DEAFENING RUMBLINGS

President Obama, who since the midterms has been assiduously defining himself as ineffectual and eager to capitulate, is now carrying that to the point of self-parody. Notice the fate of the ozone standards in consequence of business pressure, for example. Environmentalists were already giving this Democratic president a grade of "F".

Meanwhile, one Huffington Post columnist reports that if you talk with elected officials about Mr. Obama, you hear "unprintable rage", while another opines that it is getting impossible to take the man seriously. There have been no calls for him to step aside, I reckon because the pols assume they're stuck with him and don't want to be seen as further lessening his dwindling prospects.

But not everyone is so guarded. Ernie Chambers is a black man who served as a state senator in Nebraska for 38 years with an outspokenness and a legislative mastery that made him both a state treasure and a holy terror. He got national headlines a few years ago when he lampooned a certain kind of lawsuit by suing the Biblical deity for making terroristic threats against some of his constituents. While recently announcing his candidacy for resumption of the legislative career from which term limits sidelined him, he was asked his thoughts on our first black president. His reply was that the latter should not be in office and that he was "pathetic", "a milquetoast", and "a weak, scaredy man". So much for that monolithic racial support that was touted as the incumbent's ace in the hole.

And members of the Congressional Black Caucus, notably Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, have become thunderous in their exasperation, Congressman Emanuel Cleaver notoriously referring to the president's budget deal with the Republicans as "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich". They say they're supporting Mr. Obama, but you get the impression that that support is eroding fast. Unemployment among blacks is at a 27-year high, and that isn't being addressed.

To be fair, Mr. Obama would face the charge of helping "his own" at the expense of everyone else if he did something about black unemployment in particular. But another kind of personality in the White House, white or black, could win respect for having the guts and the fairness to do it. The rationale would be, "We're going to act where the need is greatest, and race be damned."

This White House has apparently decided that Democrats have nowhere else to go. Well, they stayed home in the midterms, and you know how that worked out. The notion that they and independents will be terrified of the Republican nominee and therefore will drag themselves to the polls is ill-founded. You're dreaming if you think the GOP is going to nominate some Marginal Melvin who preaches that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Americans will not vote themselves out of those "socialist" benefits, especially in a sagging and threatened economy.

As for that overnight phee-nom Rick Perry, he has spoken and written enough to guarantee that the Repub establishment will bump off his candidacy if the journalists and rival candidates can't. The nominee will be someone superficially unscary but acceptable to the tea-partiers, such as a Jeb Bush or a Chris Christie.

The assumption lingers that there will be no Dem challenger to Mr. Obama. When nothing keeps happening, it's human nature to think that nothing will go right on happening. But ask the people of Vermont: A well-groomed landscape one day, a hurricane's devastation the next.

A credible opponent could count on being photographed with hand held aloft not only by Ernie Chambers but by Al Gore and a number of vigorous Dem activists and celebrities. And that would be before establishing viability. The prospect has gone from inviting to irresistible.

Right now either no one is running yet or someone is being quiet and cagy while laying plans. Whichever it is, you can bank on this: You will see a mightily contested race.