Traders Set to Vote Early, Often

In case you missed it, Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) was elected in the media precincts as the Democratic presidential nominee last week. Immediately after, a wake was held for the Republican Party in its current incarnation, Reagan high priestess Peggy Noonan presiding.

In her column in The Wall Street Journal Friday, Noonan quoted from a memo by Rep. Tom Davis (R., Va.), who warned party colleagues that they "fail to understand the deep-seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures." For good measure, Davis told Noonan the GOP is "an airplane flying right into a mountain." The columnist concluded that her party has grown so complacent that it's all but doomed this fall — pointing to the recent loss of a formerly safe House seat in Mississippi as a foretaste of the indignities to come.

And it's not just Noonan and Davis who can sense which way the wind is blowing. Our very own pundit, Donald Luskin, wrote Friday about the retreat of Reaganomics, which he blames on a "fat and happy" electorate. (The fat is indisputable, but as far as happy goes, all the polls and my growing gut tell me anything but.)

Don defines Reaganomics as perfectly sensible economic liberalism as well as "little regulation" and "sound money" — which of course are the problematic parts. You can't have sound money if you borrow on a Reaganometric scale, and you can't have it if you keep cutting taxes and adding perks. And as much as Reagan's deregulation freed the economy from the dead hand of bureaucracy that Nixon imposed it's now come to be associated with tainted meat, uninspected and routinely delayed planes, Enron, WorldCom and no-money-down adjustable mortgages. The revolution brought a lot of used-car dealers to Washington and the ideology made it easy for them to let industry lobbyists write laws and gut regulatory agencies from the inside. And even the people who don't believe that's what went on have noticed that they're rowing against the tide.