This morning’s most important read, by John Judis at The New Republic, is about the kind of foreign policy John McCain would likely operate as president of the United States. It’s not a very reassuring picture. McCain’s neoconservative advisors are one problem, and his League of Democracies fixation is another:

[T]he greatest problem with McCain’s division of the world is that it threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. McCain isn’t advocating a new cold war, but, if he initiated a global struggle against autocracy by founding a League of Democracies, the resulting split would roughly reproduce the cold war confrontation between West and East. By building a new organization that excludes Russia and China, the United States would create gratuitous tensions with these countries. Even without such provocation, U.S. and European relations with Russia have been growing more fractious since 2002, and McCain’s approach threatens to exacerbate them in particular.

But perhaps the biggest problem, says Judis, is that McCain’s highly temperamental personality tends to disproportionately affect his foreign policy thinking, leading him to “personalize foreign policy conflicts.” His powerful hatred of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, could have a big impact on a McCain presidency’s behavior.
Please read the whole thing, particularly if you are one of those folks who flirts with the idea of voting for McCain because of his experience in foreign policy.

Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis has an instructive post on poll interpretation. Sher discusses three new polls that have Obama ahead by 9, 8 and 6 points. Contrary to MSM spin that he should be “doing better,” however, Sher argues that “a final victory with that margin would be earth-shifting.” Of today’s New York Times article ,”Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race,” Sher says the headline:

…makes it sound like massive numbers of whites have an unfavorable opinion of Obama.
The complete poll data shows that 1) 31% said they are “undecided” or “haven’t heard enough,” and 2) McCain doesn’t do much better, only scoring a 35% favorable rating from whites, with a similar number also not expressing an opinion.
The article also notes that McCain leads Obama among whites 46%-37%, a 9-point margin. (The other two polls today have McCain up 8 and 7 points among whites.)
But it doesn’t tell you that in 2004, President Bush beat Sen. John Kerry among whites by 17 points.
Obama runs at least 8 points better among whites than Kerry, not to mention performing vastly better among Latino voters (39 point lead) than Kerry (9 points).

An equal opportunity debunker, Scher has this to say about WaPo‘s article on its poll, noting

…this line buried at the bottom of the Washington Post analysis of its poll: “The candidates are tied among whites who earn less than $50,000 a year, while McCain leads by 10 percentage points among those earning more than that.”
Yes, Obama runs better among white working-class voters than other whites.
Not a half-bad step forward for race relations, in my book.

Amazing what a little clear thinking can do.

At National Journal today, the estimable Charlie Cook offers some thoughts on the chattering-class obsession with handicapping the vice presidential options of Barack Obama and John McCain. He notes that Washington “insiders” don’t have a great record of getting this stuff right in the past, unless the choice was fairly obvious:

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 selection of George H. W. Bush was not a shocker, nor was Michael Dukakis’ 1988 selection of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, nor the 2004 selection of Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. But none were foregone conclusions, either.
But the 1988 selection of Sen. Dan Quayle, R-Ind., was a total surprise, as was the 2000 selection of Dick Cheney.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 pick of Tennessee Sen. Al Gore was a bit unusual — similar age, adjacent states, similar ideology, no prior personal relationship — and not many thought that Gore would choose Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., either.
For that matter, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro’s selection by Walter Mondale in 1984 was a big surprise, too.
In short, the political community has a sorry track record of picking running mates.

Not being completely inured to the temptations of veep-speculation, Cook goes on to suggest what ought to be the main criteria for both candidates:

For what it’s worth, my view this year is that a choice that looks overtly political, a crude attempt to curry favor with the voters of one state or demographic group would be seen as just that, political, and that is not good in this environment.
This is a time when picking someone enormously qualified for the job is the primary factor. Picking someone who might be of some help in securing 270 electoral votes is secondary, but still of significant concern. That is, in fact, the right politics.

We’ll soon know if Charlie has any better idea than the rest of us about the choice to be made by Obama and McCain.

In the same issue of The New Yorker that features the questionable cartoon cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, and a less-than-entirely flattering profile of Obama’s Chicago roots by Ryan Lizza, there’s another piece that probably won’t get the attention it deserves: Hendrik Hertzberg’s analysis of the recent charge against Obama of serial flip-flopping.
Hertzberg goes through the issues on which Obama has supposedly flip-flopped or “moved to the right” and makes some astute judgments:
Iraq policy? “A marginal tweak.”
Abortion? No change.
Faith-based programs? “A shift of emphasis.”
Death penalty? “A substantive tweak,” but still a tweak.
On public financing of campaigns, Hertzberg suggests that Obama broke an ill-advised promise, but didn’t really change positions.
It’s on FISA that Obama most obviously did a “U-turn,” though Hertzberg seems as baffled as I am as to whether it was politics or substance that led him to do so. Hertzberg notes the broad spectrum of civil libertarian opinion about the gravity of FISA, but leaves it to the reader to decide how much this matters.
But in general, all the talk about Obama’s “flip-flops” obscures a basic reality:

Meanwhile, McCain has been busily reversing his views in highly consequential ways. He opposed the Bush tax cuts because they favored the rich; now he supports their eternal extension. He was against offshore oil drilling as not being worth the environmental damage it brings; now he’s for it, and damn the costs. He was against torture, period; now he’s against it unless the C.I.A. does it. He keeps flipping to the wrong flops

Flip-flopping is bad politically. But flip-flopping to the wrong position is worse. Maybe Obama’s done that on FISA. But McCain’s made a habit of it, and even where he hasn’t, he tends to wind up with positions that should disturb any voter unhappy with the Bushian status quo.

Gerald F. Seib’s column in today’s Wall St. Journal addresses the effects of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapse and the deteriorating economy in general on the upcoming election, and he sees increased chances for a Democratic sweep. As Seib succinctly puts it,

Voters think the country is in a mess, and they are more inclined to trust Democrats to clean things up.

One reason says Seib, is that the traditional GOP panacea/meme, “Let the markets work things out” won’t play so well in the current climate:

…the Bush administration, resistant to intervene in markets, and reluctant to ride to the rescue of investors in the specific case of the housing mess, stepped up over the weekend to offer a virtual government guarantee that Fannie and Freddie would stay solvent.
It grows ever harder for Republicans to campaign against government intrusion in the marketplace the more Republicans themselves appear to be losing faith in letting markets work. And if voters want intervention in the economy, why not get the real deal with Democrats? In sum, it is hard to imagine new economic scares represent anything but more bad news for Republicans, who tend to get the blame for things that go wrong simply because they have controlled the White House for the past seven years.

And, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds even one-third of Republicans now disapprove of Bush’s job performance, includng 20 percent who “strongly disapporve” — and all-time high. In addition, 52 percent of Independents now “disapprove strongly” of his job performance. The poll also found that “a broad majority finds their finances to be a cause of stress in their life.”
All of which is making John McCain sweat more than a little. Seib explains,

…the mortgage crisis also has left Sen. McCain trapped between this instinct to act and his party’s inclination to let markets work out solutions. Maneuvering in that middle ground has left him uncomfortable at times, caught between a desire to help homeowners and distaste for bailing out investors and speculators who made bad bets.

Regardless of the presidential contest, Seib believes Democratic Senate candidates could be the major beneficiaries of the growing economic insecurity:

when the Journal/NBC News poll asked voters last month whether they preferred a Democratic or Republican controlled Congress to emerge from the election, voters responded by a whopping 52% to 33% margin that they wanted Democratic control…Increasingly, the question is how many innocent Republicans will be sucked under by these currents, and whether there is even a chance that there will be enough of them to give Democrats the magic 60 seats they need to create a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate….A fresh examination of the roster of Senate seats up for election this fall shows that Democrats have legitimate shots of taking over 10 seats now held by Republicans — and are in real danger of losing only one, that of Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

Seib is not alone in that asessment. At a press breakfast held last Saturday, Nevada Sen. John Ensign , chairman of National Republican Senatorial Committee gave a list of the ten “most competitive” U.S. Senate seats up on November 4, and only one is currently held by a Democrat. Bob Benenson of CQ Politics lists the ten Senate seats most likely to flip to the opposing party as VA, NM, NH, CO, MS, NM, AK, OR, ME and LA — all but LA currently held by Republicans. The only difference in the two lists is that Ensign had NC instead of MS.

The steady growth of publicly-available political polling in recent years has in part been due to the developing of automatic calling technologies–often known as “robocalls”–that make surveying less expensive and complicated than in the past. But this technological development has collided with another: the significant number of people, particularly younger folk, who don’t own a land-line phone.
As pollsters Paul Maslin and Jonathan Brown explain at Salon.com, many of their brethren are simply missing cell-phone-only voters, who, since they also tend to be concentrated in a particularly pro-Obama demographic, may represent a hidden margin for Obama amounting to perhaps 2 percent of the electorate.

By law, cellphone users cannot be called by an automatic dialing system (to prevent obnoxious telemarketing), and cellphone numbers are not part of the normal random-digit-dialing residential-exchange universe. Survey companies prefer to conduct polls using automatic dialing, but to find cellphone-only voters, they must employ the less-efficient hand-dialing method. Cellphone users must be sampled separately and at greater cost in time and money. This means that polls utilizing the cheaper and more efficient means of making survey calls do not include cellphone interviews.
And as survey respondents, these voters are less cooperative anyway. Even if they are contacted, they are less likely to take a call, or to arrange a call-back, than land-line households — further increasing the cost of reaching them.

Maslin and Brown dismiss substitutes for surveying of completely “wireless” voters as inadequate, and offer some evidence that this omission matters in polling results: “Gallup Poll results from earlier this year (prior to Obama’s designation as the presumptive Democratic nominee) had a 4-point swing in favor of Obama once cellphone-only respondents were folded into the overall sample.”
Most intriguingly, Maslin and Brown suggest that a similar failure to fully account for new technologies may have been an important factor in the most famous failure of the polling industry: the 1948 presidential election won by Truman against the predictions of virtually every polling operation. “Pollsters may have missed some Democratic voters in 1948 because they were technologically behind Republican voters. They were less likely than Republicans to have land lines.”
Tuck this insight away in the back of your mind for the next time you read a poll based on robocalls.

I did a post this morning noting the gathering campaign to force John McCain to disclose his (probably scary) views on Social Security, and suggesting that it presented McCain with some bad choices in terms of his rep as a straight-talker, a fiscal hawk, and a paragon of principle.
I should have mentioned a more fundamental political issue: the importance of Social Security to seniors.
In a post today on the close divisions between the two candidates in the latest Newsweek poll, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called attention to the vast “age gap” between supporters of Obama and McCain:

Another interesting finding from the Newsweek poll is that there seems to be a massive age gap forming around the choice between Obama and McCain. Among voters aged 18 to 39, Obama led McCain 56 percent to 33 percent; voters 40-59 were essentially a wash (44 percent McCain/41 percent Obama) while those 60 years of age or older went for McCain by a 48 percent to 37 percent margin.

McCain’s appeal to seniors is in no small part because he’s a familiar figure who has long been perceived by many older voters as trustworthy. If Democrats can spend some time showing seniors that McCain is a weasly flip-flopper on Social Security who would love to gut the program while accelerating tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, those perceptions could significantly change. Watch for it in future polls.

Worried about the precedent being set by federal bail-outs of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and before that, Bear Stearns?
At Huffpo today, progressive economist Jared Bernstein suggests this isn’t the best time to be worrying about the “moral hazard” of efforts to prevent a financial meltdown:

[Y]es, moral hazard is a big problem that contributes to the underpricing of risk (which, at some level, is the main factor behind all the bad stuff that’s happening now). But the time to worry about moral hazard is not the weekend when the big bank is failing. It’s years before, when you’re setting up the regulations under which the financial system can flourish without going off the rails.
These are tough challenges, and deep-pocketed, powerful forces will fight reform every step of the way. It’s going to take equally tough, persistent focus by the next administration and Congress to craft the regulations that truly promote greater stability in the financial system. Enough already with the shampoo approach to economic growth: bubble, bust, repeat.

In other words, the key thing to focus on right now is preventing the situations that lead to the choice of moral hazard or real-world calamity. And as Bernstein concludes: “Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think the McCain/Gramm team is up to the challenge.”

For a politician who likes to style himself as a straight-talking conservative fiscal hawk, John McCain has been rather evasive on what he proposed to do about Social Security.
He supported Bush’s politically disastrous 2005 privatization plan. His new “economic plan” calls reform of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the key to long-term fiscal responsibility. And at roughly the same time, he called the “pay as you go” structure of Social Security a “disgrace.”
But he’s dancing around anything terribly specific right now. And that’s deliberate:

McCain and his aides say the lack of specificity is intentional — the result of lessons from 2005, when Bush tried to sell a skeptical public on private accounts.
“There’s a really careful recognition of the history,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s economic advisor.
“The history on Social Security has been if you put out specific proposals or preconditions, you polarize the debate and the deal doesn’t get done.”

So much for “straight talk.”
As Peter Wallsten of the L.A. Times reports today, Democrats have decided to smoke out McCain’s position on Social Security, by using the available evidence attributing Bushian views or worse to him, and then challenging him to come out with contrary views if he can. It’s a classic “smoke-out” operation, and it’s coming very soon.

On Tuesday, a coalition of Democratic strategists, labor unions and liberal activist groups that helped defeat Bush’s efforts in 2005 plans to launch a similar campaign. They intend to target McCain and dozens of GOP congressional candidates who have supported proposals to allow workers to divert some of their payroll taxes out of the Social Security system and into private investment accounts….
This week, the coalition — which began laying its plans Friday in a conference call arranged by the DNC — will start demonstrating at McCain’s events and offices, particularly in key states with many seniors. The group has ordered thousands of signs with “Hands Off My Social Security” on one side and “My Social Security Is Not a Disgrace” on the other.

This campaign is intended to force McCain either to confirm the politically dangerous views he has embraced in the past, or to admit another flip-flop, or to look like just another mealy-mouthed Washington pol–all mirroring attack lines his campaign has taken against Barack Obama, who does happen to have a specific Social Security proposal, albeit one just focused on boosting revenues.
This should be another lively week on the campaign trail. But at least Phil Gramm won’t be the one speaking for the McCain campaign on Social Security.

Today’s edition of The Orlando Sun-Sentinel has a headline that should gladden the spirits of Dems: “Voter Registrations in Florida Show ‘Huge Swing’ Toward Democrats.” Political writer Anthony Man reports that the latest tally shows 106,508 Dems added to the FL voter registration rolls from Jan-May, compared with 16,686 for Republicans.
Man quotes Broward Democratic Chairman Mitch Ceasar, “The Democratic brand has cycled back.” And you gotta love his quote from Marian Johnson, political director for the Florida Chamber of Commerce — “It’s a huge swing…I looked at that and said ‘wow.”
Democrats may find yet more encouragement regarding their FL prospects in David Rieff’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article “Will Little Havana Go Blue?,” which discusses Dem gains among greater Miami’s Cuban-American community. (See also our staff post below, noting that, for the first time, more FL Latinos are now registered as Dems than Republicans)
As always, there is a cautionary note. Man reports that state GOP leaders are already responding with a call for a more energetic registration campaign from their party. And of course the FL Republican establishment has never been shy about cranking up their voter suppression efforts, which will be at full tilt going forward. Hopefully, FL — and national — Democratic Party officials are also strengthening their voting rights legal teams.