If the Democratic Party is unable to elect a president under these circumstances, it will be hard to consider it a legitimate factor in any future election. As a barometer of how the executive is doing, or a check on its excesses, the party will continue to be a somewhat viable force in Congress and inertia, coupled with the de facto split of the country into two (roughly along the lines of the proposed actual divorce of the Confederate States from the rest of the union 140 years ago) will keep the party alive and well in the northeast, the two coasts and parts of the rust belt, but it will be hard to take any campaign it mounts in 2012 with any degree of seriousness.

It is a simple story. Greed and avarice and an unchecked financial system led to a near collapse of the country, and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Among other things, the New Deal saw the emergence of the federal government and new regulatory authority as a way to prevent the excesses that led to the Great Depression.

Worls War II and then the Cold War put the argument over governmental oversight on hold for about 50 plus years, but by the time things finally calmed down enough to allow the political process to review what had been wrought, the Republican Party had found a way to rehabilitate itself from what happened in 1929, by taking advantage of the movement of southern states away from the Democratic Party in response to the federal government's insurance of basic civil rights for all, particularly those historically treated as less than citizens, the descendants of former slaves.

By absorbing these southern white voters and establishing a cultural alliance with a religious based antipathy to pluralism, which abounded in the south as well, the Republicans took over the executive and, less successfully, the Congress and was able to achieve their goal since FDR took their toys away. Deregulation.

Their acolyte Reagan put their mantra well:

Government is not the answer to our problems. It is our problem.

(or something like that)

The result is this: an endless war based on the need for oil and the desire to restore the country its semi-imperial status; the issue that most concerned the Japanese in the lead up to World War II, a collapsing economy thanks to all the deregulation, and the most unpopular president in decades.

Yet, the conversation is not about these issues or the myriad others facing us: it is whether we are allowed to criticize the Republican candidate for nominating an untrained ideolgue as vice president, without being called "disrespectful."

And having nominated a person who looks as if he is descended from slaves (he is not, but looks are everything), the sin of racism which had bedeviled this country since its birth, has made what should be a landslide election start to look like a toss up.

It is not our candidate's fault that this may be so; it is our country. As we begin to careen into yet another crisis in our financial markets, I turned to see how all of this is being covered by broadcasters, and saw, instead, interviews with movie actors, intense discussions of football games, the rehashing of weather issues and airheads on CNBC talking about how little they know. (The CNBC coverage was the best that was out there.)

It is time to wake up. We said that we would on September 11 and we did stop talking about sharks for a few months, but we continue to be obsessed with the unimportant (should Senator Obama get "tougher"?, do Senator McCain's lies work? should Governor Palin have tried to get her former brother in law fired?) which is, in my not so humble and awfully scared opinion, a very bad sign.

This is the week it has to turn around, folks. There will no Canada to emigrate to, no way to escape, if that doesn't happen.