What of the Right-Wing 527s?

It is journalistically axiomatic that ideological readers both left and right prefer bad news over good, the sensational over the quotidian, and in general a fright-filled carnival over a pleasant walk in the park.

Which is to say, by and large they enjoy having their hair straightened by familiar bugaboos and foreboding tales of dark conspiracies underway by the omnipotent opposition, rather than stumbling on the auspicious and hopeful. Woe to the journalist, editorialist or columnist who writes of the latter.

It is with this axiom -- caveat, really -- in mind that nevertheless I present the second of back-to-back pieces with a positive bent. Yesterday I noted "Yet More Evidence of an Obama Blowout," and today I'm calling in some back-up.

Because yesterday there appeared twin pieces in the New York Times and Politico with nearly identical messages that buttressed the happy prospect of the blowout I had just written about.

The good word -- for progressives, anyway -- concerned, as the Politico put it, "the flatlined state of conservative third-party efforts. The truth is that, less than five months before Election Day, there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group."

Sure, everyone knows they're coming and it's not improbable that in time they'll come in some strength. But the curious thing is that the 527s haven't come yet, especially since everyone knows just as well that a nasty, brutish counteroffensive by the GOP and McCain campaign is their only hope.

Yet it seems that hope itself is what lies at the bottom for the right. En masse it is dispirited and disarrayed, left ideologically and emotionally shattered by a two-term administration and 12-year Congress of epic incompetence.

Where to turn? Where to go from here? Hell, the right doesn't even know where it's at.

With one exception: It does know that it's facing its worst electoral crisis since 1964 -- principally in the form of the Obama juggernaut and the Republic's cris de coeur for change.

Hence the financially struggling McCain campaign and somewhat better-off Republican National Committee have their work cut out for them: to spread gloom, to lay on the doom, to muddy any shimmers of progressive hope and, in general, suppress the votes of those now in possession of it.

But that's not enough. The McCain and RNC tag teams cannot by themselves get the job done, because a) they simply haven't the money and b) any direct viciousness aimed at the first African-American presidential candidate could easily result in unrecoverable blowback.

So enter the "independent" 527s, which, as noted, surely must enter. Writes the Politico: "Conversations with more than a dozen Republican strategists find near unanimity in the belief that, at some point, there will be a real third-party effort aimed at Obama. But not one knows who will run it, who will pay for it, what shape it will eventually take or when such a group may form."

And here it is, late June already, nearly two months later than the Swift Boaters got launched in 2004.

The right's problems are numerous. Some of the old money isn't ponying up this time around; the hyperconservatives had their hearts and designs set on only an anti-Hillary campaign; some 527s -- such as Ari Fleischer's Freedom Watch -- that once pledged an anti-Obama campaign are retreating from the presidential battlefield; there exists a near absence of pro-McCain enthusiasm; and the FEC has imposed new message restrictions that, frankly, have taken much of the fun out of operating a self-respecting political organ of character assassination.

Both the Politico and NY Times added that every right winger "interviewed ... cited the same central reason" for the scarcity of 527 activity: "a fear that their party’s nominee will publicly denounce them and hold a grudge."

That sounds honorable and civilized, but I don't buy it for one minute, since honor and civility are hardly the hallmarks of political hatchetmen. It is, rather, an excuse -- an excuse to cover the right's splendid demoralization and almost surefire sense of an impending and explosive loss.

Sorry, but that's the good news.