The economy is the fundamental political issue because the political class, bipartisanly, got us to this dreadful place. We could count the ways, but you know all those, even if the political class, bipartisanly, doesn’t.

Marie Antoinette had nothing on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, except perhaps Marie’s ignominious end, no longer practiced in civilized countries.

Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, once all the noise is removed, produced one inescapable conclusion.  It did not take those elections to produce that conclusion.  It is as plain as day, but there is something about our time in America that requires a two-by-four up aside the head to get through.

The voters of New Jersey and Virginia said they are hurt, confused and angry.  They are hurt, confused and angry over the shambles that is our economy.  Yes, it is still (and seemingly ever) the economy, stupid, as some clichéd headlines acknowledge, although stupid is really much too weak a word to describe those who don’t get this.

Tell us that the same motivating factor is not the fundamental political issue across all fifty states, and either you’re really not knowledgeable enough to be talking or you’re a liberal political consultant trying to hang onto your retainer.  Not national?  Only in a political fantasy is the economic pain of the electorate not national.

The economy is the fundamental political issue because the political class, bipartisanly, got us to this dreadful place.  We could count the ways, but you know all those, even if the political class, bipartisanly, doesn’t.

So against that backdrop, with unemployment nudging 10 percent nationally and much worse in some areas and for some groups of workers, with local, state and national debt escalating like swine flu, what does the most powerful person in Congress do?

Does she tell the American people that Congress got the message, and until the economy is fixed (not based on the lying data of lying politicians and lying bureaucrats), Congress is going to devote every waking hour to fixing it, whatever that takes?  Does she walk among the barrios and the plains and the tent cities from sea to angry sea, offering, even insincerely, comfort to the afflicted?

She does not.  Instead, she makes some calculated, cutesy statement about gaining two Democrat votes (from California and New York special elections to fill, temporarily, empty seats) so she can plunge ahead in her imperial attempt to transform American health care into the most disruptive, costly and byzantine system of statist dictate yet perpetrated on the American people (and we are already enduring some past champions of the genre).

She schedules a vote for Saturday.  Does the House plan cost $1.2 trillion or $2.4 trillion?  None of the numbers are even close to the ultimate reality.  And for what?  Are you going to be better off?  Are your neighbors?  Are your children?  Your parents?  Your doctor?  Your hospital?

You’ve heard all the arguments, pro and con.   If you’re for it, or if you’re for your Congress doing this right now at the expense of critical economic issues, to which this will but add, then enjoy your weekend.  If not, well, you might better be doing some fast critical thinking as to how you can convince your Representative in the House to respond to you, not to Nancy Pelosi, and now.

Pelosi must have this vote before the House recesses.  She knows it; the President knows it.  That’s the only hope either of them have to keep their members in the Yellow Submarine after Tuesday’s election, which was not about who or which party won or lost, but about what people, in states far more than two, desperately want and need.

It’s not this.  Not this way.  Not now.