Yesterday, I cast a skeptical eye on the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll horse race result that had Bush over Kerry 2 points. It just did not match up plausibly with roughly contemporary results from Gallup and ABC New/Washington Post. Today, there’s additional confirmation that the NBC News result is probably more an outlier than a trend.
The new ARG poll, conducted March 9-11, has Kerry over Bush by 7 points (50-43) among registered voters, including a very nice 9 point lead among all-important independent voters. It’s also worth noting that, with Nader thrown in, Kerry’s lead is still 6 points (48-42), with Nader only drawing 2 percent.
The ARG poll also registers Bush’s approval rating at a mere 45 percent, which I believe is the lowest ever in this poll.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
What I really want to hear is that Bush’s intensive negative ad campaign ($6 million?) in the swing states is not working. Then I think we will know his goose is cooked. I have heard that the 527 campaigns plus Kerry are matching the Bush effort.
What a relief. Why is it that the political coloration of the organizations sponsoring or conducting the polls (NBC, WSJ, Fox) always seems to result in bias? How do their subjective wishes seem to get into the polls?
Here’s the commercial that will win the election (based on real footage, I’ve seen it):
Video:
Bush sitting at Booker Elementary on Sept. 11, 2001
VO:
On September 11th 2001, President Bush was in Florida at the Booker Elementary school for a planned photo op. By the time he arrived he already knew the first tower of the World Trade Center had been attacked. He proceeded with the photo op. In this unedited footage you can see the moment Andrew Card, his chief of staff notifies the President of the second attack.
Video:
Card leans in to whisper to Bush
VO:
Card is quoted as saying, ”
A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack”
Watch the President’s reaction.
(key over the video) HE KNOWS
VO:
The president went on with the photo op for a minimum of another 9 minutes (some witnesses say as long as twenty minutes), asking no questions, not acting, not responding to the crisis. At the same time Vice President Cheney was taken to a secure location. Weren’t the children potentially at risk? Wasn’t the president a target?
Would YOU call this steady leadership?
________________________
If you’d like to see the actual raw footage of Bush at Booker the file is large..25 megs…
but it can be downloaded here
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bushbook.mov
I took at look at the ARG poll, and I was fascinated by two of the findings: first, that Bush’s support among REPUBLICANS is softening. 17 percent of Republicans polled disapproved of Bush’s handling of the economy. Double-digit disapproval among Republicans on the economy cannot be spun into good news for Bush; second, among Independents, Nader actually draws support away from BUSH! I think that if Kerry can avoid a major, and I mean major scandal, he’s in an extraordinarily strong position to take the White House in November.
C. Ama
This may be slightly off on a tangent, but it is very timely given the recent events in Madrid. I am wondering about Bush’s consistently favorable ratings regarding “fighting terrorism” and his continual lead over Kerry regarding his ability to combat terrorism. I have heard repeatedly that a new terrorist attack could be an “external event” that would send people scurrying back to Bush, because of their confidence in his ability to fight it.
But it seems to me that another terrorist attack, particularly of the kind that we saw in Madrid (where two previously distinct terrorist groups may be acting together) is very strong evidence that Bush is not winning the war on terrorism. He is using poor judgment, his ideological bent is causing us to approach the matter incorrectly and his domestic “starve the beast” plan is limiting our ability to execute the war properly. I realize this is all speculation, but at what point do we believe that the public will turn on W on this issue (like they have all the others) and realize that he is botching this one too?
The thing I find most interesting here is the rumblings of discontent among Republicans about the economy and jobs. It would be interesting to see how this correlates with household income — my guess is that the discontent among Republicans is mainly among people of average-to-below-average income, who are beginning to figure out that, while they may be in line with Bush’s social conservatism, their economic interests aren’t being well served by the Bush administration.
Greg