From Mike Allen's POLITICO PLAYBOOK

This Washington insider is usually on the mark!--tr

FROM Mike Allen's POLITICO PLAYBOOK on line.

TIME magazine dubs Obama “MR. UNPOPULAR”-Michael Scherer: “White House aides explain this change as a largely inevitable reflection of the cycles of history. Midterms are almost always bad for first-term Presidents, and worse in hard times. “The public is rightly frustrated and angry with the economy,” says Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communications director, explaining the White House line. “There is no small tactical shift we could have made at any point that would have solved that problem.” In more confiding moments, aides admit that the peak of Obama's popularity may have been inflated, a fleeting result of elation at the prospect of change and national pride in electing the first African-American President. As one White House aide puts it, 'It was sort of fake.'” MOST INTERESTING "THE PROSPECT OF CHANGE" AND "SORT OF FAKE" views from inside the White House itself. Maybe we should dust off "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" to get up to date--tr

THE BLACK SHIRTS ARE COMING (tr): "FIRST LOOK: Kate Zernike, a national correspondent for The New York Times, is out Sept. 14 with “Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America” (243 pp. Times Books. $25). $16.50 on Amazon http://amzn.to/9AX3RW Cover image http://amzn.to/b5Rwxz

--From the Prologue: “[T]he Tea Party had stepped into the void after the 2008 elections, when the right seemed to lack direction … Tea Partiers tended to believe that they had done all the right things in life: they had gotten married and had children, they went to church once a month or more, they paid their taxes … They had earned their place in the middle class, and they were out to protect what they saw as theirs. They distrusted people they regarded as elites, most notably the Obama administration … They believed that too much had been made of the problems facing blacks … [E]ven though Tea Partiers told the Times poll that they were devoted watchers of Fox News, they also said that the information they trusted most of all came from others in the movement, not from the mainstream media.”

--From the Epilogue: “As the Tea Party headed toward the 2010 midterm elections, it … remained, at its heart, more anti-establishment than anything else. It had stirred energy among Republican voters, but that energy might just hurt the Republican Party. … The Republican Party establishment worried that [senatorial candidates Rand Paul in Kentucky and Shannon Angle in Nevada] might alienate independents and conservative Democrats with their Tea Party ideas, costing the party two elections that should otherwise be easy for it to win. … The Tea Party groups were working to keep the movement's energy alive. They spent the summer planning for big events coming up - Glenn Beck's rally in Washington in late August, the FreedomWorks 9/12 march in the capital in September, the National Tea Party Unity Convention planned for Las Vegas in mid-October. … The movement was much more structured than it had been for the first 9/12 march on Washington the year before … But divisiveness and ugliness were still pushing into the movement at its fringes.”