When ex-actor Ronald Reagan won the presidency for the first time, I became convinced that American politics had become indistinguishable from show business. Nothing that has happened in the intervening years has caused me to change my mind on the subject. But the phenomenon of television personalities throwing their own pseudo-political "rallies" on the National Mall in Washington certainly breaks new ground in both the political arena and the entertainment world, I have to admit.

I'm speaking, of course, about the upcoming "rallies" on the Mall thrown by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, as a response to the "rally" thrown by Glenn Beck earlier this year. I began thinking about the subject a few weeks ago, when a friend of mine asked if I would be travelling to D.C. for Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" or Colbert's "Rally to Restore Fear" (now combined into one giant "rally"... to restore "sane fear," or perhaps "fearful sanity," one assumes). Well, no. No, I won't. Sorry about that.

Now, I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, so to speak. I certainly don't want to annoy the fans of Stewart and Colbert, who are legion. I guess (to be scrupulously honest) that I don't mind annoying the Beck fans, but they already seem pretty annoyed -- so it'd be hard to even measure any effect my humble column would have on their level of annoyance, I suspect. But someone's got to point out the fact that these "rallies" are nothing more than glorified commercials for television shows. Beck and Stewart and Colbert are entertainers, not politicians or even activists.

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Sheriff Joe Arpaio, of Arizona, recently made the news. In his own words: "I just got done welcoming Sarah Palin to our County [sic]. Had a nice chat and gave her a pair of pink underwear." This marks a turning point in the American political scene, where pink underwear has been rehabilitated, so to speak, within the Republican Party.

Now, I should probably be writing about the election or some other weighty subject, but this news item... well... tickled me pink. [OK, sorry about that. I'll stop now.] Because I remember the historic origins of pink underwear as a political symbol in the Republican Party, which I thought was worth sharing in an effort to provide a lighthearted moment in the midst of the election fracas.

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I hate to say it, but we all might have to get used to saying "Speaker Boehner" pretty soon. But what is this going to mean -- for Republicans, for Democrats, for President Barack Obama, and for the country at large? At this point, these questions are worth examination, because while Democrats may yet avert disaster in the midterms, denying the real possibility of a Republican House next year is now little better than wishful thinking, or (even worse) intentionally burying our collective heads in the sand.

I should start by saying that a Republican takeover of the House is by no means a foregone conclusion. Democrats might indeed stage an upset "victory" (in other words, not losing as much as has been prophesied) and retain a slim margin under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But at this point, it seems more likely -- from looking at the polls -- that Republicans are going to pick up the net 39 seats that they need to grab power in the lower house of Congress.

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I'm going to (mostly) resist the urge to take advantage of this column's volume number in order to write a really gross column. Numerically, and inventory-wise, a "gross" is (of course) one dozen dozen. Twelve squared.

But to dwell on this cheap pun would be unseemly, even though there's plenty of "gross" material out there with which to do so, it being less than two weeks before an election. Even unrelated to the election season, there are several items to choose from (Clarence Thomas' wife calling up Anita Hill to magnanimously allow Hill to apologize to her and her husband would probably lead the pack in this category -- followed soon after by the news of Clarence's girlfriend shopping around a book she's writing which pretty much confirms Hill's account of things... seriously, what decade is this?).

Instead of such sophomoric humor, we're going to move right along to the awards portion of the program. One program note before we do so, though -- this column will not appear next week, due to the way the calendar worked out this year. In its place will be our yearly Hallowe'en column, where we expose a frightening (but, hopefully, not too gross) nightmare scenario for Democrats and Republicans. So join us here next week for that, and two weeks from today this column will resume its normal format.

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President Obama, of late, has been doing quite a bit of soul-searching over his first two years in office. It is odd for this to be made public just before an election, instead of just after one, but it does show, at the very least, that Obama is starting to learn some important lessons from his performance so far. Of course, it can be argued that it may be too late for Obama to have learned these lessons, but then he still does have over half of his term to serve -- so I say better late than never, personally. And (without a shred of evidence to make such a claim) I would also say that the fact that Obama's realization that he has room for improvement comes almost immediately after Rahm Emanuel left the White House is, indeed, no coincidence.

President Obama gave his navel-gazing interview to the New York Times Magazine, where he looks both forward and back. He has also spoken elsewhere this week on a similar theme. And one of the biggest areas for improvement he identifies is on his ability to communicate better why he thinks his agenda is the best one for America to the public.

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Since we seem to be smack in the middle of "debate season," it's worth taking another look at the state of the Senate midterm races. Also, because it has been three weeks since we last took a look at the Senate's political landscape. Since that time, both Republicans and Democrats have seen some movement in their direction, but a large number of states remain simply too close to call, with less than two weeks to go before the election.

Over in the House, it is looking more and more like the Republicans are going to be in control next year. It is still possible for the Democrats to squeak out an upset here, but to do so they'd pretty much have to run the tables of all the races in which they even have a chance. And, if you believe the mainstream media, the momentum is not exactly headed in this direction. But there are so many individual House races that it is almost impossible to keep track of them all, so I leave that sort of thing for the professional poll-watchers.

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Just to be clear, that is "settles" as in "settles an outstanding court case," and not the colonial sense of the word. Native American farmers today agreed to a settlement of their claims of discrimination against the Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) for three-quarters of a billion dollars.

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The folks in the Tea Parties across America should be prepared to be disappointed after this year's election returns are in. That sounds like a sweeping and Democratically-optimistic election prediction, but it's not. I'm actually assuming here that many Tea Party candidates will indeed win at the polls. Instead, what I'm talking about is what happens afterwards. Because while it's a whole lot of fun to wave signs at a rally, actually governing is a whole different story.

The media has already decided this is "The Year Of The Tea Party," no matter what happens at the polls. Something like 130 candidates have been identified (or identified themselves) as Tea Partiers this year. And, as I said, some of them are going to win their races. Not all of them are named Christine O'Donnell, in other words. And they're going to arrive in Washington next January with the wind at their backs, and raring to go. But that's when things are going to get a little tricky.

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[OK, that was rather a fun title to write, but I have to at least begin with a warning that, while today's column is almost completely Obama-centric in focus, that only about the first third of it is going to deal with the gays-in-the-military issue -- the remaining two-thirds will examine the foreclosure mess and what it means politically. Just didn't want to mislead anyone by my title today, that's all.]

The White House has announced (as pretty much everyone expected them to) that they will be asking for a "stay" of the federal judge's order this week which demanded that the United States military immediately cease all enforcement of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy of forbidding openly gay people from serving their country. This was a blow to many who support overturning the policy, since President Obama himself has long advocated (even fiercely, at times) getting rid of it. But now the White House is caught on a tightrope, or (to be less charitable) caught in an extraordinary display of doublethink. What Obama is saying, in essence, is: "We're fighting to get rid of DADT, while at the same time we're fighting to keep it." But, to be more charitable towards the White House, there is a valid constitutional reason for this awkward position, and also a valid political reason.

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[Note: This column originally ran on 11/25/09. Today was likely going to be either a quick column or a re-run anyway, due to an automotive-related appointment; so this column immediately sprang to mind due to the term being in the news again in a political setting.

The back story: Democrat Jerry Brown was just asked (in his final debate with Republican Meg Whitman in the current governor's race in California) about the use by a Brown campaign person of the word "whore" to describe Whitman. Brown and the aide quite obviously didn't know there was a live microphone recording them, and it came in the context of how Whitman had sold out to public unions for endorsements. As far as I'm concerned, this was fair usage of the term, especially in what the participants thought was a private conversation, for reasons outlined in the article below.

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