P.M. Carpenter

As this marathon health-care bill enters the uncertainty of semifinals tonight, we are left with one question of much broader philosophical scope: What in God's name are the likes of Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln doing in the Senate Democratic caucus?

Don't get me wrong. Only the radically unhinged insist on the contemporary equivalent of Cold War loyalty oaths and few demand that comprehensive ideology tests be rigorously applied to Democratic members of Congress. The oldest political party in the world achieved that status because of its often exasperating diversity of opinion and doctrinaire sloppiness -- fair enough.

But should there not be one issue of paramount public importance each year, or each Congressional session, or, at the very least, each decade or even century that the pertinent pols must sign on to if they plan on calling themselves Democrats or caucusing with same?

Doubtless you recall all those plucky reassurances from the Democratic establishment earlier this month about what sure looked like political bloodbaths in Virginia and New Jersey. In the former's gubernatorial contest, the Republican victor annihilated the Democratic loser among independent voters by a prodigious 31 points; in the latter, by nearly 30. But, comforted the establishment, Those races don't mean a thing, nothing to see here folks, move along, it's just some local trouble with no wider implications.

You knew it was humbug then. And now, reports the Politico, the establishment is finally 'fessing up. Those races weren't offering idiosyncratic, mystical tea leaves to be interrupted by personal whim; they were unmistakable foghorns of doom.

I was about mid-sip last night when MSNBC's Ed Schultz induced the coffee-spraying moment: "What's the holdup?" he abruptly asked a dumbfounded Sherrod Brown about health-care legislation in the Senate. Why aren't all Democrats on board with this yet? he continued, apparently back on board himself with legislation he's derided for weeks.

I understand Mr. Schultz's frustration, as well as his ambivalence. We fought and won the First World War in nearly less time than has been devoted to butchering health-care reform. What I don't understand, however, is how liberals like Schultz can now envision the end zone, just as that zone has receded farther than ever.

The way things are going -- or, to be more precise, the way things are crawling or stalling or dying -- Congressional Democrats have only one major hope for 2010: the Republican Party's hardest-core base.

There the GOP was, earlier this month, primed for what seemed like a shockingly substantial comeback. It retook the governorships of two populous states, rattled the Democratic Establishment, and, above all, had election-winning independents swooning.

The party's chairman, Michael Steele, was once again moved to rhetorical heights, bellowing and boasting about a "Republican renaissance." But this time, Michael was actually on to something: In at least one of the gubernatorial instances, his party had taken a historically immoderate man and force-fed him a modern, moderate message and plastered him in a moderate image.

So, it turns out there's at least one major upside to George W. Bush's fiscal recklessness: Reuters reports that his successor -- having just suffered a $1.4 trillion deficit and spent the mammoth sum of $6.7 billion in Afghanistan in merely one summer month (June) -- sees prodigiously unattractive "budget implications," as the NY Times put it in a "Well, duh" moment, for any U.S. troop escalation.

Every which way the White House Office of Management and Budget cuts it, for every added troop we send to that war-torn sinkhole we also send along about a million taxpayer bucks, says OMB.

There's the soldier's pay, of course, but far more than that, there's everything that soldier will need while he or she is there: tanks, Humvees, planes, helicopters, replacement equipment, intelligence services to help stay alive, a place to dwell and modern roads to travel on. That sort of stuff.

The aggregate math, then, is fairly easy: send about 40,000 troops and we spend about $40 billion. That is, another $40 billion, each year -- or another $3.3 billion on top of June's $6.7 billion.

The good news is that 7 out of 10 Americans don't believe that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president of the United States; the bad news is that 3 out of 10 do, which only confirms my long-held theory that we can always expect about one-third of the American electorate to believe absolutely anything, support absolutely any cause, agitate for absolutely any lunatic.

Among Republicans, says the recent CNN poll from which the above figures are extracted, the imbalance in favor of lucidity is less pronounced, of course: a slight majority says yes, Ms. Palin is indeed qualified to hover over the nuclear button. After all, she's a mom, and as she argues in this week's newly released blockbuster of personal memoir and political philosophy, Going Rogue, "there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood."

President Obama was only partly correct when, as Senator Obama, he ventured that we live not in a red America or blue America. Because, oh, how we love to dwell tribally in our red or blue cable networks and news.

Tribalism -- even if, in the cases of Fox and much of MSNBC, it is structured electronically -- provides us a sense of security, a sense of oneness and wholeness, an elimination of any uneasy doubt, a barrier against the "Other" as well as a handy (if not righteous) social instrument to bludgeon the Other's political culture.

Tribalism is reinforcement; it is not exploration. Hence Keith Olbermann, like Senator Obama, was only partially correct when he told the Associated Press last month that the odd man out, CNN, "seems to still think it is the primary source for its viewers, that they know nothing until they tune in. This is, ever increasingly, nonsensical. People now watch news on TV for elucidation and context and analysis. They have brought the facts with them."

A bit more than a week ago I wrote that "it's safe to conclude there's not an outside observer left who doesn't believe there's electoral trouble stirring," and now come a couple of new polls -- one showing the symptoms of a national rage turned inward; the other, mostly just the rage.

The first -- the depression-diagnosing Associated Press-GfK poll -- I briefly mentioned yesterday in reference to Afghanistan. The American body politic's demoralization is deepening: In merely one month, a whopping seven percent of respondents added themselves to the disapproving chorus.

Roughly the same percentage joined the ranks of those who "disapprove of Obama's handling of Iraq," which, given Iraq's relative obscurity in the news of late, was, I would wager, more of an indication of generic discontent than any specific dissatisfaction.

In the latest AP-GfK poll we see a seven-point uptick, from last month, in disapproval of President Obama's handling of Afghanistan, as well as a four-point increase -- now at 54 percent -- in opposition to sending more troops.

Whether they're just weary of what seems to be an unwinnable war or are consumed with all things domestically troubled, the American people, by and large, "get it" -- assuming the poll's accuracy, of course, and assuming other polling corroboration and assuming a sustained uptick in opposition. That's a lot of assumptions, but the atmospherics, if you will, would also seem to confirm them.

We've had it. We've had enough. We want out; or at the very least, we'd like to see no more than a little hastened training of Afghan security forces. In that immutable nation, one more year of ramming our heads into a brick wall is as good as 20.

"We are winning," declared former president Bill Clinton to a gathering of Democratic senators yesterday on the issue of health care, in the clearest sign yet that they're losing.

When your team must be told that it's winning, when the easy grace of impending victory gives way to the stilted panic of propaganda, then you know you're in trouble -- big trouble.