TO paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again. In this case, “they” are the brothers Koch, billionaire oil tycoons David and Charles, operating through their tax-exempt organization, innocuously named Americans for Prosperity. As soon as the results from the Florida and Arizona primaries were in last week, they opened their wallets and bought $1.4 million in attack ads in four states.

If Florida’s Tuesday primary results are any guide, it appears the almost universal diagnosis of anti-incumbent, anti-establishment fever is actually a highly selective condition, afflicting mostly Republicans in high-profile races.

Is our democracy in peril? Everyone seems to think so. The far right keeps chanting its nonsense mantra, in one form or another: “I want my country back!” The far left responds with doom and gloom: “What’s happening to my country?” Name-calling and obstructionism seem the only rules of debate. Reason is dead. Facts evaporate amid the onslaught. The dwindling middle throws up its hands: “A pox on both your houses.”

Billionaire Jeff Greene plunked down $10,000 (chump change for him) on April 30, the filing deadline, to buy a slot on Florida’s Democratic primary ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Rep. Kendrick Meek, who got on the ballot the old-fashioned way, collecting 112,476 voter signatures from all 67 Florida counties. Greene then launched his campaign with waves of slick mailings, the first of which introduced him to voters as a regular guy who just wants to restore jobs, “rein in” Wall Street, and “get results” for other regular folks.

THE much-ballyhooed Republican tidal wave on the electoral horizon may be little more than foggy mist, calibrated by Republicans and their media enablers to confuse voters and befuddle Democrats. It’s high time Democrats stop feeding the frenzy and pundits stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Instead, let’s quit the hand-wringing, take off the kid gloves, and come out swinging. Those who dare are winning.

I am deep in the heart of Tea Party-land. Gwinnett County, a collection of bedroom communities riven by I-85 northeast of Atlanta, has been a Republican bastion ever since segregationists were driven out of the Democratic Party by the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

I’m not here to do political research, just visiting family for the holiday. But when the politics of time and place smack you in the face, what’s a poor blogger to do?

IMAGINE you live in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District and you have to make a choice. The following colloquy is all you have to base it on. Who would you bet on? The exchange never actually took place, of course, but every word is drawn directly from public statements by the interlocutors, the presumptive Republican and Democratic nominees for Congress.

“ALL politics is local,” Tip O’Neill once famously said. Sometimes, it also works the other way around: local politics becomes national, at least in its implications. That’s how it is this year in northeast Florida.

RAND Paul may be soaking up the headlines, but his isn’t the only Tea Party horse race running in Kentucky. The Bluegrass State also features another that similarly reflects what I believe is an emerging national showdown between disgruntled voters on the right and progressives pushing back from the left. This one pits a three-term Republican incumbent against a self-declared “new kind of Democrat.”

In a sane universe, Alex (Adelaide) Sink would be a shoo-in for governor of Florida. Her biography alone should be enough, but when you pit that against the policies and practices of either of her likely Republican opponents — well, judge for yourself.