P.M. Carpenter

A flame to a moth is nothing compared to the attraction of a television camera to a United States senator, and yesterday this anthropological fact of political life was -- as though it needed to be -- proven once again, as the full comedy troupe of Max Baucus & Friends made its much-awaited and splashy debut.

And boy is it a good thing the show's headliner, Max himself, had already marked up a bill and toiled so faithfully with his five fellow gang members for roughly a year; now they have only a bit more than 500 amendments to ponder before the end of the week.

Headlining was Max, but actually starring, or so I thought, was Iowa's Mr. Sunshine, ranking committee member Chuck Grassley. I didn't catch all of his act, but what I did see on C-Span was the most disingenuous folderol I've heard since Republican speeches tumbled in pseudopatriotic unison onto the Senate floor in support of the coming Iraq disaster.

This was not a good sign.

On Sunday, CNN's John King asked President Obama: "Our Pentagon correspondent ... has been told that General McChrystal has finished his report and his recommendation to you, but he has been told, 'Don't call us; we'll call you. Hold it.' Are you or someone working for you asking him to sit on that at the moment because of the dicey politics of this?"

To which Obama gave a winding, modern-Afghanistan-survey-course, 389-word answer, which I have reduced here to a mere 138:

It's the damnedest damned if he does, damned if he doesn't predicament I've seen in politics for some time.

When President Obama neglects to publicly work the health-care issue for ten minutes running, he's accused of dogging it, of failing to provide leadership -- and that, rather than health-care reform, becomes the preeminent story. When he stages a media blitz, he's assaulted for being "overexposed" -- and that, rather than health-care reform, becomes the preeminent story.

Anything to avoid covering the substance of this rather dry subject, inextricably packed as it is with the mysterious bureaucratic language of penalty-bearing "mandates" and unbending "cost curves" and other such unavoidable, byzantine details. All that complexity for a somewhat bemused American electorate, half of which, as I recall from one poll last decade, couldn't name the sitting vice president of the United States; and all that complexity "reported" by depthless media that are still pondering whether racism is a meddling factor in American politics.

Two brief passages in Adam Nagourney's above-the-fold "Political Memo" this morning stand as a salute -- or surrender? -- to the well-nigh comical perniciousness of modern American politics.

The far right, observed Nagourney from the vantage point of Friday's "Values Voters Summit" in Washington, is officially leaderless, idealess, and, let's face it, downright clueless as to how to cure its idealessness; it has suffered a "string of electoral defeats"; its base is much smaller and now so superannuated it's approaching the point of extinction -- yet, merely by making a public jackass of itself, toting Obama-Hitler signs and shouting down lawmakers, this "formerly dispirited base of the Republican Party" now possesses "new hope ... that it can still command public attention and influence policy in Washington."

Because it does command public attention. There is no subjunctive here, where there should be. This is not a matter of ill-tempered toddlers merely trying to gain the attention of adults and thereby shortcircuit the well-behaved product of responsible parenting. No, the right has their attention. The adults, the grownups, the parents, are all ears.

I try my best to avoid writing apocalyptic pieces, since, according to the blogosphere, the sky has been falling with almost daily regularity since roughly the blogosphere's creation. Still, it's time to look around and acknowledge that, to seize on just the latest example, Sen. Max Baucus' wasted days and wasted nights of fraudulent bipartisanship were but the tip of a representative democracy on the major skids. And recovery is questionable.

Yesterday I noted the Politico's characterization of contemporary bipartisanship as "The Great Myth" -- every Washington pol knows, observed the paper, "that the political incentives driving them toward conflict are vastly stronger than any impulses they may personally harbor for conciliation and compromise" -- yet failed bipartisanship is but a symptom, it seems to me and many others, of that far uglier disease mentioned above, which we'll return to momentarily.

This is hardly news, even though the Politico in recent days headlined it as "The Great Myth": the prospect, that is, "that there’s any chance of genuinely bipartisan health care legislation reaching [President Obama's] desk this fall."

And if "myth" seems too gentle of an appellation for the intentionally deceptive, how about, more accurately, a bipartisan "charade"? -- a kind of cynical, two-party dance "performed for the benefit of a huge bloc of practical-minded voters who hunger for the two parties to work together and are mystified that it never seems to happen."

But if casual dancing characterized the charade of bipartisan health-care legislation up until yesterday, we can safely say that Max Baucus' finance committee -- more narrowly, its Gang of Six -- has staged the all-time lollapalooza of ballroom galas.

It wasn't until this morning, when I read this passage in the Politico -- "As he sat in the chamber awaiting the start of the vote, [he] nervously wrote notes on a sheet of white paper" -- that I realized who Rep. Joe Wilson reminded me of: Shelley Berman -- the 1960s stool-sitting stand-up comedian who specialized in playing a sniveling, whining, jittery, neurotic little spoof of a man.

Did I say man? The only good reason to keep contemptible rodents like Wilson around the House -- other than that a lot more contemptible rodents in South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District want him there, and that's their perfectly democratic business -- is to remind us from time to time that at least a few good men, such as South Carolina's Jim Clyburn, still serve.

President Obama's speech in Manhattan yesterday, on the nation's economic troubles and needed Wall Street reforms, was, like pretty much everything else these days, also about health care.

Though pointedly delivered on the one-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers' explosive collapse and intended to spur regulatory reform, the president's purpose was, as well, to allay heightening public fears that the federal government's intervention in, and ownership of, the economy is unbounded -- fears gleefully stoked and exploited by anti-health-care-reform elements, which, in turn, have led in part to the Washington Post's latest poll findings: that "President Obama continues to face significant public resistance to his drive to initiate far-reaching changes to the country's health-care system."

There was, in particular, one middle-aged lady among the teeming, aggressively benighted masses which thronged the National Mall on Saturday who was, in my opinion, trying just a trifle too hard at faking sincerity.

She's a schoolteacher, from Jacksonville, Fla., who told the NY Times that "It's more than Obama -- this isn't a Republican or Democratic issue." She went on to explain that she and many others in the crowd had been seething for years at the government's growth and its Constitutional abuses; they were purely philosophical citizens all, we were asked to believe, who only coincidentally had had enough following the installation of a black Democrat as president of the United States. Nothing partisan or personal, you understand.

If history is a reliable guide -- and it usually is -- that substantial uptick in President Obama's health-care approval rating will soon be followed by an unpleasant descent, leaving him just about where he started before Wednesday night's speech. Thus so much for the first half of Democratic-consultant Joe Trippi's deliberations: "He has to reach down there and make something big happen in the country -- either a lot of Americans changing their minds, or members of Congress backing his agenda even if it puts their own political hides at risk."

To which Trippi added -- unrhetorically, as far as I know -- "Can he get people to do these things?" Ah, there's the rub in the political balance sheets; the prospect of a handful of at-risk lawmakers' unemployment versus progress for 300 million. No contest, right? Save the lawmakers.