Politics: Summer's nearly over. Things are about to get serious.

As the fall ballot approaches, neither party is in much of a position to address the economic realities faced by most Americans: poverty-level wages; anxiety about getting a job or losing the job you have, about ever buying a house or losing the house you have; lack of access to affordable health care despite the passage of "revolutionary" health care reform; the longest work day and the longest commute in the industrialized world; the loss of public services as fundamental to the prospects of the middle and working classes as libraries, schools, even roads. Much less does either party have anything believable to say about extricating us from the quagmire in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Democrats have the bigger problem, though, and, even with all the help they're getting from self-annihilating Republican candidates like Rand Paul and Ken Buck, it's going to hurt come November: they're in power.