Harold Meyerson

Among the House districts Democrats are battling to hold are five along the border with Mexico.

Of all the gloomy outcomes that the Democrats have cause to fear in tomorrow's election, here's one that seems to have escaped wide notice: They're in trouble on the border -- the one with Mexico.

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How do I, a card-carrying liberal — if only liberals had it sufficiently together to issue cards — think my way through this year's crop of California ballot measures

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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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