“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863,” wrote William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust, speaking of the moment just before Pickett’s charge, when “this time, maybe this time” the Confederate forces will achieve a “desperate and unbelievable victory.” And for certain conservatives, now around sixty years old, there is an instant when it’s always 1994, and the rebel troops of Georgia’s Newt Gingrich, armed with the Contract for America, shellacked the Democrats and drove Bill Clinton into despair and confusion.

Well, we know what happened then. Within a few months, Timothy McVeigh took all the anti-Washington rhetoric seriously and blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, and a few months after that Gingrich took all the anti-Washington rhetoric seriously and shut down the government, and that was it for the Republican counter-revolution. Clinton regained control, and governed for another term, despite a vast right-wing conspiracy to de-legitimate his election.

These days, those Gingrichites are in high clover, as by some measures the novelist/Tiffany’ Customer of the Year has taken the lead for the GOP presidential nomination. I wish them the joy of the moment, for it will all be over soon enough. Before long, it will be remembered that before Gingrich met this moment, he stood in line, suit-buttoned, hair-combed, resume suitably updated, while flibbertigibbet Republicans swooned for Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain– in short, pretty nearly anybody–to stand as an alternative to Mitt Romney. Newt is getting a shot now because there is practically no one else in the room. It is impossible to think that Gingrich would be in any way a factor in this race if any of these lightweights had caught fire, or if Jeb Bush or Chris Christie or some other real candidate were running. (Of course, all these other candidates looked strong before they had to actually run, so maybe they would have pulled an el foldo as well.)

Gingrich should not be underestimated. He could win the nomination. He presents himself forcefully and with great confidence, and he brings with him an air of authority. Having gone toe-to-toe with Bill Clinton, he will be able to face President Obama on an equal basis (maybe too much of an equal basis–Gingrich will have trouble looking respectful, and not looking like a condescending know-it-all.) But it says here that long before the election, Gingrich will implode. Seldom have we ever seen a public official more self-impressed and self-satisfied, more in love with his own voice and his own clever formulations, than Newt Gingrich.

He will blow himself up. He nearly did it the other day when he said “child labor laws are stupid.” Lurking with in that remark was the not unreasonable idea that teenagers could be given part-time jobs to teach them a work ethic, pride and responsibility. But Gingrich could not make that simple proposition. He had to throw a bomb. He had to insult a century-old accomplishment of the Progressive Era. He had to assert his own intelligence over all those who spend their lives thinking about children and education and work and poverty. He had to put himself forward as the sneering, snarling expert on everything. Why? He cannot stop himself. He believes he is the smartest man in any room in which he stands.

And that is why he is an idiot.

Writing in The Atlantic last week, James Kwak had the best analysis of the failure of the ludicrously-named Supercommittee: the committee may have failed, but the Republicans won. Indeed, as Kwak says, they had already won.

“In 1994, Newt Gingrich — the man who is now the frontrunner in the Anyone-But-Mitt race — led the conservative bloc to a sweeping electoral victory, definitively wrenching the party out of the grasp of “moderates” like George H.W. Bush. At the time, the top income tax rate was 43.7 percent and the top capital gains tax rate was 29.2 percent, set by the Tax Reform Act signed by President Reagan in 1986.” Obama wants to make the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends permanent at 18.8 % (15% set by the 2003 tax cut, plus 3.8% for Medicare payroll tax); to keep the estate tax exemption at $3.5 million, not $1 million as it was before 2001; and to kill permanently the Pease and PEP (personal exemption phaseout) provisions that were suspended by the 2001 tax cut, would be killed permanently.

To pay for these cuts on the wealthiest Americans, Obama will cut government programs–cut Medicare, cut defense, postpone retirement, on and on. “In short,” says Kwak, “if Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Grover Norquist had a master plan to turn the United States into a low-tax, small-government society back in 1994, it’s safe to say they are ahead of schedule.”

And even so, they are not content. Pressed by the Tea Party insurgents on their right, they are now demanding that that tax rates on the rich go down to 28%. Is this what Americans really want–low taxes on John Paulson and the Koch Brothers in excahnge for shitty schools? I don’t think so.

This is what halted the Republicans in 1994: they didn’t know when to stop. Afflicted by overreach, they shut down the government. In doing so, they saved Bill Clinton‘s presidency. Mark my words: they’re going to save Barack Obama‘s as well.

With the premiere of Iron Lady approaching at the end of December, we are certain to be treated to a heavy dose of Margaret Thatcher‘s greatest hits. None will be more pertinent to the issues of this moment that the point she made in her final Question session as prime minister in 1990, shown in the clip above. In the merry, feisty exchange, a Labor MP respectfully asks her if she regrets that disparity between rich and poor widened during her tenure. Thatcher denied the relevance of such statistics, and instead argued that people of all classes had benefited during under her administration. And that, she said, was the difference between her and her opponents in a nutshell: “He would rather the poor were poorer as long as the rich were less rich.”

Well of course this is a false choice: the poor could certainly be less poor without the rich becoming richer, but that is neither here nor there. Thatcher came up with a phrase that has served as the underpinning for at least fifty years of American policy. Ever since that old sailor John F. Kennedy pointed out that a rising tide floats all boats, it has been widely accepted by nearly all Americans that as long as everyone is improving, we can accept wide discrepancies in wealth. As even the great American mafioso Barzini acknowledged in The Godfather, “After all, we are not communists.” Our social contract accepts the reality of the rich, as long as things overall are improving for everyone.

But as Paul Krugman once again points out today in the Times, things really aren’t improving for anyone. He cites a Congressional Budget Office report that showed that between 1979 and 2005, “the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.”

In other words, the rising tide has been channeled into the Yacht Club’s marina. The super rich have been getting richer, while almost no one else has enjoyed very much of a gain at all. And much of what the super rich have gained has come through government tax-cutting, which has exacerbated the deficit, which hurts everyone. Far from Thatcher’s trade-off, the rich have grown richer precisely at the expense of the poor and middle classes.

I wonder what the Iron Lady would say about that?

In Slate, Michael Moran argues that much of America’s economic difficulties has nothing to do with actual economic problems, and everything to do with the paralysis of the American political system. “Only about 30 percent of the trouble facing the U.S. today is economic,” he writes. “The U.S. economy, compared with all the other developed economies, is in the best structural and demographic shape to weather this storm and ultimately regain its health. But a cancer does exist: The real problem America faces is political, and once again today, it is on stark display.” Moran blames this problem on Americans who don’t vote in primary elections; by leaving the choice of candidates to the partisans of both parties who tend to favor more extreme standard-bearers. “The result: an American economic crisis that is eminently solvable has been trusted to the hands of political hacks representing fringe minority factions within each political parties whose primary incentive is to avoid providing ammunition to the other side. Thus has our political system turned a simple question of accounting into an economic version of the Arab-Israeli conflict – a conflict for which the solution has been clear for 40 years if only either side were willing to deal with reality.”

Well, sure, but blaming 120 million people is the same as blaming no one. I would point the finger at something simpler: the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate on a bill. This is usually incorrectly referred to as the number of votes needed to cut off a filibuster, which often leads people to wonder why a majority party doesn’t challenge the minority party to mount an old-fashioned, stand-on-their-feet, gum-up-the-works, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type babblethon. In fact, the super majority is what is needed to stop senators from adding amendments to the bill, which can be inconsequential and paralytic.

But the super majority is just a rule of the Senate, as changeable as any. Prior to 1975, Rule 22 of the Senate said that it took two-thirds of the Senate to invoke cloture and end a filibuster; in 1975, that number fell to 60. Thirty-five years later, we can see that 60 is still way too high. I understand that the Senate prides itself on its role as the more deliberative of the two houses, the one less reactionary to tides and trends. But as we see, sixty votes doesn’t protect deliberation; it empowers obstruct. It doesn’t protect minorities; it neuters the will of voters.

Just to be clear, protecting the filibuster may be a long-honored custom, but it ain’t the law of the land. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.” For the first 15 or 20 years of the Senate, there was no right to unlimited debate. After that, the right to filibuster was enacted. By 1917, after a long era of Senatorial obstructionism, the two-thirds threshold was established. The Founding Fathers almost certainly did not envision the establishment of any kind of a super majority, because the gave the Vice President the right to break deadlocks in the Senate when the body was “evenly divided.” Now the body can be deadlocked when the vote stands at 59 to 41, a state of affairs that clearly disenfranchises the Vice President. Although I bet most people don’t care about that.

Let’s start a campaign: Bring Democracy to the US Senate. In January 2013, when a new Senate convenes as part of the 113th Congress, it will have to adopt the rules that will govern its proceedings. Those rules will be adopted by a simple majority vote. We must begin a campaign to persuade the Senate to change Rule 22. to either get rid of the super majority, or at very worst, lower the threshold to 55 votes. Since pledge-signing seems all the vogue these days, let’s get the people who are going to run for the Senate in 2012, incumbents and challengers alike, to pledge that they will end the tyranny of Rule 22.

Following Saturday’s “Take a bath and get a job” slam on Occupy Wall Street, Grumpy Old Man Newt Gingrich continued his “Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!” campaign for the presidency yesterday by advocating an end of Child Labor laws. Proving that there is truly nothing sacred in the right’s efforts to roll back the accomplishments of decades of progressive government, Gingrich said to an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

First question: Has Gingrich ever seen how kids clean?

Second question: Do we really want 14 year old kids cleaning toilets?

Third question: When Gingrich talks about the tragic things we do in the poorest neighborhoods, do “truly stupid” Child Labor laws really top the list of the policies and programs we have promulgated? Are they really ahead of negligence, indifference, hostility and racism?

Fourth question: What’s next–restoration of the work houses?

“You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America,” Gingrich added. How much more extraordinary radicalism can we stand? Poor school districts across the country are cutting teachers, cutting labs, cutting books, cutting after-school study sessions, and cutting extra-curricular activities. I guess this radical rollback isn’t enough; this radical disinvestment in the future isn’t enough. Let’s pass out the Lysol. I’m all in favor of young people having jobs, and learning discipline and responsibility, but this proposal is squarely in mold of those middle-class destroying policies that lay off older workers in favor of cheaper youngsters, and lay off American workers in favor of cheaper workers abroad. It’s hard to send janitor jobs off-shore, so let’s end Child Labor regulations, and get minimum-wage teens to haul garbage instead of unionized workers.

Gingrich’s brainstorm is just a new rendition of the same GOP theme: the maximization of profit and its retention by the ownership class, at all costs, is the only thing it stands for.

Today in New Hampshire, presidential candidate, corporate consultant, and Tiffany’s Customer of the Year Newt Gingrich told a group of college students that he would change the social security system to allow them to opt out of the current system, in favor of putting the money into private retirement accounts. Seven years ago, in what may have been the most prescient three minutes of his life, the peerless George Carlin warned us this was coming.

Last Friday, my college-age daughter was applying for a part time job at a retail outlet. In the meandering path job interviews sometimes take, the manager began talking about Occupy Wall Street. “They should get jobs,” said the manager, who said that he was the child of eastern European immigrants. “The world doesn’t owe them a living.”

Funny, then, to hear not 36 hours later that familiar trope (long one of my mother’s favorites) emerge from the lips of the multimillioniare corporate consultant Newt Gingrich. The Occupy Wall Street movement, he said at the Republican debate, “starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park so that they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.” This sense of entitlement, he said, is a “symptom how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”

You have to hand it to Gingrich; it’s kind of a bold move to try to protect the prerogatives of the Wall Street Banksters with 1960s-era culture war language. Once again, dirty, lazy, (and probably pot-smoking and free-loving hippies) are loose on the land, trying to get something for nothing from you, the hard-working, church-going, football-loving backbone of the nation. Meanwhile, avaricious, mendacious, venal Wall Street has been getting something for nothing from middle America, and somehow Barack Obama and the democrats have failed to rally the country to go after them. This failure has left the door open for the man who has a revolving credit account at Tiffany’s and his ilk to protect the plutocracy by making small retail store managers believe that they have more to fear from unemployed students than from the banksters whose practices and privileges continue to burden the economy.

Among the few embarrassing experiences left to a person in his fifties is to be exposed as a naif. Over the years I’ve grown quite complacent, in my aging bourgeois post-9/11 whiteness, to snuggle myself under the warm comforter of a visible police presence. It’s been dismaying and alarming and frightening to see what I had come to be believe were law-enforcement professionals suddenly act like goons in the service of the Banking State. Now is the time to remind ourselves of the terrifying brilliance behind Mayor Richard Daley‘s timeless malapropism: “The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.” (Photo, by Randy L. Rasmussen of The Oregonian, showing an Occupy Portland protester the same age as my daughters being pepper-sprayed in the face by a policeman.)

Says The Washington Post this morning, “Some Republican leaders think that primary and caucus voters will be looking for the most electable candidate, which would play to Romney’s one clear advantage. But a Post-ABC News poll in October found that more than seven in 10 Republicans said it was more important to support a candidate who shares their views on the issues rather than one who is considered most likely to win next November. In the other five areas tested in the new survey, Romney shows no greater strength than other GOP contenders. On empathy, 21 percent say Cain is the one who best understands their problems, compared with Romney’s 17 percent. On honesty, it’s Cain at 22 percent, Romney at 17 percent. The two also run closely on the economy and issues generally, while Newt Gingrich rivals Romney on upholding core Republican values.”

On Meet the Press yesterday, GOP strategist Alex Castellanos said that if Herman Cain won Iowa, he could sweep the early primaries and win the nomination. Surely that could happen. The fact that Romney has stayed at 25% while Cain has been soiled by three sexual harassment stories tells me that the GOP just doesn’t want to elect Romney. The fact that Romney has had to endure the boomlets of Trump, Bachmann, Perry and Cain tells me that the GOP just doesn’t want to elect Romney. They do not love the Ken Doll. And Cain is like Icarus–the closer he gets to the sun, the sooner he will melt. The pizza will not be delivered.

None of this would matter much if President Obama weren’t so weak. But economic conditions are terrible, and his favorability rating among independents is at 40 percent. He is eminently beatable. But not by someone who is going into a gunfight armed with a pea shooter.

Every year pundits seem to look for a state that is a magic domino that will, when it falls for a candidate, bring most of the other states in after it. But given how split these candidates are, and given how swoony the GOP electorate has been for a Knight on Horseback all year, could this not be the year when a late entry turns some post-Super Tuesday primaries into a surge that he rides into the convention, and out of nowhere beats this very weak field?

Someplace out there, a Jeb Bush or a Haley Barber or a Chris Christie or, dast I say it?–a Donald Trump is looking up and thinking “No one is winning this game. No one is scoring. I can get into this game at halftime and still win.”

Fearless forecast: the 2012 Republican nominee is not yet in the race.