I wrote a post on election day which talked about the politics of personal destruction that Lee Atwater created and used in the most vile way imaginable. It was so successful that it spawned his heir apparent, Karl Rove who has carried the mantle proudly. They play on the prejudices of Americans in such a way as to bring out the dark underbelly of society. I said that if Obama had won the election then not only did America rise up to vote for the better man, it also repudiated the Lee Atwater school of campaigning, at least for now.

Has a real crisis beaten the Lee Atwater school of smear politics?

So today is the day we all get to find out if the Lee Atwater school of politics has been defeated by the reality of our economic situation.

It has taken a real crisis to combat the very successful campaign strategy that Atwater championed to win George H.W. Bush the White House in '88. The same techniques that Karl Rove mastered and implemented in beating McCain and then Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Will truth and reality finally win out?

I wish I could tell you that Americans henceforth will never be influenced by scurrilous personal attack ads and campaign smears in the future, but my hope today is that finally this great nation has been shocked into actually using their brains to decide who should lead us out of the wilderness that came upon due to the negligence of Conservatism. I think Americans unfortunately have a short memory span and these dirty tactics will always be with us. If Obama wins, then I do think that America have no excuses any more if they do get taken in by these cowardly tricks. So I say to you now:

Yes, We Can.

I believed that it wouldn't end with Obama's election and those who thought so were a bit naive. Well, now it's come back with a vengeance and it's sick and it's ugly, but it's real. Everything that has come out of the mouths of the conservative movement and transmitted by their conduits to the public has been targeted at racial elements in our society.

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(Jerry Brown: Post-Reagan - Pre-Jarvis - hair and optimism in abundance)

Since today is an election day in California, and since California is teetering on an abyss yet again, I ran across an old Meet The Press from October 15, 1975 featuring an interview with Governor Jerry Brown.

In 1975 California had a $300 million surplus. But then, the average household income was $13K a year (hard to imagine . . .not really). New York City was the problem child at the time, plunging hip-deep in bankruptcy and asking for bailout money from the government. To a lot of people it seemed an abstract concept, the U.S. Government actually bailing a city out, and the Ford Administration were loath to offer any help at first. But that was New York City - it could never happen in California.

Famous last words.

So here is Jerry Brown in his first year as Governor in 1975. Loaded with optimism and new ideas and all was sailing along before that little thing called Prop 13 and the Howard Jarvis Tax initiative blew into Sacramento in 1978. And 34 years later we're casting our eyes to Washington with hopes of a bailout.

I've included commercials for one of the sponsors of Meet The Press - Exxon. Seems the issue of clean coal just can't get off the ground.

Like I always say, some things just never change.

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Republicans were out this weekend in force, holding town-hall meetings designed to "reconnect" with constituents -- and demonstrating in the process that they remain as clueless as ever.

As it happens, there was also an interesting Rasmussen poll showing that those constituents basically despise them:

Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party’s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.

Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.

In other words, the Republican base, by a large margin, is unhappy with their party's political leadership for not being right-wing enough. And that happens to comport with what their real leadership, aka the Right-Wing Punditocracy, has been saying.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the electorate at large has a distinctly different outlook. They strongly want Republicans to cooperate with President Obama, and strongly believe they are not making a good-faith effort to do so, either. Republicans want to fight, but this not a fight Republicans are winning:

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that the president has a 63 percent favorability rating. But 31 percent of Americans approve of how congressional Republicans have conducted themselves, a dropoff of 13 percentage points from February when the same question was asked.

Here's the standard GOP analysis of the problem:

Shortly after the November elections, Republicans en masse began to acknowledge that the party had lost its way on the issue of fiscal discipline during the Bush administration. Their vote against the stimulus bill was the first real test for Republicans to exercise their frustration with what they describe as excessive federal spending. And they're shaping a message around this theme.

"We are united," said Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "The debt of this country is a national crisis and a national security issue."

The problem with this is that Republicans seem to believe that it was simply George W. Bush's profligate ways with the budget that caused the economic disaster we currently are confronting. And that's part of the picture, to be sure. But only a small part.

The cold reality is that, as we explained after the election, the economic turmoil was created by a broad swath of Bush policies that, in every respect, were clear products of conservative fiscal and governmental philosophy:

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