I keep going back to the Terri Schiavo case. That's when I think the rightwing carousel began to break down and the painted horses lost their rhythm, pawing the air to no avail. Talk radio and cable news tilted heavily for Schiavo's parents and against Michael Schiavo, Jeb Bush jowlily postured and interposed himself with shameless zeal, Congressional Republicans stuck their beaks into this private turmoil, Bush broke precedent to interrupt his precious downtime in Crawford to sign a hocked-up bill,--and they all misread the public's mood. The American public wanted them to butt out. That they could get it so wrong was a sign that they had lost touch and couldn't mold public opinion on every issue as if it were the mashed-potatoes mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Sign. But so thick, rich, and impacted was their arrogance that they ignored the warning sign, just as they ignored the warning signs in Iraq until it turned into a danse macabre.

But the misreading of public opinion re Schiavo didn't cost Republicans much. The misreading, the mishandling, of the immigration controversy will. As Tom Watson writes today, "The outpouring was not from the right-wing base, as hoped. Oh, immigration reform is in the wind alright - but it's not moving in the direction that people like Tom Tancredo, James Sensenbrenner, and JD Hayworth intended. It's moving the other way, entirely. By stirring the pot in a desperate attempt at a galvanizing issue in what is shaping up as a disastrous election year for the home team, the Tancredo Wing has pretty much ensured that immigration reform in the United States will lead to a liberalization of current law. One more trip to the well with the old fear-laden, us-versus-them cultural themes of Ronald Reagan's craven Southern Strategy has yielded disaster for nativist conservatives."

It's to Bush's credit that he didn't demagogue this issue or dehumanize illegal workers and their families. On this at least he has conducted himself with decency and moderation. But even he, the halo'd savior of Peggy Noonan's vanquished dreams, is a minor player when pitted against the physiognomy of the angry white conservative male, whose ranks include not only Sensenbrenner, Tancredo, et al, but such splendors of democracy as Jim Bunning, Duncan Hunter, and James Inhofe, not to mention escapees from the hellmouth such as Michael Savage (whom Watson quotes in an update) and Joseph Farah, who characterizes the protesters as "hundreds of thousands of ungrateful human parasites", which John Derbyshire at NRO considers good eye-gouging stuff.

Norman Mailer has described the Iraq invasion as the last stand of the white male ego, and the immigration battle may be the white male ego's last gumless roar. Not only because the demonstrations were conducted with such dignity, unanimity of purpose, and uniform discipline (a human river of white shirts and blouses as compared to the motley look of antiwar demos), but because the spokespeople for the other side are putting their case with a passion, logic, pride, command of history, and undauntedness that leaves their debate adversaries dangling off the hook. Steve Gilliard has a lengthy transcript of Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas rhetorically boxing Lou Dobbs' ears on CNN as Wolf Blitzer plays hapless referee.

Since September 11th, nearly all the pressure and energy has come from above, a topdown authoritarian lid clamped over the country--over the world--as the Bush administration preached a gospel of fear and launched its War on Terror. But over the last year or so, the energy and motion has surged from below in a renewal of people power, first in the Latin American cities that have elected new leaders, then in Paris, where students and supporters protested the proposed change in hiring/firing laws (and prevailed), and now, in the streets of American cities, where hundreds of thousands have decided to end their invisibility in the political process. The grip of fear can't be sustained indefinitely in an open society addicted to entertainment and diversion, and Bush's grip has cracked. He seems a shrugging, camera-mugging irrelevance when you see him on the stump now. It's as if he's trying to convince us he's still in charge, or perhaps trying to convince himself.