The week ended with 36 attendees at an Obama rally in Maryland collapsing in apparent illness. As one wag said, it seems like just yesterday Obama crowds were swooning; now they are simply sickened. Our quick-witted Vice President Biden told a Wisconsin audience they were the dullest crowd he'd seen, and Obama, who had just made plans to get out of town earlier than planned -- two days after the November election -- told his supporters to stop sulking.

I suppose he plans to avoid the gnashing of teeth, the rending of garments, the wailing, and the caravan of moving trucks heading toward D.C. as his fallen party members return to the hustings after the certain-to-be-disastrous midterm elections. Still, not everyone can join him on his whirlwind Asian trip. It is unlikely in any event to achieve its obvious aim of getting the election off the front pages. Still, it might be a good idea for Obama to be out of town because I think those of his party left standing will be looking for someone to blame. He seems to me a likely target, especially since the chance of being confronted in the  congressional gym shower by a naked Rahm now seems to have passed.

Of course, we shouldn't get cocky. We all know the polls are not infallible, but they are increasingly uniform in predicting an historic loss for the historic president. The eye-opener was the Gallup poll this week which on a high-turnout model predicted a Republican lead on the generic ballot of 53%-40% and on a low-turnout model a Republican lead of 56%-38%. Level-headed Michael Barone started comparing these figures to "1894, when Republicans gained more than 100 seats in a House of approximately 350 seats."

Aside from telling the voters to stop sulking, the White House has been doling out one-year waivers on certain ObamaCare provisions to big employers who employ unionized teachers and low-wage workers after the employers let the White House know (in this critical pre-election time frame) that without relief from that law, they will have to cancel health insurance coverage for their workers. This Government-by-Obama-Whim has been a consistent pattern on everything from oil drilling to enforcement of voting rights -- and is making it impossible for civics and law teachers to say with a straight face that ours is a nation of laws, not men, and that in a representative republic, Congress makes the laws and citizens are held equally to follow them. Word has it that some are simply playing the theme song from Chicago when they get to those parts of the lesson. Others hum, "Whatever Obama wants, Obama gets," as his army of unconfirmed czars, hangers-on, and the idiot Speaker of the House and Majority Leader of the Senate carry out his ill-conceived plans and seal their own political doom in the process.

As if parodying the strip show hawker who advertises more girls than costumes, the new website for the lawsuits filed against ObamaCare tells us there are twenty lawsuits by 21 states (http://healthcarelawsuits.org).

Even the brilliant Holder notion to inspirit Hispanic voters to come out en masse for
Obama by attacking Arizona's immigration law has flopped. Latinos, according to a recent polls, are suffering in enthusiasm for Democrats, and their turnout is likely to be low. On the other hand, support for Arizona appears to be strong and growing.

This week, another of the Attorney General's bright moves backfired. He gambled that there was no need for a military trial for one of the African embassies' bombers, Ghaliani. Holder's been on a moral preening kick for so long that he seems to have overlooked the fact that the rules of evidence in civilian trials are quite a bit more onerous than those in military tribunals. The federal judge set him straight, ruling that the government couldn't call a key witness because it couldn't prove that the government hadn't learned of that witness through an interrogation which didn't afford Ghailani the rights due a civilian defendant.

As I rifle through the various polls and the demographic breakdowns, I can see only one hope for the Democrats, and it probably is a bit late to pull it off -- add a referendum on making pot legal in each state and bring out the slackers whose loyalty appears undiminished. Of course, that has its drawbacks. They cannot be trusted to...like, you know, actually be up on where or how to vote or how to get there. That means the scheme would require quite an army of people to get them to the polls. But that takes money, the SEIU, and ACORN, and the money in Democrat coffers has to go to protect formerly safe seats like Reid's and Barney Frank's. Several of the SEIU officers are under criminal investigation, and the union blew a lot of time and money on last Sunday's unpersuasive proglodyte* rally on the mall. As for ACORN, it's temporarily been denied federal funds; some of its people are under indictment, and others may be unemployed as offices closed.

Oh, well -- MSNBC is not giving in to despair. Its creative staff has put its heads together and devised a new slogan: "Lean Forward." Around my house, that slogan reminds me of how we always referred to daylight savings time: "Spring Forward, Fall Back."

*Proglodyte is a word coined by my buddy, Rick Ballard. I love it because it accurately describes the progressives as the backward-looking troglodytes they are. And nothing said "proglodytes" as much as the crowd on the mall, in which each union group carrying matching signs and wearing matching T-shirts and an endless stream of whiners at the mic were all calling for justice and more money for them and their pet causes -- causes unchanged since 1960, while the rest of the country has largely (you should pardon the expression) moved on.

 - Clarice Feldman