Harold Meyerson

As battle cries go, the Tea Party's "Take our country back" is a pretty good one. It's short and punchy, and it addresses a very widespread sense that the nation that Americans once lived in has changed, and not for the better.

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The banks have resumed foreclosing again.

Phew! Glad to see American business bouncing back.

On Monday, two of the nation's largest financial corporations, Bank of America and GMAC, announced that they were reopening their foreclosure mills, which they had shuttered earlier this month in the wake of reports that they were processing foreclosures with essentially no oversight. Federal officials are now investigating the foreclosures for possible financial fraud.

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As Election Day looms, the Democrats look to be embattled in places where they've not been embattled for decades. Republicans are threatening Democrats in such true-blue regions as New England and the Pacific Northwest.

But here in California, Democrats are increasingly upbeat about their prospects. Jerry Brown has withstood Meg Whitman's $140 million assault and for the past two weeks has finally been up on the air with ads of his own. In Carly Fiorina, Sen. Barbara Boxer  has been blessed with an opponent who stands well to the right of Californians on social issues such as abortion. Both Brown and Boxer are up in the polls, and union-funded polling for congressional and state legislative seats shows that Republicans will have trouble picking up seats in November, even though California's unemployment rate -- 12.5 percent -- is the third highest of all 50 states.

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For anyone who needed to gauge just how far the demonization of teachers unions has gone, the final episode last spring of TV's "Law and Order" -- the real one, not the new L.A. knock-off -- was instructive. Bracketed by the customary soundtrack "cha-chungs," the story concerned a loony former substitute teacher bent on blowing up the high school where he'd subbed. But the real heavy was a weaselly union lawyer who blocked the cops' access to the teacher's whereabouts, on the grounds of -- well, something like Marx's labor theory of value, or Walter Reuther's argument for co-determination at General Motors; it wasn't entirely clear which. Said weaselly lawyer crumbled, of course, when confronted with Sam Waterston's righteous rectitude.

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On Saturday, the season's lone march on Washington not convened by a television personality will unfold in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Sponsored by One Nation Working Together -- a coalition of black, Latino, feminist, gay and lesbian civil rights groups; unions; and environmental organizations -- the march is clearly intended as a counterweight to Glenn Beck's religious-right extravaganza of August. It also has become something between a counterpoint and a complement to the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert comedic shriek scheduled for late October.

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In 1911, Gov. Hiram Johnson was able to make far-reaching political reforms in California. Both Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown could learn from him.

Of all the California gubernatorial polls taken this year, the one that tells us most about the state didn't pit Jerry Brown against Meg Whitman. In July, the folks at Public Policy Polling decided, presumably just for the heck of it, to see how Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis would stack up if they ran against each other today.

Davis won.

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