What is the sound of one tooth gnashing?

Something like this: CLUMP-SCRAAAAPE “Ow my fucking gums are bleeding again!”

I haven’t written about politics for a while because, good lord, what is there to say? Americans are stupid, and we’re getting ready to prove it again.

I said at the beginning of the primaries that I liked Obama a lot, but I thought he’d benefit from some seasoning. I saw a picture in my mind’s eye of him being sworn in with more meat on his bones, some gray in his temples, after having been senator for a term or two, then governor of Illinois. That guy looked like the first black president to me.

And who knows? I may still be right.

It’s not even that Obama’s a bad candidate this time around. He’s not lightning in a jar, but he’s not John Kerry or Al Gore circa 2000, either. He gives great speech, but his great speeches are in the mold of the great speeches of old. They inspire and challenge the listener to lift him- or herself up to the standard of the speaker’s rhetoric. And as a country, we’re just not up to putting in that kind of effort anymore. These days, even when we go to war, we’re not asked to sacrifice anything - on the contrary, our leaders tell us the patriotic thing to do is go shopping. Which we can do from home, at our computers. Being a patriot used to take effort. Ask John McCain.

Garrison Keillor wrote a typically well-thought-out, well-researched piece on the subject of the nasty turn in recent polling, with this thesis: “Hello? Do you see us out here? We are not fruit flies, we are voters, we can read and write, we didn't just fall off the coal truck.”

Wrong! Yes we did. At least the so-called Independents have if the shift in polls since Gov. Palin’s convention speech is any indication. Keillor then goes on to de-bunk all the lies the campaign has been repeating about her daily, but so what? Nobody cares! All he’s doing is flinging around boring facts, he might as well be prepping us for a history mid-term. Do you honestly think John and Jane Q. Hockeymom are gonna stick around till the paragraph starting with, “When you check the actuarial tables…”?

Fuck, no. Mr. Radio-guy is just lording it over everybody how smart he is, what a snob, how elite. Christ, isn’t he on Public Radio? What else do you need to know about his “leanings?”

Back when I was doing speed, I hung out a lot of your basic truck-drivin’, gun-owning types, and one of them finally pulled me aside one day and told me I was rubbing people the wrong way with my highfalutin’ vocabulary (the result of an educational zeal that didn’t take me a single step further than the mandatory minimum 12 years). I learned real quick that Regular Folks don’t like it when they think you’re trying to show off your intelligence, because that’s not something they even have respect for in the first place. What they want to know is, Can you field-dress a moose? And while we’re having that beer together, how’sabout you flash us them titties?

Keillor's misread of the electorate reflects the same mistake the Democratic party keeps making; we keep nominating Richie Cunningham while the GOP keeps running The Fonz. Gosh Mrs. C, that’s not much of a contest, is it? Your Bill Clinton type – who is both policy wonk and affable skirt-chaser you’d like to have a beer with – only comes along once in a generation. Apparently.

The only reason the GOP at first decried Obama’s celebrity (remember their creepy “The One” commercial, where he shared screen time with Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and various giant phallic symbols?) is because they were scared of it. They’d run on it themselves and pulled off two increasingly improbable election wins in a row with it, and this time the other side had the telegenic goods in the bag instead of them.

But now that that they’ve got their own literal beauty queen on the ticket, they’re back in the pink and as a nation, we’re poised to screw the poor, hapless pooch yet once again. I don’t even think running Hillary against this Palin woman would have done the trick. Hillary’s no hockey mom, and that’s what the rubes are buying this year.

Are we really on-track to bestowing the presidency upon the Oldest Living Candidate ever who, in between multiple bouts with skin cancer, still found time to rubber-stamp most of the Bush administration’s nation-busting policies for the last 8 years?

Yes, we are.

Do we really think it’s a good idea to put a totally unknown quantity with scant executive and no legislative experience one heartbeat away from the Oldest Living Candidate ever, just because she can read a teleprompter and has a white-trash melodrama playing out in real time that the rubes in the hinterlands can relate to?

Yes, we do.

We can’t really be getting ready to keep executive power in the hands of the same party that has aggrandized and squandered it so rapaciously for most of the last decade, devastating us at home and humiliating us abroad, can we?

Yes, we can.