Could it really be true that the bums we threw out last year we want to bring back this year? Are we out of our minds? At this point the answer to the two questions is "yes," and "yes." But that's normal; we're a democracy.

Those who divine public opinion in the pages of polls show only 40 percent approve of President Obama's handling of the economy, and there are fears among top Democrats that they will lose control of the House this fall.

There is a pile of evidence that our worst economic woes are the fault of the eight Bush years, that Obama has reined in the abusers on Wall Street, and that he is struggling to cage the python of national debt.

Yet those who read the future in the entrails of opinion polls say that public attitudes are hardening in favor of returning the party that did the damage.

That is a peculiarity of our democracy, one noted in the early 1830s by an aristocratic French lawyer, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote two awed, admiring and amused classic volumes, "Democracy In America."

He wrote that unlike the vehement arguments in Europe, there is an embargo here on serious debate, "Once an idea has taken hold of the American people's minds, whether it's a just one or an unreasonable one, nothing is more difficult than to uproot it."

The fascinated young attorney, not yet 30, whose own parents escaped the guillotine by three days, would have looked upon the body of the Tea Party movement with mild curiosity, but the zealous fringes of the movement would have given him a chill, as he would have seen in them a distant echo of Jacobin savagery.

Tocqueville would have been drawn to President Obama because of his respect for learning and for polite self-assurance among "great personages." He did not meet but was put off by the populism of then-President Andrew Jackson.

He would approve the logic and be amazed by the alacrity — for a democracy — of the administration's just-passed legislation to regulate some Wall Street practices that took the country within a whisker of depression.

And it is only just, Tocqueville might say, for Obama to be given credit for trying to douse a fire started before he moved into the White House.

Two weeks before the inauguration, the projected deficit for 2009 was well more than $1 trillion.

The numbers are persuasive. When President Clinton's term ended in 2001, there was a surplus of $710 billion. The debt today (including almost $500 billion from the Great Recession) is $1.6 trillion, a swing of $2.3 trillion.

What surely would have stunned Tocqueville, as it did me, is the three-to-one imbalance between the cost of the Bush tax cuts of $702 billion over the next decade compared to only $162 billion for war costs.

But numbers and logic don't persuade voters when they have lost their confidence in the president as an economic steward. Evidence on the street where voters live shows foreclosures and lost jobs.

Obama lost public confidence last summer when the Bush-sponsored and Obama-blessed TARP program was saving the financial industry while working stiffs were losing their jobs and houses.

Instead of the president building confidence in his leadership by showing up at work places and doing everything he could short of an FDR-style jobs program, which Congress would reject, he was largely on the sidelines as the GOP led a highly politicized anti-health care campaign during the recess.

The White House is now paying for failing to reassure the people.

It might be a purgative for democracy and an object lesson to the modern Republican Party for them to win both the House and Senate. My French friend Alexis and I will feel pangs of sympathy as they try to clean up their mess.

Imagine the inner turmoil of Republican leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell as they address House and Senate caucuses with somber faces announcing that the Bush tax cuts have to be sacrificed in the name of the deficit.

What a morbid moment for the GOP as it deliberately turns away from Reagan and the reverse Robin Hood philosophy of taking from the middle class to give to the wealthy: supply-side economics or Reaganomics.

According to the theory, the more you cut the taxes of the upperdog and free him from pesky regulations you would ignite such a bonfire of economic expansion that it would more than pay for the loss of tax revenue.

Reaganomics was good in theory, but it didn't work, and two miserable men would have the heavy duty of telling their caucuses, or … they could have some fun, hold firm on the tax cuts and take machetes to Obama's health care and financial reforms.

The ensuing orgy of partisanship would cause the capital to freeze up like an engine without oil and the rising anger of a frustrated public would give Alexis an alarming feeling that Jacobins were rising from the American heartland.

So it goes in this great and wondrous American democracy: We throw the bums out, call them back with some reluctance before throwing them out again. If we keep this up, Alexis might say, we're bound to get it right eventually.

H. Brandt Ayers is chairman of Consolidated Publishing Company and publisher of The Anniston Star.