it?

Anyway, here's the latest from USA Today/Gallup -- and this one's the kind of whopper that compels one to either laughter or apathy, either disbelief or disgust: Half of all Americans now say that Barack Obama "deserves at least a 'moderate' amount of blame ... for the nation's economic problems"; and half of them believe he deserves a "great deal" of that blame.

Peculiar indeed is that the second statistic is actually less unsettling: there is, and pretty much always has been, about one-quarter of the U.S. population that's eager to expose its utter detachment from reality, no matter what the issue. But that half of this once-great republic now sentimentally reflects the clinically goofy one-quarter is ... let's not be alarmist here ... alarming.

Now, it's true that U.S. presidents have far less control over the economy than most folks believe, and it's similarly true that whatever influence U.S. presidents do have over the economy most likely won't reveal itself within a span of 15 months.

But consider for a moment what Obama's 15 months have been subsequent to: years of plutocratic frivolity, fiscal malfeasance, rising income inequality, executive unaccountability, working-class stagnation, official indifference, unprovoked and unpaid-for war, unfunded entitlements, trade imbalances, a breathtaking swing from surplus to debt ...

And for the inescapable and unavoidably long-term fallout from that, it's Obama who deserves a "moderate" level of blame?

Half the nation believes that? In simplest terms, psychosis means a detachment from reality. I rest my case: We as a nation are either half-crazy, or half of us are completely nuts. Take your descriptive pick.

"If the election were [held] now, we'd have a 'change' election; we'd have a 1994," said Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton's pollster in that dark year, to USA Today.

Yet I'd characterize another 1994 as more of a "relapse" than change. As I understand it, virtually every schizophrenic thinks he'll do better than the last time he got off his meds, a.m.a. -- although his underlying disease is, of course, unmitigated. You can work out the beckoning metaphor from there.

Still, Greenberg "questions whether Republicans will be in a position to capitalize on voter discontent." And therein lies a surprisingly valid questioning, since these days the Republican National Committee finds itself compelled to clarify that its fundraising phone bank is not, in fact, housed at a phone-sex center.

On a grander scale, however, predictive doubts stem from a repeatedly verified scattering of the electorate: "The anti-tax 'Tea Party' movement has a favorable rating nearly as high as [the major parties] do -- 37% compared with 41% for Democrats and 42% for the GOP."

Now that's nuts; however the upside is that Tea Party-endorsed candidates could wind up wreaking some famous havoc in GOP primaries, thereby opening a breach for you-know-who. To date, the empirical evidence from recent primaries has said no; it tends to confirm that disorganized Tea Partyers will, by and large, support the "mainstream" Republican, out of a desperation to defeat Democrats, if nothing else.

The thing is, though, nobody knows where the electorate might stand even one month from now, let alone in seven months.

But sure, you say, that's self-evident. The future is always impossible to accurately predict. And that of course is true. Nonetheless, in this case here's the vastly distressing kicker: The future is not normally resistant to accurate predictions largely because of the intervening variable of raging madness.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter


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