Harold Meyerson

The good news for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina here in California was that they won their Republican primaries. The bad news was that they had to run in Republican primaries.

Whitman, now the GOP nominee for governor, and Fiorina, the GOP nominee for senator, dispatched their nearest primary rivals by margins of better than 2 to 1. Each spent a queen's ransom to do so -- in Whitman's case, close to $80 million of her own money -- but both former CEOs have plenty left over to take on their Democratic opponents this fall: in Whitman's case, Jerry Brown, the once and, he hopes, future governor; in Fiorina's case, incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer.

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How to spend $80 million of your own money in the primary and render yourself unelectable in the process.

LOS ANGELES -- As California Republicans wind up a costly party primary election, they'd do well to remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger became the only Republican elected to a major statewide office since 1994.

It wasn't his celebrity. It wasn't his program. It wasn't his opponent (though Gray Davis was certainly an unpopular governor). It wasn't even his accent.

Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003 chiefly because he didn't have to enter a Republican primary. The contest in which he won the statehouse was that most unusual of electoral animals, a recall election, in which candidates of all parties, and voters of all parties, participated. Arnold never had to careen rightward to win a plurality of Republican voters in a Republican primary. The electoral recall process eliminates primaries altogether.

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For American Jews, Israel's catastrophic misadventure on the high seas this weekend has only deepened the chasm that increasingly splits them into two camps. On the Web site of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which represents this nation's aging Jewish establishment, the story on the deadly encounter is headlined "Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers." The deaths of nine people protesting Israel's blockade of Gaza don't even rate a sub-headline.

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Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don't really believe we're still in recession. Or maybe, they just don't care.

How else to explain the continual harping on the deficit by editorialists, centrist think tanks and the like when the nation is still enmeshed in the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? How else to understand the growing opposition to the jobs bills Congress is set to vote on this week, particularly when nobody has identified any future engine of American economic growth save countercyclical public investment?

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The Senate is poised to vote this week on amendments to the financial reform bill that will determine whether Wall Street's banks will serve the American economy or whether the American economy will continue to serve Wall Street's banks.

As they prepare to vote, senators might look at the latest report from the Congressional Oversight Panel on the TARP, chaired by Elizabeth Warren. Last week, the panel released a study of how America's banks used TARP funds to provide loans to small businesses. Lending by the biggest banks -- those with assets of more than $100 billion, which received 81 percent of government bailout funds -- declined, while lending to small businesses from medium-size banks, with assets of $10 billion to $100 billion, which received 11.4 percent of the bailout, increased.

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Moribund Democrats showed surprising signs of life in yesterday's elections.

For a party presumably at death's door, the Democrats had themselves a pretty fair election yesterday, while liberal and labor Democrats had an altogether bang-up time.

The Democrats held John Murtha's southwest Pennsylvania House seat in exactly the kind of white working-class district that is supposed to be trending Republican this year. Voters ousted the exquisitely vulnerable Arlen Specter -- an avowedly careerist incumbent in an anti-incumbent year -- in favor of a far fresher face, Joe Sestak, who also has a better chance than Specter come November.

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