There’s a useful new poll out, done by Celinda Lake’s firm for One Voice PAC, on public attitudes towards funding for the Iraq War.
In addition to the usual options of voting unconditionally for or against Bush’s supplemental appropriations request, this poll’s “third option” is worded a bit differently than most. Instead of messing around with timetables or dollar figures that probably don’t mean a lot to people, the poll tests support for the appropriation with the stipulation that funds can only be used to protect U.S. troops and contractors and withdraw them from Iraq. Overall, that option gets 47 percent support, compared with 22 percent for an unconditional denial of appropriations, and 23 percent for unconditional approval.
These findings, of course, still suffer from the fundamental problem that the only way Congress can “get to” the third option is to vote against any appropriations, and slug it out with Bush over a protracted period of time. If House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey has indeed delayed the moment of truth on Iraq funding until January, then maybe pollsters can figure out a way to test that scenario. In any event, this poll indicates pretty decisive overall opposition to anything like a indefinite continuation of the war, with independent voters aligned much more closely with Democrats than with Republicans.
Lake released not only a poll, and a memo, but 200 pages of crosstabs. You can slog through them, or look at Paul Rosenberg’s summary over at OpenLeft. (On the regional splits, BTW, Rosenberg misreads a verticle for a horizontal crosstab, and concludes that support for unconditional funding is more than three times as high in the South as in the Northeast. Actually, the regional disparities are a lot smaller, with unconditional funding supported by 15% in the Northeast, 24% in the Midwest, 25% in the South, and 20% in the West.)

The staff post earlier today on the methodology and internals of the Des Moines Register‘s Iowa Poll led me to this rather startling discovery about the poll’s picture of the demographics of likely Democratic caucus-goers: Only 2 percent are under the age of 25, while 51 percent are over the age of 55.
Two percent under 25? Is that possible? Does the poll assume that Caucus Night will coincide with big episodes of Heroes or Grey’s Anatomy?
Given these numbers, the really amazing thing about the Iowa Poll results is that Barack Obama is still within striking distance of HRC. And to flip the issue around, even if the percentage of Caucus-goers under 25 turns out to be twice as high as the Iowa Poll suggests, all the media stories about Obama’s robust campus-based support in Iowa have been apparently been goosing a ghost. You don’t count if you don’t vote.

As the Republican presidential candidates’ debate in Michigan yesterday illustrated, GOPers (with the partial exception of a confused-sounding Mike Huckabee) dutifully lined up in support of Bush’s veto of S-CHIP expansion legislation, defying both public opinion and the sensibilities of Sen. Charles Grassley, who happens to be from the first state in the nominating contest.
At the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has a good write-up of where the candidates are, why they are there, and the price they may ultimately pay for treating a successful and highly popular health care program as “socialized medicine.”

Much of the content, on economic policies at least, of the Republican candidates’ debate in Dearborn (not Detroit, as I misrepresented it earlier today) this afternoon would have sounded perfectly normal twenty years ago. Lowering taxes, reducing regulations, and cutting public spending (in the abstract) are the eternal, divinely-established rules for growing the economy. Entitlement programs are out of control. Relentless optimism is America’s greatest economic asset. If you substitute “China” for “Japan,” even the hand-wringing of Hunter and Tancredo about trade sounded perfectly familiar. And Ron Paul’s lectures about monetary policy sounded a lot like those of Jack Kemp back in the day.
The one candidate who might have taken the debate in a different direction was Mike Huckabee, who likes to talk about economic inequality (not that he proposes to do anything about it other than a highly regressive national sales tax). But he was virtually ignored by the questioners for much of the debate, and then he strangely delivered his rap on pay disparities in the form of a warning to Republicans that people might resort to joining unions! (He also flubbed a chance to distinguish himself from the field on S-CHIP by refusing to say whether he would have vetoed the bill in Congress).
But beyond economic policy, the most alarming segment of the debate was the candidates’ answers to the question about whether a president should seek congressional authorization for military action against Iraq. With the obvious exception of Ron Paul, and the partial exception of Fred Thompson (who at least, by mentioning the War Powers Act, seemed to recognize there are some legal restrictions of executive military powers), the candidates all treated congressional authorization of military action as purely a matter of political expediency. Mitt Romney appeared to dismiss the constitutional issues by saying he’d “refer it to the lawyers.”
They are giving us all fair warning, folks.

The Republican candidates for president are gathering this afternoon in Detroit for a debate on economic issues sponsored by The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC (telecast live at 4:00 EDT on CNBC, and rebroadcast at 9:00 EDT on MSNBC). It ought to be an edifying show, in the sense of displaying that the conservative conquest of the Republican Party extends beyond national security adventurism and social-issues extremism.
Jonathan Chait has an op-ed in today’s New York Times reminding us that Republican fealty to the completely discredited supply-side theory of economics is at an all-time high. He singles out John McCain’s surrender to the supply-siders as exemplifying their iron control of the GOP:

Last year, Senator John McCain earned widespread ridicule for publicly embracing Jerry Falwell, whom he had once described as “evil.” But an equally breathtaking turnabout occurred earlier in the year, when Mr. McCain embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once denounced as an unaffordable giveaway to the rich. In an interview with National Review, Mr. McCain justified his reversal by saying, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.” It was the political equivalent of Galileo conceding that the Sun does indeed revolve around the Earth

The debate may showcase some ideas a lot nuttier than eternal life for Bush’s tax cuts. A Wall Street Journal article by Amy Schatz yesterday focused on Fred Thompson (who will be making his first candidate forum appearance in Detroit) and his views on tax policy. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but Schatz appeared to suggest that Fred’s main economic goal is to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to pay for a cut in corporate tax rates. Now that’s a vote-winner! (Fred also seems inclined to launch a trade war with the European Union–not usually thought of as the source of America’s biggest trade problems–by exempting exports from federal taxation).
So if you work at home or work for someone who doesn’t object to blowing two hours watching a bunch of old white men in suits speaking in the economic equivalent of The Unknown Tongue, you should check out today’s debate. It will provide a timely reminder that these guys live in a very different America than most of the rest of us.

Lots of progressive activists are agonizing about John Edwards’ campaign fundraising woes. But the more dramatic money saga is on the Right, where third quarter fundraising numbers appear to confirm that Mike Huckabee, for all of his yeasty ideological and personal qualities, just can’t raise the dough.
After all, Huckabee is almost perfectly positioned to finish second or third in Iowa. Were he to beat Fred Thompson there, he’d not only become the Hot Item in the Republican race, but would probably become the overwhelming favorite of the Christian Right. Moreover, he’d roll into New Hampshire touting a national sales tax plan that makes both corporate and “populist” conservatives drool. He’s got the rock band; he’s got the humor; he’s got the weight loss; he’s got the Kevin Spacey looks. He’s got every political insider in the hep world expecting him to make a move and keep the contest interesting.
As the old saying goes: If he had some ham, he’d make a ham sandwich, if he had some bread (pun intended).
With every imaginable realistic-longshot advantage, Huckabee raised about a million in the third quarter. By contrast, Ron Paul, whose only real function in the campaign is to ensure that candidate debates don’t sound like a jingoistic echo chamber on Iraq, raised five times that much. Ol’ Fred raised nine times that much. And though we haven’t seen Sam Brownback’s numbers yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the doomed Kansan outraised Huckabee.
Unless something changes real fast, Huckabee’s campaign will become a talking point in every professional fundraiser’s pitch to future political campaigns.

Speaking of Iowa, there’s new data on the current preferences of those almighty likely Caucus-goers. It’s the latest installment (and the first since May) of the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, which has a large impact because the results are so often referred to in the Register‘s much-followed campaign coverage.
Among Democrats, the major news was another confirmation that Hillary Clinton’s in the lead (contradicting the recent Newsweek poll of Iowa showing Obama in the lead). More important than the numbers (Clinton 29, Edwards 23, Obama 22, Richardson 8, Biden 5) is the finding that HRC is supported by nearly half of those (one-third of the total) who say they’ve definitely made up their minds. The poll could also pour a bit of cold water on the Richardson campaign; the Guv was at 10 percent in the Iowa Poll back in May.
On the Republican side, the poll shows the two candidates who dissed Iowa by skipping the August State Republican Straw Poll slipping into fourth and fifth place, with Rudy Guiliani falling from 17 percent to 11 percent since May, and John McCain diving from 18 percent to 7 percent. The major beneficiaries of that lost support appear to be Mike Huckabee, now in third place with 12 percent, and Fred Thompson (not a candidate back in May), who’s now at 18 percent, trailing front-runner Mitt Romney (29 percent, down 1 from May). Fred’s robust support levels are somewhat surprising; he’s only been in the state once since his touring-the-State-Fair-in-a-golf-cart fiasco in August. But that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily got the kind of organization that could convert that support into Caucus results. Once again, Iowa Exceptionalism is on display in this poll, which provides no evidence of the Rudy boom or the McCain revival that national polls have shown.

Media Matters’ Paul Waldman has a very angry article up at The American Prospect that can best be described as a cry of rage and frustration at the predominant position of Iowa (and to a lesser extent New Hampshire) in determining the Democratic presidential nomination, despite another three years of handwringing about the irrationality of the situation. Waldman’s take is distinctive mainly insofar as he assigns principal blame for Iowa’s continued power to the political press corps rather than to the candidates, the DNC, or to Iowans themselves.
I dunno about that. The DNC and the candidates, acting in concert, could have neutered IA and NH for this cycle, simply by refusing to recognize delegates chosen there, and by refusing to campaign there, just as they’ve successfully neutered efforts by MI and FL to change the calendar. The one point (which Waldman doesn’t raise) on which the media seem most responsible is with respect to the DNC’s one timid effort to interfere with the Duopoly, the authorization of a post-IA, pre-NH Caucus in Nevada. If current media coverage is any indication, NV’s theoretically important results aren’t going to get much attention at all as the press corps flies from Des Moines to Manchester in January (indeed, NV could lose its position entirely if IA and NH move up in response to the Republicans’ authorization of significant early events in MI and FL).
Waldman’s argument (echoed by Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias) that Iowa’s power is actually increasing strikes me as an overstatement of a situation that’s attributable to completely coincidental candidate dynamics. Given the total domination of the field, financially and in terms of national appeal, by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it’s true that for Edwards, a loss in IA will likely be the end of the road. But HRC can obviously survive an IA loss, and so could Obama, particularly in the case of an Edwards defeat which would create a one-on-one competition that is bound to help Obama. And for Richardson, Dodd or Biden, an upset third-place (much less second-place) finish in IA would represent a new lease on life, not a death sentence.
And look at the Republican side of the campaign: the two leading candidates (according to national polls) for the GOP nomination are both pursuing post-IA victory strategies (one, Fred Thompson, seems to be pursuing a post-IA, post-NH strategy). Sure, the refusal of candidates to boycott MI and FL is a factor here, but in part it’s because there are so many delegates to be won later. Maybe the media will crown Romney the nominee if he wins IA and NH anyway, but it’s just as likely that IA will create a viable dark horse like Huckabee who will muddy the waters.
By examining the low participation rates in the Duopoly events, Waldman does effectively dispute the much-heard claim that voters in IA and NH have earned their power by developing a tradition of careful and knowledgeable candidate vetting, essentially performing a public service for the rest of us, who would prefer to tune in much later. Iowa’s especially low participation rates are, of course, less attributable to apathy than to the peculiar demands associated with spending a long, cold evening listening to boring speeches, mastering the arcane Caucus rules, and also voting on party platform issues. But Waldman’s point is well-taken: it’s not like we’re witnessing the revival of Athenian democracy in IA or NH every four years.
He does not, however, grapple directly with the other common argument for beginning the nominating process as we do: it forces candidates to engage in a form of retail politics that keeps them from simply becoming actors in TV ads. Lest we forget, the first major effort to challenge the Duopoly on the Democratic side–the southern-based version of Super Tuesday held in 1988–produced what was then dubbed a “tarmac campaign” where the candidates never engaged with voters at all, and the results simply confirmed what had happened earlier in NH.
We obviously need a new system for nominating candidates for president. But we need a “system,” not just something that’s different from the status quo. The remarkable durability of the Duopoly has always suggested to me that the best opportunity to abolish it would be in a cycle where an incumbent president is running for re-election without intra-party opposition (a situation that Democrats have only enjoyed once since 1964). Maybe that could happen going into 2012. But shhhhhhh! Let’s don’t talk about it much, or Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire may start eliciting pledges to maintain the Duopoly forever.

The folks at Third Way have a poll and analysis out this week on the politics of abortion. The poll, by the Feldman Group, was actually conducted back in July. The analysis, by Third Way’s Rachel Laser, is new.
The main value of the poll is two-fold: first, instead of trying to force people into “pro-choice” and “pro-life” camps, it encourages expressions of ambiguity, best indicated by the fact that sizable majorities of Americans appear to simultaneously believe that abortion is the “taking of human life” and a practice that should basically be up to women and their families and doctors, not government. Second, the poll is pretty sophisticated in showing significant shifts of opinion on ancillary issues like emergency contraception, depending on whether the question links the subject explicitly to that of abortion prevention.
On a quick reading, the poll analysis seems to suggest that talking about abortion prevention (which is exactly what Third Way thinks progressive politicians should do) can backfire if perceived as a “dodge” of the underlying issue of abortion itself. But the only way around that is to self-label oneself as “pro-choice” before embracing the common ground of abortion prevention, which undoubtedly shrinks that common ground. Short of simply identifying oneself with the morally incoherent views of so many Americans, it’s hard to see a position that won’t ultimately fall prey to the polarized labels. And while reaching out to “the other side” does have the value of lowering temperatures, let’s not forget that we may well be one Supreme Court appointment away from a situation where yes-no questions about the legality of abortion become impossible to transcend.

I concluded the previous post by suggesting that Christian Right leaders needed some evidence that their Threat to take a walk if Republicans nominated Rudy Giuliani was shared by actual voters. Well, turns out (via TPMCafe’s Election Central) that there’s a new Rasmussen poll providing just that. It suggests that fully 27 percent of Republicans would go third-party in a hypothetical Giuliani-Clinton contest.
A poll showing support for an unnamed third-party candidate more than a year prior to an election is not terribly solid proof of what voters would actually do after a vicious and polarizing D versus R campaign. But it could raise some serious doubts among Republicans who don’t much like Giuliani but see him as the one guy who could hang onto the White House.