Why Democrats don't mind losing
"Loooser!" is one of nastiest playground insults. For today, at any rate, the Democrats' Harry Reid won't mind being stuck with it.
Some might say he's just getting some practice in.
He doesn't look much like a winner, with a face that invites the description "bespectacled" even from those of us who wear glasses, and a manner that seems to always teeter on the edge of irascible. He is a favourite target for his Republican opponents, who frequently describe him as being on the hard left. This doesn't mean he's a revolutionary Marxist, just that he would find ideological soul-mates in any of the three main British political parties. He is almost certain to lose his Nevada seat in this autumn's elections.
His insistence on bringing forward a vote in the Senate on financial regulation when he doesn't appear to have enough votes to win it may be, rather than the signature of a loser, a canny political tactic. He needs 60 votes to win, which means all of his own side plus one - just one - Republican.
At the moment it seems that all 41 of them are standing firm against the bill. This is a vote for cloture. Yes, that's "cloture", not "closure", although it means roughly the same thing.
It stops a filibuster; that is, endless talking to make sure a proposal gets nowhere - and Americans think cricket is complicated. It's best seen as a symbolic head-count, answering the question: have they got enough votes to get the whole thing through?
So why might the Democrats invite - indeed, welcome - the defeat of a measure that President Obama says is necessary to prevent history repeating itself, not as farce but as a second tragedy for "ordinary Americans"? This is a bill that the president says will bring in tight new laws for banks and other financial institutions. It is a bill, he says, that will stop the reckless and the crooked, greedy conmen and the irresponsible gamblers from again heedlessly creating a new financial crisis and wrecking the lives of millions of innocents.
There are elections for all the seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the seats in the Senate in the autumn mid-terms, halfway through the president's term of office. Things aren't looking too good for the president's party, but if there is a place in the political atlas of the mind that is less popular than Washington, it's Wall Street.
If the Democrats can brand their opponents as the sort of Washington politicians who would line the pockets of their Wall Street friends rather than vote for a measure to protect the American people, it might or might not turn the polls around, but it might save a few seats. And it gives them that most important thing in politics - a story to tell, with heroes, villains and dragons to slay.
When that great chronicler of the Depression, John Steinbeck, portrayed a bank as a machine that might be loathed by every one of its human members but still moves like a machine almost against their will, he was tapping into a deep seam of American populism: a poll just out shows that two thirds of Americans want tough new rules on banks.
And like any good political trap, this one can be sprung either way: if the fear of being branded a friend of Wall Street drives one - just one - Republican into their arms. then they get a bill that they genuinely want. Win or lose tonight, in the short term, at least, they win.
I’m Mark Mardell, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s North America editor. These are my reflections on American politics, some thoughts on being a Brit living in the USA, and who knows what else? My 
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