Keith Olbermann weaves a jolly video recap of the Primary season. Music is the appropriate “The Hardest Geometry Problem in the World” from the ‘Rushmore‘ soundtrack, by the awesomely talented Mark Mothersbaugh.

It brings to my mind two things:

One, the smell and feel of Bisquik pancakes, made just right, which for reasons only Poe’s narrator in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ can connect, will ever be evoked by thoughts of Mike Huckabee.

And two, this simple prescription for the minor fissure in the Democratic Party: Debt or no debt paid off, Hillary needs to begin quietly showing up at the town halls of “hardworking Americans, white Americans,” and start informing them she lied:

About Farrakhan, about Obama’s inferiority to McCain, about Ayers, about Wright, about his lying about her NAFTA scandals, about being elitist, about all the scum she raked up and hurled randomly at him – viral Muslim sleeper agent e-mails to 3am Phone Calls.

She needs to look her supporters right in the face and say, “I was wrong then. I’m right now. Vote for the man I convinced you was a villain, less than the opposition candidate.”

Fortunately for us all, these are Hillary supporters. They’ll do whatever she tells them to.

Anxiety-related illnesses are spiking all over our nervous nation, with insomnia now joining the ranks of obesity, hypertension and the popularity of reality TV shows. What’s got everyone staying up so late to bite their nails?

Forty-eight percent of Americans say they’re more stressed now than they were five years ago, and the same percent report regularly lying awake at night because of stress, according to a new study by the American Psychological Association.

…So what is it we’re worrying about while we stare at the ceiling all night? Primarily two things: money and work, the main woes for nearly 75 percent of Americans. That’s way up from 59 percent of us stressed out over those two things a year ago.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that percentage of the population correlates well with the segment that has had their standard of living dive in this “boom” economy. Yet immediate, personal concerns set aside, it’s hard to ignore the aggravation of worsening environmental factors. Five years ago, we were not yet in Iraq, not yet dreading global warming, even though we were – universally – in a post-9/11-and-government-defecit-inspired economic slump.

Even our Vice-Commander-In-Chief, Dick Cheney, seems to be afflicted by disturbed sleep patterns. Listening to the boring account of the record wildfires in California, he nodded off on camera.

What could be depriving the penultimate leader of the free world of his necessary rest? Answers to that are in the headlines, and are most thoroughly explored in a New Yorker article this month by Seymour Hersh, “Shifting Targets“. In one ominous word, Cheney’s burly boogeyman is, “Iran”:

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

As anybody listening to the race can tell you, most every leading Democrat supports a military option to limit Iran’s nuclear program. But apparently that either doesn’t pass muster with Cheney or doesn’t affect his feeling that it’s the current administration alone that would be – and thus must be – aggressive enough to launch or support a pre-emptive military strike on an Iranian nuclear program.

If I could take Mr. Cheney by the hand, I would sit him down and soothe him by mention of Mitt Romney. Romney is now leading significantly in New Hampshire, finally stirring that conservative base that he’s so ruthlessly courted by antics like throwing his pal Larry Craig under a speeding bus of moral judgment, declaring himself born-again Pro-Life and overall being a prudish prick whenever possible. Should Romney knock noggins with fellow frontrunner Clinton, chances are he could snap her over-moneyed, under-spined support and pull off a victory. And where would that put him so far as pushing the Big Red Button against Iran is concerned?

Romney, who has been advocating a hard line against Iran throughout his presidential campaign, said military action would be necessary if severe economic and diplomatic sanctions don’t convince Iranian leaders to abandon pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

“If for some reasons they continue down their course of folly toward nuclear ambition, then I would take military action if that’s available to us,” Romney told a crowd of doctors and nurses during a question period that followed a health care speech.

He added: “That’s an option that’s on the table. And it’s is not something which we’ll spell out specifically. I really can’t lay out exactly how that would be done, but we have a number of options from blockade to bombardment of some kind. And that’s something we very much have to keep on the table, and we will ready ourselves to be able to take, because, frankly, I think it’s unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons.”

Doesn’t that sound butch enough? Perhaps not for Cheney, who has been fiercely at odds with a CIA that insists on downplaying Iran as even a potential threat. Cheney sees the Iranian nuclear weapon capability as a certainty, and thus sees America pre-emptively attacking it as a quid pro quo.

Given this, expect to stay glued to your television sets this spring, to watch a new round of pretty lights liven things up in the Middle East.

Karl Rove’s departure from the White House will likely have little effect on the policies of the Bush Administration, but its significance as a hallmark in the political soul of the nation is great. It gives us an occasion to reflect on what Rove and the adherents of his political strategies have contributed to how politics are conducted. And it lends itself to inspire us to wonder if the impact he made on that conduct is now rippling to an end.

Americans of any political stripe should hope so. This may sound like a profoundly partisan statement – a sneer at a man who has been a loyal streetfighter for the victory of the Conservative movement. In fact, as a political scientist, I tip my hat to Rove’s record of triumph. But as a citizen who believes in the virtue of both sides of America’s political discourse, I see Rove’s strategies as an insidious toxin in our political system – a chemical WMD that has reliably both won the field and poisoned it. For Rove’s victories were – like many of the policies they then allowed – pyrrhic victories. The reason for this is the principle objective of his strategy: relentless focus on wedge issues.

Wedge issues are issues that divide Americans into two distinct camps. It’s easiest to define what a wedge issue is by defining what it is not.

A “non-wedge” issue would be issues that most Americans differ on how to go about achieving success, but not whether such things should exist at all. The tax code is one issue; national defense is another. By contrast, wedge issues are the issues that divide sharply on whether they should exist or not, and usually have profound emotional associations: abortion, gay marriage, and “right to life” for instance. In all of Rove’s recent campaigns, from 1996 to 2006, he has always relied chiefly on negative statements about opponents coupled with pushing wedge issues into the media agenda.

In doing so, his wedge issues have chiseled away at the political bridge in American political dialogue and cut a Republican Party “base” that leaves many conservatives feeling like they’re in the dust. The advantage of defining a campaign with the emotionally-fierce wedge issues is that it riles up a zealous “base”. This base provides a dependable cadre of voters that will always mobilize in strong numbers for Republicans because of the side of the “wedge” they are on. Meanwhile, swing voters are influenced by the relentless negativity, usually to vote on the basis of a candidate’s sullied character, rather than on their opponent’s policy beneifts – or to not vote at all out of mutual disgust. Rove did not so much as get people to vote /for/ his candidate on issues like national defense as /against/ the other candidate.

The result? Apathy and disappointment among swing voters, and a base that is viciously active and powerfully organized around those wedge issues. As a result of the latter, Republicans – and, even, to the extent that vocal minorities influence the dialogue and thus the agenda – have to pander to the extreme on those wedge issues. That the wedge issues are not the “Reagan Republican” or “Goldwater Republican” priorities of the “western” Republican party, driven by a love of individualism and small government, but the priorities of the “southern” Republican, moralistic and dependent on government enforcement of values, leaves many Republicans stuck in the mud, and the “big tent” with them. Now issues that normally would not unite Republicans of the Goldwater stripe with those of Jerry Falwell’s – such as gays in the military and stem-cell research – embody the Republican base that all GOP candidates must cater to in order to win.

Just as this forces wedge issues to typify the Republican base, it vilifies it. Democrats who otherwise would and have met across the aisle on non-wedge issues are forced into positions of staunch opposition to their GOP counterparts. The result is a divided electorate – one that is increasingly suspicious of the other side even though cooperation is not only necessary, but entirely possible and comfortable. If the caustic, paranoid rhetoric in partisan political commentary that has risen since the mid-90s is not evidence of this enough, looking at the electoral results in Rove’s races shows that the victories he wins are always close calls, and always carried due to a staunch socially conservative base. In short, the wedges have driven us apart, demolishing consensus and leaving it with a feeling of angry void and impending collision.

This is not all Rove’s mantle to bear, but with his record of triumph and ruthlessness in achieving it, he has been its standard bearer. He has helped create an America that votes against, not for; mobilizes to react, not act; distrusts rather than hopes. To follow his example was to be successful; to attempt to resist it was to be seen as outdated or, at best, anomalous. Now that he is gone, will his adherents and their strategies leave with him?

No. Already Clinton and her campaign’s captain, Terry McAuliffe, have taken reflexive negativity to a blitzkrieg level. They mechanically follow Rove’s playbook, tossing the wry positive politics of the last milennium’s final decade out the window in favor of a cynical, manipulative means of sure success. What Rove matured from mere tactics into a full-fledged religion, candidates like Clinton, Edwards and Romney are waging holy war with.

Now America is faced with a dilemma that will not be solved with the departure of one man or the change of nameplates in the White House – it is a wear in the fabric of the nation’s soul. The aberration that was Rove’s strategy has become the rule. And if due censure is not stuck on those who fight and win by it, that rule may one day be synonymous with American politics.