People who remember the old comic strip “Peanuts” will recall an often repeated situation where Lucy offers to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Then, as Charlie comes running up to kick it, Lucy snatches away the ball and Charlie Brown loses his balance and goes crashing on his backside.

The reason this same scene remained funny, despite how often it was repeated, is that in the later repetitions Charlie Brown would express suspicion at Lucy, recalling how she had tricked him before. She would then come up with some claim that she wasn’t going to do that any more— and of course she did.

There is a similar routine that has been repeated many times in Washington, over the years, with the Democrats playing Lucy and Republicans playing Charlie Brown.

It goes like this: Democrats start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people who they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Sometimes the deal is sweetened by the Democrats promising to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases, and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republicans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown.

This old trick is now being unveiled by the Obama administration, like so many other old political tricks used in this “change” administration.

In one of President Obama’s many prissy little sermonettes, complete with finger wagging, he has declared: “Next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits step up. Because I’m calling their bluff.”

There is already a bipartisan commission set to provide political cover for the Democrats’ wild spending that has increased the national debt from 63 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004 to 83 percent in 2009— and official estimates of more than 90 percent this year, with more increases in sight.

Why Republicans join such transparent attempts to rescue the Democrats from the political consequences of their own actions is one of the many unsolved mysteries of human nature in general and the Republican Party in particular.

What this political game boils down to is that Democrats get all the political benefits of playing Santa Claus to all sorts of groups and special interests, while Republicans who vote to raise taxes to pay for all this are cast in the role of Frank Nitti, the enforcer for the mob.

Many elections have confirmed that Santa Claus is more popular than Frank Nitti, surprising as that may be to some people.

Republicans are not the only suckers in this game.

The voting public’s willingness to believe fancy rhetoric and ignore hard facts is a crucial part of this scam.

When the Obama administration said that it could provide health insurance to millions of additional people without increasing the national debt, shouldn’t common sense have told you that somebody was just insulting your intelligence?

When the two thousand page bill was rushed through Congress too fast for anybody to read it, shouldn’t that have made you realize that you were being played for a sucker?

When this bill that was passed with lightning speed was scheduled to take effect only after the 2012 election, didn’t that suggest that they didn’t want you to find out how it works in practice in time to turn against Obama when he is up for reelection?

Recent polls show that a lot of people are against ObamaCare. But there are still a lot of other people, though not as many, who are for it.

Even more amazingly, there are still Republicans lured by the siren song of “bipartisanship” and apparently unaware of the difference in popularity between Santa Claus and Frank Nitti.

The most important indicator is the president’s job approval. In the Real Clear Politics average of the last two weeks’ polls, President Obama has a 48% approval and 47% disapproval rating. This points to deep Democratic losses. The president’s approval rating last November was 54% when his party was trounced in New Jersey and Virginia.

On the economy, a mid-June AP poll reported that Mr. Obama has 45% approval, 50% disapproval. That’s a dangerous place for any president when jobs are issue No. 1.

The problem is worse in swing areas. Last week’s National Public Radio (NPR) poll of the 60 Democratic House seats most at risk this year showed just 37% of voters in these districts agreed Mr. Obama’s “economic policies helped avert an even worse crisis and are laying a foundation for our eventual economic recovery”; 57% believed they “have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.”

Mr. Obama also suffers because his handling of the catastrophic Gulf oil leak has undermined perceptions of his competence. Both national and Louisiana polls rate Mr. Obama’s handling worse than the Bush administration’s Katrina response, widely viewed as a tipping point in that presidency.

Mr. Obama’s failures mean he can’t lift his party by campaigning. A Public Policy Poll earlier this month reported that 48% said an Obama endorsement would make them less likely to vote for the candidate receiving it, while only one-third said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by the president.

Republicans jumped into the lead last November in Gallup’s party generic ballot match-ups among all voters, and since March the GOP has led or been tied every single week except one. In the Rasmussen Poll’s tracking among likely voters, Republicans have been ahead by an average of seven points, 44% to 37%, since March. This reflects a significant political development—independents breaking for the GOP.

Then there is the intensity gap, which is particularly important in midterms. In Gallup, 45% of Republicans are “very enthusiastic” about voting this fall versus 24% of Democrats. This staggering 22-point gap is the largest so far this election year. And in the NPR survey of 60 swing Democratic districts, 62% of Republicans rated their likelihood of voting as 10, the highest. Only 37% of Democrats were similarly excited.

All these trends are influencing individual races. Though twice as many Republican Senate seats are being contested in November, state-by-state surveys show if the election were today, 49 Democrats and 43 Republicans are poised to win. Eight races are too close to call, but Republicans lead in five.

House races are historically much more difficult to predict. But the NPR survey found in the 30 Democrat seats considered most at risk, the GOP leads 48% to 39%. This nine-point margin points to Republican winning virtually all 30 seats. In the next tier of most vulnerable Democratic districts, Republicans lead 47% to 45%, meaning the GOP could take many of those 30 seats. By comparison, in the 10 Republican districts thought at risk, Republicans lead 53% to 37%. Republicans should hold virtually all of those.

It will take a net of 10 Senate and 40 House seats for the GOP to win control of the legislative branches. These are big numbers—but they are within reach.

Democrats do have some advantages. Unlike 1994, they wouldn’t be caught unprepared. And they’ve stockpiled money. The Center for Responsive Politics reports the average Democratic Senate candidate has $2.1 million on hand to the average Republican’s $1.4 million; in the House, Democrats average $504,000 to Republicans’ $239,000.

But cash won’t save the Democrats. Complex combinations of factors decide elections, and this year the driving forces are the president’s low standing, his mishandling of the economy, his failure to respond to the oil spill, and the interconnected issues of jobs, spending, deficits and ObamaCare.

It is an explosive mix for Democrats. All these measures—from his job approval to handling the economy and the Gulf oil leak to the generic ballot to intensity—will remain roughly where they are unless a dramatic event causes a shift. That’s unlikely: The president can do little to radically improve the landscape.

It has taken a year and a half of bad policies to put Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats in their precarious position. As voters hold them accountable for misdeeds, mistakes and misjudgments, Democrats will endure a beating this year they are not likely to forget soon.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It’s 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health-care reform — lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked the New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its “two parties . . . with their duel-to-the-death paralysis.” The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what’s new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic — and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there’s the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. “Don’t blame Mr. Obama,” writes Paul Krugman of the president’s failures. “Blame our political culture instead. . . . And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable.”

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about “extremists” trying “to eliminate the filibuster” when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . . But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise — expanded coverage at lower cost — led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

That, it’s widely agreed, is the sad tale of Barack Obama, who has managed to demoralize liberals while inspiring a wave of gloating among conservatives. A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds that already, most Americans want to vote him out in 2012.

But both Democrats and Republicans are jumping the gun. They forget that this storyline also describes Ronald Reagan, who saw his approval rating sink over his first 12 months — yet rebounded to carry 49 states in his 1984 re-election bid. Bill Clinton was significantly less popular than Obama for most of his initial year, and we all know how that turned out.

George W. Bush likewise managed to hack off a lot of onetime supporters soon after taking office, and when his popularity soared eight months into his term, it was not because of anything he did but because of the 9/11 attacks. He, too, won re-election.

American politicians and commentators are generally not afflicted by a deep knowledge or appreciation of history. If they were, they would not waste their time laboring to explain something that requires little explanation. They could simply state the obvious — new presidents invariably lose public esteem in the first year of their terms — and go on to try to explicate something truly mysterious, like Lady Gaga.

That’s the implication of research by Douglas Rivers, a professor of political science at Stanford University, scholar at the Hoover Institution and professional pollster. Though Obama rated the lowest of recent presidents at the end of his first year, Rivers says the pattern “is pretty much in line with what you would expect.” What we see is “more a continuing trend than an Obama phenomenon.”

That’s not to say Obama has made no mistakes. You can’t occupy the White House without disappointing a lot of people. Every president bungles some things, and every president pays a price.

His fiscal policy and health care plan, in particular, have energized the opposition and spawned public resentment. On the other hand, his grades on gay rights and immigration have actually improved — possibly because he has done less than expected on either issue. There is no real evidence to suggest that the public finds Obama far more fallible or detestable than they usually find presidents at this stage.

On health care reform, it’s not clear what he could have done differently to appease a notoriously demanding citizenry. Surveys indicate people think that if his plan passes, they will get “worse care at a higher cost,” says Rivers. What do they expect if his plan doesn’t pass? “They’ll get worse care at a higher cost.”

I wish I could say Americans’ suspicion of health care reform shows a sensible appreciation of the limits of government power and responsibility. But I suspect the real problem is they fear it will not guarantee them everything they want at someone else’s expense. Rivers notes that when you ask people about specific components of the plan, they turn out to be “fairly popular.”

If Americans distrust the government, they also take a dim view of the private sector, or parts of it. “Anything negative for insurance companies is popular,” says Rivers. Most people blame insurers for rising health care expenditures, even though insurance companies are one of the few constituencies with a powerful interest in reducing outlays.

This is not really quite the contradiction it may appear. People don’t mind when national health care costs rise. They do mind when their personal health care costs rise. When that happens, they blame health insurers. They may also blame the president, even if costs were rising before he arrived and threaten to keep rising long after he leaves.

It’s a mistake to think every political trend has deep meaning. Most of the disillusionment with Obama is the result of a natural process that tells nothing about the future. Every honeymoon ends, but the end of the honeymoon is not a harbinger of divorce.

The good news for Obama is that he has lost ground with the electorate mainly because of things he can’t control. The bad news for Obama is that making it up will require the help of things he also can’t control.

In Massachusetts, conservatives preferred victory to purity. Brown is not a social conservative. He’s pro-choice and, while supporting traditional marriage, believes “states should be free to make their own laws in this area.”

Yet conservatives and tea partiers joined moderates and independents in the Brown coalition. This was actually one of the smaller manifestations of the Brown Effect.

The bigger ones include: An enormous psychological boost for Republicans of all stripes, a firm belief they can win anywhere, help in recruiting strong candidates and raising money for the midterms, the death of the Obama mystique, a critical 41st Republican vote in the Senate, and a stirring example of how to win.

This breakthrough may foreshadow a Republican revival after the lost elections of 2006 and 2008. Brown’s victory “was not just symbolic,” insists Republican consultant Frank Luntz. “It’s representative of a change in the public’s mind-set.”

But Republicans must be wary. “Republicans — not President Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid — will decide their future,” Luntz says. The midterm elections in November “will require a genuine break with the past.”

Luntz’s advice includes opposing earmarks, “a laserlike focus on wasteful Washington spending,” and “no tolerance for ethical malfeasance whatsoever — no more Mark Foleys.”

Pre-Brown, Republicans were more excited than Democrats. The Brown Effect only adds to their enthusiasm to defeat Democrats, Obama, and their agenda, and elect Republicans.

This is crucial because zeal creates turnout. Republican turnout sagged in 2006 and 2008, then soared last year in New Jersey and Virginia, which replaced Democratic governors with Republicans.

The Brown Effect has also galvanized independents and made them almost as fervent as Republicans.

Republicans are now three for their last three in stirring independents. In New Jersey and Virginia, independents went 2-to-1 for the Republican candidates. In Massachusetts, Brown had a 3-to-1 advantage among independent voters, according to a Rasmussen poll.

The Brown Effect has debunked the idea of the persuasiveness of Obama’s oratory. The president delivered 29 speeches to promote his health care plan last year. His campaigning in New Jersey and Virginia didn’t help the Democrat, nor did his appearance in Boston aid Coakley. If Obama’s magic didn’t work in Massachusetts, it’s gone.

And if a Republican can win in Massachusetts, a Republican can win anywhere. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who’s recruiting House candidates, puts it differently. “If we can win Barney Frank’s district [Brown apparently carried Massachusetts's Fourth Congressional District by 1 point], we can win anywhere,” he says.

McCarthy believes 2010 will be a wave election. He’s returning to potential candidates who declined to run earlier, figuring they couldn’t win. After Brown’s victory, “they now see it as doable.” Richard Hanna, who lost narrowly in 2008 to Democrat Michael Arcuri in upstate New York, filed to run again the day after Brown won in Massachusetts.

Brown’s near-flawless campaign is an example for Republican candidates to follow, especially in Democrat-leaning states. He was skillful in encapsulating an anti-Obama message: “Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country.”

That’s a mantra conservatives, tea party people, moderates, and independents can embrace. The Brown Effect leaves them nothing to fight about and much to fight for.

America’s preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of Good King Barack the Hopeychanger’s reign by electing a Republican?

In Massachusetts?

In what the tin-eared plonkers of the Democrat machine still insist on calling “Ted Kennedy’s seat”?

Remember the good old days when the glossy magazine covers competed for the most worshipful image of the new global colossus? If you were at the Hopeychange inaugural ball on Jan. 20, 2009, when Barney Frank dived into the mosh pit, and you chanced to be underneath when he landed, and you’ve spent the past year in a coma, until suddenly coming to in time for the poll showing some unexotically monikered nobody called Scott Brown, whose only glossy magazine appearance was a Cosmopolitan pictorial 30 years ago (true), four points ahead in Kennedy country, you must surely wonder if you’ve woken up in an alternative universe. The last thing you remember before Barney came flying down is Harry Reid waltzing you round the floor while murmuring sweet nothings about America being ready for a light-skinned brown man with no trace of a Negro dialect. And now you’re in some dystopian nightmare where Massachusetts is ready for a nude-skinned Brown man with no trace of a Kennedy dialect.

How can this be happening?

Scott Brown MA Candidate for U.S. Senate

You don’t need to have been in an actual coma. Subscribing to The Boston Globe, the unreadable and increasingly unread Massachusetts snooze-sheet, has much the same effect. As the house organ of a decrepit one-party state, the Globe endorsed Martha Coakley with nary a thought using its Sober Thoughtful Massachusetts Election Editorial template (“[INSERT NAME OF CAREERIST HACK HERE] For Governor/Senator/Mayor/Whatever”) and dutifully obscured what happened when one of the candidate’s minders shoved to the sidewalk a reporter who had the lese majeste to ask an unhelpful question. If you’re one of the dwindling band of Bay Staters who rely on the Globe for your news, you would never have known that a Massachusetts pseudo-”election” had bizarrely morphed into a real one – you know, with two candidates, just like they have in Bulgaria and places. On Friday, the paper finally acknowledged that something goofy was happening: As the revealing headline put it, “Race Is In A Spinout.” As in “spinning out of control”? You mean, out of the control of the party and its dopey media cheerleaders? What they really mean is that the Democrats’ coronation procession is in a spinout.

Now this is Massachusetts, so the Dems may yet regain control of the spinout and get back on track for victory. If not, they’ve already taken the precaution of tossing Martha Coakley under the bus the way her minder sent that guy to the sidewalk. Martha? Oh, hopeless candidate.

Terrible campaign. Difficult climate. Yes, but this is Massachusetts.

Tone-deaf candidates running on nothing but a sense of their own entitlement are all but compulsory: This is a land where John Kerry demonstrates the common touch by windsurfing off Nantucket in buttock-hugging yellow Spandex.

As for the “climate,” that gets closer to the truth, but, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg pointed out, in this case the Democrats created the climate. If Scott Brown gives Martha Coakley a run for her money on Election Day, Jan. 19, 2010, will be a direct consequence of Jan. 20, 2009. Once upon a time, Barack Obama, in the words of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, was “standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.” Seeking to explain why the God of Hope had fallen farther faster than any modern president, David Brooks of the New York Times argued that the tea-party movement had declared war on “the educated class.” He seemed to think this was some sort of inverted snobbery: If “the educated class” is for it – “health” “care” “reform,” cap-and-trade, Miranda rights for terrorists – Joe Six-Pack and his fellow knuckledragging morons are reflexively opposed to it.

This almost exactly inverts what really happened over this past year.

“The educated class” turned out to be not that educated – if, by “educated,” you mean knowing stuff. They were dazzled by Obama: My former National Review colleague Christopher Buckley wrote cooing paeans to his “first-class intellect” and “temperament.” I used to joke that “temperament” was for the Obammysoxers of “the educated class” what hair was to Tiger Beat reporters. But you don’t really need analogies. As David Brooks noted after his first meeting with Obama, “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” And once you raised your eyes above pant level it only got better: “Our national oratorical superhero,” gushed New York magazine, “a honey-tongued Frankenfusion of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR).”

Where’d that guy go? “People once thought Obama could sound eloquent reading the phone book,” wrote Michael Gerson in The Washington Post last week. “Now, whatever the topic, it often sounds as though he is.”

If the educated class’s pant legs weren’t as perfectly creased as Obama’s, that’s because they were soaking wet. While the smart set were demonstrating all the sober forensic analysis of a Jonas Brothers audience, the naysayers were looking at the actual policies: What is this going to cost me? And my children? And the country? A week before the presidential election, I wrote in this space:

“Settled democratic societies rarely vote to ‘go left.’ Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.”

For the most part, that’s just the ratchet effect of Big Government, growing, expanding, remorselessly, under cover of darkness. What happened this past year is that Obama and the Democratic Congress made it explicit, and did it in daylight. And, while Barack may be cool and stellar if you’re as gullible as “the educated class,” Nancy Pelosi and Ben Nelson most certainly aren’t: There’s no klieg light of celebrity to dazzle you from the very obvious reality that they’re spending your money way faster than you can afford and with no inclination to stop.

“The educated class” is apparently too educated to grasp this insufficiently nuanced point.

It’s not just the money. The notion that the IRS should be able to seize your assets if you don’t arrange your health care to the approval of the federal government represents the de facto nationalization of your body, which is about as primal an assault on individual liberty as one could devise.

As Michael Barone observed, “the educated class” was dazzled by style, the knuckledragging morons are talking about substance. They grasp that another year of 2,000-page, trillion-dollar government-growing bills offers America only the certainty of decline. Just before the Senate’s health care vote, Obama, the silver-tongued orator, declared that we were “on the precipice” of historic reform. Indeed. On Tuesday, we’ll find out whether even Massachusetts is willing to follow him off the cliff.