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I spent a few days in Missouri last week, giving a talk and hanging out with local campus activists. They’ve got a fascinating senate race in Missouri this year, between Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and embattled incumbent Claire McCaskill.

We talked a bit about the race while I was in town, my hosts and I, and so when I stumbled across a lifestream of the campaign’s first debate yesterday morning, I watched a bit of it. As it turned out, one of the first questions was on the post office.

The mail is one of a relatively short list of government services that are explicitly mandated in the constitution, but both Akin and libertarian challenger Jonathan Dine took aim at the USPS, arguing that its current financial setup is unsustainable. (Akin argued that postal rates need to go way up and Dine said he’d be happy to see the end of Saturday delivery and the closing of a bunch of rural post offices.)

Only McCaskill was willing to stand up for the mail, and to say that the current “crisis” in the postal service is a fiction. Here’s the deal:

Until 1970, the Post Office was a regular government agency, funded both through paid services and government appropriations. But Congress began the process of phasing out government support that year, and by the late ’80s federal funding for the mail had all but disappeared. In 2006 Congress went even further, passing a law that mandated that USPS — alone among all federal agencies — completely pre-fund all its retirement benefits. At a cost of billions, and with no help from the taxpayer, the postal service was required to set aside funding for the pensions of postal workers who haven’t even been born yet.

This was a dumb idea in 2006, but it became catastrophic after the financial collapse of 2008, as declines in postal revenue shattered the assumptions on which it had been based. In the last four years, the USPS has run up a deficit of some $20 billion, entirely as a result of this wrongheaded law. Repeal it tomorrow, and the financial prognosis for the USPS is transformed overnight.

Now, the politics of the mail are complex. The 2006 law arose out of previous federal budget shell-games, and there are corporate pressures on USPS policy from a huge number of sectors of the capitalist economy — advertisers, publishers, private delivery companies, even insurers, convenience stores, and winemakers. Postal policy is a mess in a lot of ways, and not all of those pushing to weaken USPS have been Republicans.

But here’s the thing: The mail is the mail. It’s an unsexy but essential component of the government safety net. It’s a public service we need, one that’s used most by folks with the fewest resources — the elderly, the poor, people with disabilities, people with limited internet access.

If you screw with the mail, you’re screwing with people in need. You’re screwing with the common good.

On that stage in Columbia, Missouri yesterday, only one of the three candidates was willing to stand up for the mail, and it’s no accident that it was the Democrat.

Claire McCaskill is no leftist. She’s not even particularly liberal. Her ads boast that she stands at the exact center of the Senate as its “most moderate Senator.” But she’s liberal enough to believe that the postal service is worth protecting, and her opponent isn’t.

And it’s stuff like that which keeps me voting for Democrats, in spite of the drones and Manning and everything else.

Because until the revolution comes, I want six-day delivery.

There’s not much I can say that everybody doesn’t already know about Mitt Romney’s attack on the 47% of Americans who, he says, just won’t “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” But I do want to make a couple of small points.

The problem Romney has with the Democratic base — the reason they won’t vote for him no matter what he does — has very little with any supposed dependency they have on government handouts. The 47% who pay no federal income taxes are spread out across the ideological spectrum. They include white Alabama retirees, Idahoans on Social Security disability, active duty military. Hell, a third of American voters with household incomes under $30,000 went for McCain.

So that’s the first thing, that he was slagging a big chunk of his own base. But that’s been pointed out before. What’s more important is to note that it’s not just 47% of Americans who believe, as Romney put it, that “the government has a responsibility to care for” poor people, and to provide them with “food [and] housing.”

Because it turns out that this very question gets polled by the Pew Research Center on a regular basis, most recently in June of this year. And they found that not 47% but 59% of Americans agreed that “the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.”

Fifty-nine percent. And that includes 36% of Republicans and 49% of those Pew identified as “high income.”

Now, no candidate for president would ever say they believed that all Americans should be guaranteed decent food and reliable shelter. Americans don’t have such a guarantee now, and they’re not going to get it from the Democrats or the Republicans in anything like the near future. But if every American who believes in such a guarantee voted against Mitt Romney, he’d lose in the biggest landslide in forty years.