Ben Nelson, D-Neb.

That “mainstream” view permeates the supposedly non-ideological press, and members of the press tend to believe that America is made up of “independents” with similar beliefs.

In fact, most Americans are more or less the opposite. (Most conservatives get this!) When they claim to have a problem with government spending, or taxation, it is a problem with getting taxed and perceiving the spending as being done on someone else. What they would like is for the government to spend money on them, using money seized from the wealthy.

Meanwhile, Democrats are terrified of taxing rich people.

At least a dozen House Democrats, several Democratic candidates and four Democratic senators — Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota — have said they won’t go along with the president’s plan to allow the cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans.

Why?

Part of the answer is that Joe Lieberman is a troll, pure and simple, while Ben Nelson and the rest believe that behaving like a Republican 50% of the time makes them moderates. And random House Democrats are both stupid and cowardly, and so they believe that they should openly announce that they are against something Obama and Reid and Pelosi are for, to prove their independence and bravery.

But it is not a particularly courageous political act to restore the top marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to 90s levels.

Jon Chait adds that these people’s worldviews are so warped by their bubbles of privilege that they don’t understand that six figures doesn’t qualify as struggling. Matt Yglesias blames media framing of deficit issues. Everyone is probably right.

But, honestly, the Democratic party no longer seriously represents working interests, in part because working interests aren’t organized anymore, and because, you know, there’s no elite approval or money in it.

I think if Democrats can’t pass a soak-the-rich tax bill before the midterms, they should wait until after the midterms and pass their tax cuts-for-everybody bill, abandon all pretense at seriousness about anything, and allow Obama to veto it and let all the cuts expire, after the midterm damage has already been done. (Not that I expect that Obama would veto it.)

But once “moderate” Democrats cave on this, Democrats in general should stop hand-wringing about why they can’t get their natural constituencies in the working poor and working class to come out and support them in midterms, and why working-class whites keep voting for Republicans. They’re killing broadly popular liberal agenda items like raising taxes on the rich and the public option — based on a “fear” of government overreach limited to anti-liberal elites — so that they can pursue “necessary” measures — popular solely among said anti-liberal elites — like austerity cuts to Social Security and reigning in the deficit by cutting back on government spending in the middle of a job crisis.

If you can come up with a coherent reason why anyone would decide to seek office as a member of the Democratic Party and then not support a Democratic proposal that is not simply popular but also vitally necessary for hundreds of thousands of desperate people, then I would like to hear it!

Throughout the entire post-New Deal era there have been massive divisions in the Democratic coalition, but they usually break down more like “people who think we shouldn’t let Americans starve on the streets vs. people who agree with that but hate black people” or “people who understand that a strong social safety net is vital for the health of the entire nation vs. people who agree with that but who also want to nuke commies.” This new brand of Democrat, I am unfamiliar with.

According to South Dakota Blue Dog Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, the problem is “the deficit.” In addition to the deficit, Herseth Sandlin also seems pretty concerned with making sure that her coalition gets to extract concessions from the liberals on all their major proposals, even if what the liberals initially draw up is by all rational accounts the correct policy.

“It’s not just a Blue Dog concern any more,” she said. “Blue Dogs … are grateful that we finally have not only some wind at our backs in terms of public sentiment, but we have colleagues in our Caucus and Republicans who are now expressing the same amount of concern about the debt and deficits that we’ve been expressing for a number of years, regardless of who has been in the White House and who has been in control.”

Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf says deficit-cutting “while economic activity and employment remain well below their potential levels would probably slow the economic recovery.” But whatever.

Almost 5 million people are currently on unemployment. Millions more are jobless, and still millions more are underemployed. According to Pew, one in three American workers were unemployed at some point during the recession. Ninety-five percent of those polled believe we’re still in a recession. But, you know, we’d better get that deficit under control right now, on the backs of the needy.

Let us also not forget the wonderful work of Senate Democrat Ben “The Even Worse Nelson” Nelson, from Nebraska, a state made up of six people who all have jobs, thank you very much. He is joining heroic Republicans like Scott Brown and Joe Lieberman in voting against putting more money into the economy and preventing people from becoming destitute. And because of his bravery, the deficit disappeared last night, forever, and we are all rich again.

Now, you may assume that the vast majority of cases of sexual assault in the armed forces is perpetrated by straight men against women. And your assumption would be completely, 100% correct. But Perkins knows all too well that predatory homosexuals are just lying in wait for permission to be open about their sexual orientation before they begin their terror campaign of rampant harassment and gross touching.

The American Family Association’s official news agency accuses Democrats of “force-feeding” the DADT repeal, and, for good measure, they put the word “gay” in scare quotes in the headline. That is a step in the direction of tolerance, actually — this is the site that referred to the athletic exploits of “Tyson Homosexual” because they automatically filter and replace all examples of the word “gay.”

Even the still-twitching corpse of the Washington Times has given in and refers to LGBT people as “gay” (“except in clinical references or references to sexual activity”).

Despite these gestures toward tolerance, and the fact that a majority of Americans support allowing gay people to serve openly, Democratic Senator Jim Webb and Republican supermodel Scott Brown have come out against repeal.

The vote could come tomorrow, and it’s by no means a sure thing.