Whether November will actually prove quite this gruesome for Democrats, I still have my doubts. The Tea Party has forced politically toxic nominees on the GOP in a handful of key Senate races -- candidates who would be certain losers any other year and who may well fall short even in this one. Plus, for all their troubles this past year, haven't Democrats proven something by winning special House elections in some very GOP-friendly districts?

But let's put the skepticism aside, buy into the panic, and stipulate (for now) that the Democrats will lose both the House and the Senate this November. This might just be where the fun begins -- at least if you're a fan of Republican infighting and back stabbing.

Fissures within the House and Senate GOP ranks have not been easy to spot since Barack Obama became president, with Republicans aligning in uniform opposition to virtually every major administration initiative. But among the party's leaders in both chambers, there are some serious personality, policy and strategic conflicts -- conflicts that figure to become more apparent if the GOP takes power.

Start in the House, where John Boehner, the GOP leader, can hear the footsteps of Eric Cantor. The two men don't care for each other and have been in an uneasy alliance since Cantor became the party's whip, currently its second-ranking spot in the House, after the 2008 elections.

Cantor, who at 45 is 15 years younger than Boehner, will soon be releasing a book called "Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders," co-written with Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, two other House Republicans who are also significantly younger than Boehner. The book will be out on September 14, boosting Cantor's national visibility just as Americans begin focusing more on politics. The potential for Cantor to steal the spotlight from Boehner was apparently not lost on the current GOP leader. As Politico reported recently:

This is classic Cantor: a hyperambitious move to publish and push ideas he thinks will help rebrand the GOP, on his terms -- and not necessarily those of his boss, Minority Leader John Boehner.

If this were an isolated incident, it would pass without a peep. But it’s not: Cantor is earning a reputation for pushing his ideas so hard and so often that some GOP colleagues are questioning his motives. Is he guided by a burning desire to help the party -- or to boost himself?

This opens the door to plenty of potential mischief if Republicans do reclaim the House. Presumably, Boehner will be elevated to speaker -- it's impossible to see Cantor toppling him just after an election that Republicans perceive as a triumph. But that also means that Cantor should have no trouble grabbing the No. 2 slot, majority leader. And given his ambition, it's not likely he'll be content to hold that spot for very long, especially if he doesn't believe Boehner has any real sense of where he wants to lead the party. Indeed, while Cantor is releasing a book outlining his concept of conservatism, Boehner has struggled to produce a coherent blueprint for what Republicans would actually do with a House majority. 

This is not the recipe for a healthy leadership team. Any majority the GOP wins this year will be a narrow one -- subject to being tossed out in the '12 elections. That will only make Cantor and his "young gun" allies more impatient with Boehner's leadership, and more likely to undermine him. Boehner, of course, knows something about how this goes. After the 1994 GOP revolution, he earned the No. 4 slot in the House Republican leadership -- but four years later, amid complaints that he communicated poorly with members and botched the party's message on television, he was ousted in a coup and replaced by J.C. Watts.

Things may be just as fun on the other side of the Capitol. No, Mitch McConnell isn't in any danger of being ousted as the Senate's GOP leader. But he faces the very messy prospect of having to deal with a new batch of Tea Party-friendly ideologues -- far-right absolutists who won't be afraid to exercise the (considerable) prerogatives of a senator, even if it puts them at odds with McConnell.

And these Tea Party senators -- their ranks could include Marco Rubio, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and Alaska's Joe Miller, among others -- will have a leader of their own: South Carolina's Jim DeMint. That's the same Jim DeMint who endorsed Paul over McConnell's protégé in Kentucky's Senate primary earlier this year.

DeMint and his fellow Tea Partiers represent a vocal segment of the GOP base: conservatives who were originally attracted to the party by its emphasis on low taxes and small government but who have watched too many party leaders in D.C. compromise on those principles. They’ve made excuses for decades, as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Republican Congresses expanded government and racked up massive deficits, but they're not willing to abide it any longer. And in McConnell, many of them see a 26-year incumbent who essentially personifies the D.C. Republican establishment.

In an interview this week, McConnell stressed that the Senate is likely to include several moderate Republicans next year, like Delaware's Mike Castle and Illinois' Mark Kirk. This may be true, but it will only make matters worse for the GOP leader if Republicans control the Senate. Uniting a Mike Castle and a Rand Paul is fairly easy now; you can concoct a moderate rationale for opposing Obama's agenda just as easily as you can concoct a conservative one. But if it's up to Republicans to advance an agenda of their own, or to work with the White House? Then the daylight between the Castles and the Pauls becomes problematic.

To be sure, DeMint will still have some new allies next year even if some of the Tea Party candidates lose this fall and even if the GOP falls short of a majority -- just as Boehner will still face a threat from Cantor if the party fails to win the House. (Actually, in that circumstance, the threat to Boehner will probably be worse.) But if the Republicans win both chambers, they'll suddenly own the spotlight on Capitol Hill -- and that's when Americans might start noticing that they aren't quite ready for prime time.

Republicans circulated audio of a testy, 22-minute interview that O'Donnell had with radio station WGMD on Thursday. Party officials also have said she inflated her resume and made flat-out untrue statements while being dogged by questions about tax liens and foreclosures. Castle says she has misrepresented his record.

"She's not a viable candidate for any office in the state of Delaware," state party chairman Tom Ross, who is backing Castle, said in a telephone interview. "She could not be elected dog catcher."

Republicans said Castle's campaign is preparing negative television ads against O'Donnell. The commercials would air in the week leading up to the primary. The campaign also has created a website, RealChristine.com, a clearinghouse of negative O'Donnell stories.

"Unfortunately, the truth always seems to be an issue," said Ross. "Her version of reality doesn't jibe with any of the facts."

O'Donnell's campaign did not return messages seeking comment.

The Tea Party Express has announced a six-figure commitment to back O'Donnell. A spokesman, Levi Russell, said the organization hopes to begin airing radio and television ads by the end of this week or early next week, and put the anticipated cost at about $250,000.

In the radio interview Thursday, O'Donnell refused to back down from claims that she won two of Delaware's three counties in her 2008 Senate bid against Biden, despite numbers that show she didn't.

"I was the 2008 endorsed candidate against Joe Biden and I won in two counties," O'Donnell had told a group in Pennsylvania.

WGMD's Dan Gaffney, a conservative radio host who backed O'Donnell's Senate bid, asked her to explain the claim.

"Look at the results," O'Donnell said. "What do they say? 49 (percent), 49. I call that a tie."

She lost that county by 272 votes.

Commenting on Kent County, home to state capital Dover, O'Donnell said: "I said I nearly tied."

The host played the audio again that shows she didn't couch it that way. Flustered by the questioning, O'Donnell asked Gaffney whether he was being paid off by Castle, who has refused to debate her.

She then blamed her schedule for the missteps. "You're on the campaign trail, starting at 5 a.m., you go to 12 ... you go until midnight," she said. "Sometimes you slip up on those things."

Although private polling shows Castle with a comfortable lead, they want to avoid a surprise like Miller upending Murkowski.

Ross argued that the two candidates -- O'Donnell and Miller -- are far different.

"When you look at Joe Miller, he's an Ivy League graduate, a war hero and an attorney who is prominent in the community," he said. "We could go across the street from the apartment Christine O'Donnell rents and we probably couldn't find anyone who knows her."

Although O'Donnell has appeared on the ballot in the past, she faces an uphill race against Castle, Delaware's sole representative in the U.S. House who won in 2008 with 61 percent of the vote.

Republicans also take some comfort in the calendar. The deadline to register in the Republican primary has passed; tea party activists energized by the upset in Alaska missed their chance to vote in the closed primary. The Republican winner will face Democrat Chris Coons.

There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."

But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.

So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

This is utter nonsense.

For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.

For decades, they comfortably coexisted in the national Democratic Party's other major source of support, the machine-folk of the urban North. But as civil rights became a national issue -- and as the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the North and West turned civil rights into a priority for Democrats outside the South -- the coalition began to splinter. When the party ratified a civil rights plank at its 1948 convention, Southern Democrats staged a walkout and lined up behind Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's governor and (like all Southern Democrats of the time) an arch-segregationist. Running under the Dixiecrat banner, Thurmond won four Deep South states that fall.

Throughout the '50s and early '60s, Southern Democrats sat in political limbo. Their national brethren were inching their way toward a full-on embrace of civil rights, but the GOP wasn't much of an alternative, not with Dwight Eisenhower endorsing integration and not with the party's Northern-dominated congressional ranks strongly backing civil rights legislation.

1964, though, is what changed everything. In signing the Civil Rights Act, LBJ cemented the Democrats as a civil rights party. And in nominating anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater for president (instead of pro-civil rights Nelson Rockefeller) the GOP cast its future fortunes with the white electorate of the South. LBJ trounced Goldwater nationally that fall, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote. But in the South, voters flocked to the Republican nominee, with Goldwater carrying five states in the region. Mississippi, the same state that had given FDR 97 percent of its votes 28 years earlier, now gave Goldwater 87 percent. That fall, Thurmond, now a senator, renounced his Democratic affiliation once and for all and signed up for Goldwater's GOP. The realignment was well underway, and it had everything to do with race.

All of this, mind you, happened before Barbour -- who claims that his generation led the South's migration to the GOP for non-racial reasons -- was old enough to vote. And while it did take a few decades to solidify the South as a top-to-bottom GOP stronghold, you can draw a straight line from the GOP's embrace of Goldwater and his segregationist allies in '64 through Richard Nixon's Thurmond-aided Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's 1980 embrace of "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Miss., and to the present day, when Republican candidates routinely win 85 percent of the white vote in statewide elections in the Deep South.

Actually, Barbour's account of his own civil rights-era political coming of age, which he relates in a different part of the Human Events interview, tells the story of the South's partisan transformation very well. His father and grandfather, he notes, were both Democrats -- "Eastland Democrats," to be precise.

That would be James Eastland, an ardent segregationist senator who represented Mississippi from 1943 to 1978. Dubbed "the voice of the white South," Eastland declared that Brown v. Board of Education "destroyed" the Constitution and that segregation was the "correct, self-evident truth" and "the law of nature." When three civil rights workers in Mississippi disappeared in the Freedom Summer of '64 (they were murdered, it turned out), Eastland privately told LBJ that no one had really disappeared -- that it was all "a publicity stunt."

Eastland, like many Southern segregationists, remained in the Democratic Party even after civil rights. But he aligned himself with the Nixon administration -- there's that Southern Strategy again -- and regularly voted with the GOP.

Barbour, too, aligned himself with Nixon, signing up with the Republican's 1968 presidential campaign, when he was just 20 years old. In the Human Events interview, he casts this as a risky, against-the-grain decision, since there were so few Republicans in the South back then, but it really wasn't; remember, Mississippi had just given 87 percent of its votes to the Republican presidential candidate in '64.

And why did Barbour join the GOP? "I don't know what possessed me, other than my oldest brother came home from the Army a Goldwater Republican in 1965." In other words, his brother -- a member of Barbour's generation, the generation that supposedly didn't see race -- left the Democratic Party just as LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, just as the Republicans nominated a civil rights opponent for president, and just as almost every white Mississippi voter crossed party lines to vote for that civil rights foe and brought young Haley along with him. But race had nothing to do with it!

In Barbour's revisionist history, old segregationist Democrats from the South stood in the way of integration in the '50s and '60s, but then a new, enlightened generation of post-racial conservatives came of age and transformed the region into a Republican bastion for ... some other reason.

In reality, the Republicans' domination of the South today is a direct result of the party's rejection of civil rights in '64 (and Nixon's Southern Strategy, which called for coded appeals and behind-the-scenes assistance to Southern bigots). The partisan disparities in Southern elections speak to an enduring racial divide: While Barack Obama won nearly 45 percent of the white vote nationally in 2008, he got just 11 percent in Mississippi and 10 percent in Alabama.

It's understandable why Barbour doesn’t like to talk about this -- and why most national Republicans would rather ignore it. The South is critical to them, and their support in that region comes almost exclusively from white voters. But to be a national party -- and to win the White House -- requires votes from educated suburbanites outside the South who have a strong distaste for racial politics. Thus, the party takes pains every four years to showcase as many black Republicans as it can at its national convention -- a message not so much to black voters but to white suburbanites who want reassurance that they're not voting for a Goldwater party.

This balancing act is especially critical to Barbour, who knows the suspicions he'll face from those suburban swing voters if he ends up challenging Obama in '12. If he can get them to believe his whitewashed version of history, it'll be a lot easier to win them over.

What does a middle-aged white man with delusions of grandeur do next? You start a news website. Never mind that you work for a news company that has its own site. You are Glenn Beck, and you now control the information that your people consume. Everyone has the same (incomplete) knowledge, which you will then reinforce through your talk show and general public wankery.

The Blaze launched mere days after the D.C. rally last weekend, and reviews began coming in immediately. The Christian Science Monitor went so far as to ask, "Why?" Which is a ticket to madness when directed at a guy like Beck.

Meanwhile, reports are still coming in about the "Honor" rally -- Beck disputes the media's crowd estimates, CBS News examines Beck now compared to a year ago, and the Washington Post tries to explain why Obama just doesn't get little Glenn. Religious questions about the Mormon Beck have been raised in the days since the D.C. rally as well. On Faith considers the possibility that a) God is speaking through the pundit (shiver), b) Beck will spur the return of American civil religion or c) that Glenn Beck has no clue who his God is. And Southern Baptists want nothing to do with him.

Check out some of the better counter-rally signs on display last weekend, in case you were worried it was one big right-wing self-love-festival:

 

Gingrich "is a super-smart man, but he doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage," he said of the thrice-married former House speaker. "He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States. His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Coburn became disillusioned with Gingrich almost immediately upon Coburn's arrival in Washington in 1995. He repeatedly trashes Gingrich in his book "Breach of Trust" (subtitled "How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders" -- besides, I guess, Senator Coburn). But his complaints have usually been about how Gingrich gave in too easily to Clinton on the budget, or betrayed some part of the Contract With America, or other policy matters, not necessarily the character stuff.

Speaking of commitment to marriage, Coburn has been accused of helping his good buddy John Ensign cover up his own messy extramarital affair. According to the husband of Ensign's former mistress, Coburn told Ensign to give the husband a million bucks to make it go away. (Coburn -- who, again, is an obstetrician -- claimed he couldn't explain his "counseling" of Ensign because of doctor-patient confidentiality.) So, you know, nobody's perfect.

Coburn's criticism might be a sign that serious social conservatives wouldn't sign on to a Gingrich campaign, but it's a moot point. Gingrich is just doing what he always does: Taking advantage of the fact that every couple years he can attract money and attention by pretending to plan a White House run.

Behind these events, under the rubric "Pray and A.C.T.," is Newt Gingrich's organization, Renewing American Leadership, although the frontmen for this particular initiative are former Watergate conspirator Charles Colson and evangelist Jim Garlow, who now works for Gingrich. Endorsers include top evangelical and political leaders such as Focus on the Family's Jim Daly, who took over from James Dobson; Princeton University professor Robert George; Fox News host and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; Cindy Jacobs of the Generals of Intercession; Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, who attended the Lincoln Memorial rally at Beck's invitation; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; and Tim Wildmon, who is taking over the American Family Association from his father, Don. Also among the endorsers of Pray and A.C.T. or Renew America are Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., who was featured at the Beck rally, and David Barton, the pseudo-academic who argues that America was founded as a "Christian nation" and is often touted by Beck on television (and who headlined Beck's "Divine Destiny" pre-rally Friday evening at the Kennedy Center in Washington).

The tenets of Pray and A.C.T. are straightforward and traditional: opposition to gay marriage and any manifestation of tolerance for homosexuality; opposition to reproductive rights for women, especially abortion; and opposition to anything that violates "religious liberty" as defined by Christian ultras (which evidently doesn't cover the right to construct an Islamic center on Park Place in Manhattan).

According to the Pray and A.C.T. website, prayer is vital but not sufficient to becoming "authentically Biblical," which requires "voting in all elections only for candidates who affirm the sanctity of life in all stages and conditions, the integrity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty and respect for conscience ... The foundational moral principles ... must become a guiding force in every local, state and national election -- year after year -- including this year's election."

If that isn't clear enough, the schedule for Pray and A.C.T.'s pre-election crusade starts with a sports arena prayer service, led by the radical theocrat Lou Engle, and then moves on to a countdown event at a church in Washington on Sept. 12, followed by an official launch event in Washington on Sept. 19, concluding with the Lincoln Memorial rally on Oct. 30 -- two days before Election Day.

Fred Clarkson places Pray and A.C.T. in recent historical context on Talk2Action, discusses why it marks an important moment in right-wing politics, and explains what may be different this year:

The Christian Right has often sought to stay the hand of God, angry with our failings as a nation, by 'standing in the gap' at large prayer rallies and pleading for mercy. They have made a special point of doing so in the run up to national elections since 1980, praying for godly government and righteous candidates, and this year is no exception. The beneficiaries are almost always Republicans and this year is probably no exception in that regard as well. But there is also an ominous element that mostly transcends parties and is on vivid display as we enter the fall campaign season.

On Labor Day weekend, Lou Engle, head of the fiery neo-Pentecostal group, The Call, is leading a worship service in a sports arena in Sacramento, California and a "solemn assembly" at the state Capitol the next day. These events were initially billed as a tenth anniversary of The Call's first youth rally on the national capital mall which drew a claimed 400,000 people. Since then, the Sacramento event has been repositioned as the kick-off of a major Christian Right fall political campaign initiative. Engle says it will be the "hinge of history" opening the door to "the greatest awakening" and "returning our nation to its righteous roots."

There are several important dimensions of this effort. One is that this is an effort at reaching and mobilizing evangelical young people into Republican politics, particularly in California; another, is that it represents a new stage in the long term cooperation between conservative Catholics, fundamentalists and the neo-Pentecostals. And finally, the militant rhetoric of Engle's armies of activists is escalating, and their organizational infrastructure seems to be increasing, especially in cyberspace.

... The eminence grise of this initiative appears to be former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose organization Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) is apparently the force behind a series of Christian Right events being organized under the rubric of "Pray & Act." This is politically important, but as Gingrich's role becomes more public, it may also become morally dissonant, since Gingrich is well known (and has been recently highlighted in the news) as a thrice-married serial philanderer. This certainly makes him an unlikely guide for a religious political movement whose leaders believe that the fate of America hinges on the health of heterosexual marriage. (His recent conversion to Catholicism not withstanding.)

…At this writing, details are still emerging, but the list of Religious Right leaders involved is impressive, and their intention to lead people from a state of fervent prayer to acquiring state power is unambiguous.

These events may fairly be seen in the context of the ongoing transition of the Religious Right as the founding generation of movement leaders passes from the scene. R.J. Rushdoony, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Bill Bright, and John Giminez (among others) have died. Pat Robertson, Don Wildmon, James Dobson, and Beverly LaHaye are in varying stages of passing the torch; and each of their designees are coalescing via Pray & Act, which in turn is appealing to and seeking to register young people to vote.

Clarkson's analysis of the deeper Dominionist and Christian Reconstructionist roots of this latest manifestation is troubling, not least because Lou Engle, who is kicking off the election-year festivities in Sacramento, has given tacit support to the execution of homosexuals in Uganda, among other extremist positions. The entire post is well worth reading.