Flash! Rove is not God.

Josh Marshall says, take a breath and get real when assessing why political perceptions are the way they are. Money quote: "People without strong grounding respect power and have contempt for weakness. They inpute power and sense and sagacity to victory and all the opposites to defeat."

During the height of the Foleygate blow-up, I had many more than a few readers write in to ask me why it wasn't obvious to me that the Foley revelations were a Karl Rove dirty trick. Didn't I get it? Didn't I see how this Foleygate business had conveniently come along just when the NIE story and Woodward's book were shining a bright light on Iraq?

I thought of dredging my memory for similar insights. But suffice it to say the examples would be legion. Indeed, there is almost no misfortune the Republicans can suffer that a non-trivial number of Democrats won't be able to convince themselves was actually a fiendishly brilliant Rove plot.

Now, I don't say this to beat up on my Democratic brethren. And I wouldn't want you to think most TPM Readers think along these lines. But it's not something to brush away either.

We don't know what will happen November 7th. Elections can turn dramatically in the final weeks. But unless something dramatic changes, it's going to be a really, really bad one for the GOP. Yet there are many Democrats who are convinced that Karl Rove has the matter all in hand and is just waiting to spring some trap.

Why do I raise this point? The last several years have taken a harsh toll on the country. But it's taken one on the psyche of Democrats too. Look over time and geography and you'll see a regular pattern. Those who are cut off from power and have the experience of repeated defeats began to believe that those who oppress them possess power and control over events all out of proportion to reality. It's the experience of being beaten repeatedly which can warp perceptions as much as winning too much.

And it's not just in the minds of Democrats.

I'm a big critic of media bias of different sorts, which I've chronicled over the years at this site. But a lot of the slavishness toward Republicans and contempt for Democrats one sees in the media, again, is the product, to put it baldly, of seeing Democrats lose three straight national elections. People without strong grounding respect power and have contempt for weakness. They inpute power and sense and sagacity to victory and all the opposites to defeat.

If you want some sense of how this works, give me an example of the losing political campaign that wasn't run by idiots. Have any examples?

This isn't just a cliff-notes version of social psychology. It's an important element in understanding the politics of the last six years. Not just the Democrats and the Republicans, but the weight of conventional wisdom, how the most silly and outlandish gambits from the GOP get a respectable hearing while ineptitude and weakness are the favored storyline for Dems. To borrow a concept from Chinese politics and cosmology, since 2000 the GOP has had the Mandate of Heaven.

If the Democrats do really well on November 7th, yes, they'll get the subpoena power that has the White House shaking in its boots. And the president's legislative agenda, as we've known it to date, will cease to exist. But I'm not certain those will be the most consequential changes. After the last six years, it will have a deep effect on the perceptions of both parties. And with a party that has based on so much on bluff, confidence and force, that could be a very big deal.