"Barack Obama is fond of quoting these words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. : ÒThe arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.Ó

As America prepares to vote in TuesdayÕs election, it appears that the arc of the moral universe, at least as the president understands it, will flatten out. Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress seem headed for a repudiation.

America has known such detours before. Eventually it moves again on the long arc toward justice. Those on the edges of the political spectrum may foam at the mouth, but in the middle often is found common sense, wisdom and compassion.
We must hope so.

All politics eventually comes down to allocating public resources and channeling collected money for the public good. But the last three decades have seen big chunks of the nationÕs wealth redistributed to the rich.

According to the noted radical David Stockman, who was President Ronald ReaganÕs budget adviser, the top 1 percent of American taxpayers Ñ those with adjusted annual gross incomes of $410,000 or more Ñ reaped two-thirds of all the economic gains between 2002 and 2006. Today, the top 1 percent earns 23 percent of all income.
Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats spent the last two years trying to even the scales a little bit. If polls are accurate, they are about to be punished for that.

The health care reform bill, for example, would be paid for in large part by raising payroll taxes on households making more than $250,000. Most of the benefits would go to households making less than four times the poverty level Ñ currently $88,200 for a family of four people.

Democrats passed a financial regulatory bill aimed at preventing a recurrence of the 2008 meltdown. It did not go far enough Ñ both parties remain far too deeply in thrall to Wall Street Ñ but it does contain valuable restraints and consumer-protection measures. Polls say the Democrats will be punished for that, too.

And they will be punished for the $819 billion stimulus bill that they passed in early 2009. Some of it, to be sure, was political pork. But about a third of the bill was tax cuts for individuals and small businesses, including $116 billion in income tax cuts for 95 percent of working families. Much of the rest of it shored up state and local governments reeling from the ever-increasing costs of health care.

Republican candidates avoided the details. They preferred to chant Òfailed stimulus bill,Ó because, while the bill may have saved or created 3 million jobs and forestalled a much deeper recession, unemployment rates remain doggedly high."