Careful what you wish for.

• Author: Durst, Will
• Position: Off the Map - Column

This is a tale of two California gubernatorial elections whose seismic aftershocks can still be felt today. The first was in 1966. Democratic California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown was running for a third consecutive term. In June of that year, upon hearing that a former Screen Actors Guild president had beaten the mayor of San Francisco in the Republican primary, he and his staff were barely able to contain their glee. (Yes, this was so long ago, the mayor of San Francisco was Republican. Back when gay meant festive. And the TV went dark at 11 p.m.) He considered his opponent a veritable lightweight compared to the grey eminence that was George Christopher: All flash and little, if any, pan. Surely, this terrific news signaled that four more years of employment as the CEO of the Golden State was in the bag. Hopefully, he refrained from calling in designers to redecorate his Sacramento digs, because that assessment proved to be as premature as a high school sophomore's first lap dance.

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On January 3, 1967, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the thirty-third governor of California. Reputedly, he went on to other political postings later in life, but whether you liked or didn't like what happened during his multiple reigns of error, the lesson to be learned from this ancient anecdote is to be very, very careful what it is that you wish for. You might just get it.

Fast forward forty-two years. The mainstream Republican machine is salivating at a Barack Obama candidacy this November like a Pavlovian dog at a school-bell testing lab. All during the primary process, rightwing talk show hosts gave the junior Senator from Illinois a wider berth than a tray of nitroglycerine on a floor full of marbles. They concentrated instead on slamming Hill and Bill for a long list of past and present outrages such as the audacity to breathe the same air as good, God-fearing folks and Clay Aiken. Didn't matter what Senator Clinton did. If she demonstrated a mastery of policy, she was an Iron Maiden lacking passion. When she teared up, she was a weak-kneed sob sister who would break down at a stern look from Premier Putin. First her husband gave her an unfair...