P.M. Carpenter

One could almost literally see the thought bubbles above Obama's head on Sunday, in the Rose Garden: "Now it falls on the United States Senate" -- God help us, I know these charlatans firsthand -- "to take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line" -- Yeah, if the baton were lathered with earmarks, maybe, and the finish line were a pot of fundraising gold -- "on behalf of the American people" -- Who writes these fantasies? -- "and I’m absolutely confident that they will" -- Well, not really confident, more like hopeful, actually, a bit disillusioned, no, in reality, downright discouraged and depressed.

Whether or not one believes that President Obama deserves this particular Congress, one must concede, simply put, that he asked far too much of it. Revamping such a huge and broken segment of the American economy -- health care -- is a job for dispassionate lawmakers with an eye toward what works nationally, not poseurs and popinjays with an eye only for reelection back home.

The evidence keeps piling up; virtually all that voters care about these days -- which is to say, worry about -- is the economy. And that means jobs.

Those without them reached the official mark of 10.2 percent last week -- the highest level of unemployment in more than a quarter-century -- while the unofficial casualties have climbed to 17.5 percent, probably the worst since the Great Depression.

These are what you might loosely call the base numbers behind what Democratic pollster Peter Hart, speaking yesterday morning on CNN's "State of the Union," pointedly called the electorate's "disgust" at Washington. "You have to do something to get people back to work," he said, with noted exasperation, "otherwise Democrats and incumbents are going to be in trouble" in 2010.

"President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Washington have rebranded themselves as the party of economic irresponsibility."

Thus wrote, in a ruthless affront to recent history, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.

It came in the third paragraph of a rather compressed, possibly hurried, five-paragraphs-long NY Times op-ed this Thursday morning, in which the author was celebrating this week's birth of a "New Republican Party," in venues such as Virginia. How did Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell do it? How did he pull it off in the wake of a massively Democratic 2008 and the state's previously rapid purpling?

How much do we really know about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old Army psychiatrist who went on a killing spree yesterday at Fort Hood, Texas?

Not much. He was born and raised in Virginia, was medically trained by the Army, became disillusioned with his career and employer when ridiculed by fellow soldiers about his religion -- Islam, and had psychologically counseled returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan and was resisting his own deployment into a war zone.

"He was doing everything he could to avoid that," his cousin told the press. "He wanted to do whatever he could within the rules to make sure he wouldn’t go over," which included retaining legal counsel to find a commission-releasing loophole, but the attorney couldn't. (The Army might want to rethink that reg, not for the benefit of future Maj. Hasans, but for their colleagues.)

Other than that, we know that an Army spokesman, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, doesn't know much, either. He informed the press that "terrorism was not being ruled out, but that preliminary evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism."

So, we really don't know. It seems that the man simply snapped. But "seems" is about the best we can do for now -- unless, of course, we go to the source of all human wisdom: right-wing Web sites.

On Monday, 24 hours before the Democratic Party's, shall we say, misfortunes in New Jersey and Virginia, there appeared in the Times a fateful piece, in which Jeff Zeleny wrote, "Interviews with voters across Iowa offer a window into how the president’s standing has leveled off, especially among the independents and Republicans who contributed ... to his margin of victory in the caucuses here."

On Tuesday, east-coast fellow independents and Republicans officially registered a similar "leveling off" -- exit-polling responses denying this defied a striking conspicuousness -- and by now, it's safe to conclude there's not an outside observer left who doesn't believe there's electoral trouble stirring that's much larger than the interior goings on in two goobernatorial races.

And President Obama had better start getting out in front of it.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod perhaps framed it best, and if not best, at least with admirable economy: "The real story here is, I think this thing is ambiguous."

That of course is true, yet the pregnant downsides to last night's elections -- in addition to the media's growing narrative of President Obama's lack of one -- outweighed, no doubt, the positives for Obama's larger agenda. And in politics it's always more prudent to internally analyze one's weaknesses and the opposition's strengths rather than celebrate whatever success has been had.

Such as Democrat Bill Owens' victory over Conservative Doug Hoffman, whose most uplifting scene was surely this, as reported this morning by the Times: "Mr. Hoffman spoke to a deflated crowd of about 50 in a hotel ballroom here soon after midnight."

It just keeps getting worse.

A climbing death toll. Firefights and terrorist bombings. Indigenous distrust. Limitless corruption. Hundreds of billions of dollars -- gone, nothing to show. Eight neglectful years, staggering to an ever-receding finish line. Even a high-ranking Foreign Service officer who's gone public with his crisis of patriotic faith: "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan.... [M]y resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Why and to what end, indeed.

Dede Scozzafava's Saturday understatement of withdrawal -- "Polls have indicated that my chances of winning this election are not as strong as we would like them to be" -- was the most clarity we've heard from New York's 23rd Congressional District in days.

A Scozzafava-campaign associate had earlier offered the rather vague but universal view: "This is the strangest thing I have ever seen. I don’t know what to make of this thing, to be honest. There are so many angles to this thing. It’s wild."

Political angles, both strange and wild, have dominated this suddenly two-man race, now between Republican-Scozzafava-endorsed Democrat Bill Owens and the Conservative Party's Doug Hoffman. But some things never change. For instance, prominent national Republicans who, out of deep convictions and imperishable principles, of course, had steadfastly backed Scozzafava and roundly condemned Hoffman, lurched on Saturday with unalarming alacrity to their former enemy's camp.

In New York's Owens-Scozzafava-Hoffman race there had loomed two major narratives of keen-enough interest in the right's internal spats, but both are suddenly receding in the early shadows of, perhaps, a much broader electoral -- and unspeakable -- shift.

First, a short look into the conventional narratives.

The Times concisely framed one of them earlier this week: "The race ... has become a contentious referendum on the [Republican] party’s future, and its outcome will help shape what kinds of candidates the Republicans run as they look to rebuild their ranks in Congress next fall."

And none other than conservative Newt Gingrich, who, as you know, is backing the "liberal" GOP candidate, just as concisely framed the other narrative, which is largely procedural in nature: He cautioned his fellow Republicans about the "grave danger of establishing the precedent that every faction can run a third-party candidate if they lose a primary or a convention," thus sabotaging many a legitimate GOP candidacy and electing the Democrat.

According to at least two recent polls, the American public is in a funk -- or perhaps I should say, is still in a funk, or is back in a funk, or worse, is maybe showing signs of fixed and permanent funkdom.

Although, says USA Today/Gallup, 6 in 10 Americans assume "the country will be better off in three years" -- by the end, that is, of President Obama's first term -- only 1 in 4 is "satisfied with the country's direction."

That may seem incongruent, and in statistical fact it is. One could write it off as the rather typical contradictoriness of public opinion polls; or, if one is acutely mired in what appears to be the nation's chronic funkness, conclude that our characteristic optimism still yearns to be free, but is being pulled under by a countervailing current of gloom.