Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller will be leading a union rally for card-check today. But realistically where is card check going? There’s been buzz that it is coming up “sooner than expected.” Then we hear the President talk in wishy-washy terms and Joe Biden say “later” in the year. Well, perhaps it will come up for a vote in the House. But the Senate is quite another matter.

You only need watch a few minutes of Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) hemming and hawing to see how badly some Red state Democrats don’t want to deal with this. It’s simply not the top priority for her, she explains. How would she vote? Well, she’s not “going to see in its present form.” Hmm. Is she in favor of it? “It’s not going to be productive to us in the things that are urgent to us now.” And on it goes.

If we learned anything by now it is that the President has limited political capital — and once it’s gone, its’ gone. If he spends it on card check, creates a huge political donnybrook, and puts his own Red state Democrats in jeopardy, it’s hard to see how he’s going to get much else done. But maybe they’ll give it a try. After all, they haven’t shown to be as politically savvy as everyone believed them to be.