Just in case anybody in Republican elite circles wasn’t paying attention over the weekend when Christian Right leaders gathered in Salt Lake City and then threatened to abandon the GOP if Rudy Giuliani is its presidential candidate, two of those leaders stood on some of the largest MSM soapboxes to repeat The Threat.
On Monday night, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins went on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show and suggested not very subtly that conservative evangelical defections would make a Giuliani nomination “Hillary Clinton’s ticket to the White House.” And today, Perkins’ mentor, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, has an op-ed column in the New York Times making it clear that while Christian Right leaders aren’t united on a lot of things (including a candidate for president), they are united in the determination to take a walk if Rudy’s leading the ticket in 2008.
The timing and nature of The Threat is hardly coincidental. As yesterday’s Washington Post/ABC poll illustrated, electability is far and away Giuliani’s most valuable credential: fully half of Republicans in that poll said Rudy was the strongest candidate on that front. Perkins and Dobson are trying to raise every possible doubt about the ultimate truth of that proposition.
Sometimes threats are empty, of course. At The FundamentaList, Sarah Posner dismisses this one:

The idea that the Christian right would endorse a third-party candidate is ludicrous, given its pathological need to defeat Hillary Clinton and ultimately maintain sway over the White House. Focus on the Family’s James Dobson has a history of threatening defection from the GOP to endorse a third-party candidate. He has never followed through because he’s savvy enough to know it would render him irrelevant. No doubt the leaks were designed to put pressure on the GOP, not to nominate Giuliani.

Talk like that, of course, will also put pressure on Christian Right leaders to put up or shut up, and the real test of The Threat down the road will be the relative willingness of rank-and-file conservative evangelicals to rule out Rudy, and more importantly, to unite behind a candidate who could actually beat him.

If you tend to think of the progressive blogosphere as primarily an echo chamber in which lefty dittoheads are led around by celebrity bloggers, you should check out the raging debate going on at DailyKos over Markos Moulitsas’ condemnation of John Edwards’ decision to accept public financing. Markos’ four posts on the subject have drawn a total of 2,408 comments, which is a whole lot even for that very large site.
I haven’t had the time to read anything like all those comments, but get the feeling that overall sentiment is more or less equally divided between those who agree with Kos and those who don’t. Some of the debate tracks the broader blogospheric debate between partisan and ideological approaches; many Edwards supporters among the Kossacks basically consider him the only acceptably progressive major candidate, and consider Kos’ willingness to write him off as a surrender to a likely HRC nomination. But while there’s plenty of angry disagreement with Kos’ conclusions, there are very few Edwards supporters who are inclined to defend his public financing decision as a matter of principle rather than practical expediency. On the other hand, a DailyKos reader poll suggests that the decision, and Kos’ reaction to it, doesn’t seem to be changing many minds about the Edwards candidacy.

It’s Wonderful Wednesday for Senator Hillary Clinton, who’s dominating political news with a double-barreled accomplishment: third-quarter fundraising numbers that return her to the top of the money pack after trailing Barack Obama for a good while; and a new Washington Post/ABC national poll that shows her with the support of a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.
On the money front, Clinton raised $27 million in the third quarter as compared to Obama’s $19 million (though her margin shrinks to $3 million if you exclude funds usable only for the general election; and Obama continues to have a solid lead in overall primary fundraising). But the bigger news was that she topped Obama in the number of new donors. Up until now, Obama’s ability to raise money from a small-donor base has been one of the signatures of his campaign.
The new poll shows Clinton expanding her lead in the nominating contest from a 41-27 margin over Obama in the last Post-ABC survey a few weeks ago to a 53-20 margin today (Edwards remained stable at 13, with no other candidate exceeding 3%). But the poll’s internal numbers are what makes it potentially significant. Here’s how the Post‘s Chris Cillizza summarizes them:

Women continue to be the bedrock of Clinton’s campaign strength; she takes 57 percent among women compared to 15 percent for Obama and 13 percent for Edwards. But, among men, too, her numbers have ticked up considerably and she now leads Obama 48 percent to 26 percent. In the Post poll earlies this month, Clinton received just 29 percent among men while in our July survey she drew 40 percent among men.
Her numbers have also grown among self-identifying Democrats and Democratic leaning Independents. Among the former group, Clinton is now at 56 percent — a ten point increase from the Post’s early September poll — while among the latter her number has increased 16 points to 46 percent.
Clinton is ahead among every age group (55+ voters is where she runs strongest with 60 percent support), in every region of the country (65 percent in the Northeast) and at every education level (high school or less 59 percent). White voters favor Clinton 52 percent to 17 for Obama and 16 percent for Edwards; black voters go for Clinton over Obama 51 percent to 38 percent.

On top of everything else, 57% of poll respondents now think Clinton is the most “electable” Democrat, indicating that as we get closer to actual voting and electability concerns typically rise, she’s turned that liability around, for the moment at least.
You can stare at these numbers for a while and come up with a few potential HRC weaknesses (e.g., the likelihood that her standing among African-Americans might decline in a one-on-one competition with Obama), and an Iowa loss might well change everything–but in general, she’s looking very strong.
After a week in which most of the media coverage of Clinton rev-olved, believe it or not, around Deep Analysis of her distinctive laugh, you’d have to guess she enjoying a good, uninhibited belly laugh today.

Tonight a new Washington Post/ABC poll came out that heavily focused on Iraq policies. But as is often the case, the poll creates nearly as much confusion as it dispels.
Check out these three sections of the poll analysis:

Overall, 55 percent of Americans want congressional Democrats to do more to challenge the president’s Iraq war policies, while only a third think the Democrats have already gone too far….
At the same time, there is no consensus about the pace of any U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. In July, nearly six in 10 said they wanted to decrease the number of troops there, but now a slim majority, 52 percent, thinks Bush’s plan for removing some troops by next summer is either the right pace for withdrawal (38 percent) or too hasty (12 percent would like a slower reduction and 2 percent want no force reduction); fewer, 43 percent, want a quicker exit….
Only about a quarter of all adults want Congress to fully fund the administration’s $190 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year, while two-thirds want the proposed allocation reduced, with 43 percent wanting it reduced sharply. (Three percent say Congress should approve no money at all.) Two-thirds of independents want Congress to reduce the funds allocated for the war effort, as do 83 percent of Democrats; 45 percent of Republicans agree.

So: According to this poll, a majority of Americans think Congress is failing to challenge Bush on Iraq; that Bush’s own troop “withdrawal plan” is about right or too fast; and that Bush’s war supplemental appropriations bill should be pared.
The funding numbers are particularly confusing. The actual decision on the table for Democrats in Congress isn’t about money numbers, but about whether they should take a hard-line position against any appropriations that don’t include a binding withdrawal deadline. Ultimately, that means a willingness to embrace a no-appropriations stance that this poll suggests only three percent of Americans support. (In July, a New York Times/CBS poll showed 61 percent of Americans wanted to make war appropriations contingent on a withdrawal timetable, another example of how wording nuances dramatically change opinions).
At OpenLeft, Chris Bowers, as shrewd a poll reader as anyone in the blogosphere, decides to interpret the numbers on Iraq funding in this latest poll as showing “Americans want to defund the war.” Well, that depends on a definition of “defund” that includes any reduction in funding.
Pollsters need to figure out ways to (a) test the Iraq issues actually facing Congress; (b) include in questions a few basic facts about troop withdrawals (i.e., that Bush is only talking about withdrawing “surged” troops) and funding levels (i.e., how much money buys what strategy); and (c) test some dynamic scenarios involding actions by Congress and reactions by Bush (i.e., a protracted funding fight).
Until that happens, new polls on Iraq will provide grist for spin, but not for any honest assessment of where the public is at present.

An interesting story that developed over the weekend, reported by Michael Scherer at Salon, was a gathering of Christian Right leaders in Salt Lake City that issued a semi-public threat to take a dive or even back a third party in 2008 if Rudy Giuliani is the GOP nominee for president.
The meeting, attended by James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer, among others, was a sidebar to a conference of the Council for National Policy, a Christian-Right dominated group of shadowy but but undoubtedly powerful provenance (Dick Cheney was the star speaker at this particular conference). According to Scherer, the attendees discussed all sorts of strategies for coping with Rudy’s front-runner status, including one of recruiting a new GOP candidate, or going third-party (the head of the right-wing fringe group, the U.S. Constitution Party, was also in the house).
My guess is that the meeting was intended as a big shot across the bow of GOP leaders to get them to take Christian Right opposition to Giuliani very seriously. You’d have to also figure that there was some discussion of the existing non-Rudy field, but any conclusions they might have reached on a consensus choice to block the New Yorker didn’t get leaked.
I wonder if the poohbahs in Salt Lake City had seen the new Newsweek poll that showed Mike Huckabee climbing up into double digits among likely Iowa Caucus-goers, just behind Giuliani and Thompson.
The same poll also showed Barack Obama moving into the lead among likely Democratic Iowa Caucus-goers, with Clinton second and Edwards third.

Most of the media coverage of money in presidential politics is really just a subset of the horse-race discussion: who’s got the most jack to spend where, and what does that say about their “viability?”
But now and then, you get a money issue with strategic implications, and that seems to be the case with John Edwards’ announcement yesterday that he was opting into public financing for his nomination campaign.
From a horse-race perspective, Edwards’ decision seems entirely logical: he can’t keep up with Clinton’s and Obama’s massive fundraising; he’ll probably have enough money with public matching funds to get through the big February 5 primaries if everything breaks right for him; and most importantly, public financing will give him a timely cash infusion going into Iowa in January, a contest he needs badly to win.
But here’s the party-wide strategic problem: by accepting public financing, Edwards will lock himself into a total primary spending “cap” that won’t expire until the Democratic convention. The concern I’m hearing today in insider circles is that if Edwards wins the nomination, he might well put the ticket at a large financial disadvantage to the GOP, whose nominee (unless it’s McCain or some other darkhorse who soon accepts public financing) will be able to run unopposed ads pounding him as a godless ambulance-chasing troop-hater through the spring and much of the summer. In other words, he’d handcuff the party.
Markos Moulitsas did a post yesterday airiing these fears (and calling the Edwards decision “stupid’); he then went on to update the post by reporting the Edwards campaign’s calm response to the handcuffing argument (e.g., the “cap” has a lot of exclusions, and non-campaign 527 organizations would be able to respond to any GOP barrage of ads). Then today Kos did another post basically arguing with the Edwards money strategy, and concluding that it puts a Democratic win in 2008 at an unacceptable risk.
I’m not suggesting that the real, live voters who will determine the Democratic nomination are following this exchange, or will care about it (though the blast from Kos is obviously not helpful to a campaign that’s worked very hard to make Edwards the preferred netroots candidate). But the underlying issue does throw some sand into the overarching argument that Edwards’ campaign has been making: he’s the best on the issues from a progressive point of view, and he also happens to be the most electable candidate as well. Given the well-documented interest of Iowa Democrats in particular about “electibility,” anything that raises doubts about Edwards on that score is bound to hurt. We’ll know pretty soon if such doubts have actually been raised, or if this is just another obscure insider bean-counting fight about unimaginably large sacks of cash.

Week before last, Matt Compton posted a review here of Matt Bai’s influential book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle To Remake Democratic Politics.
For those who enjoyed Matt’s review, or have read the book, or have simply heard the buzz about it, I recommend you go over to TPMCafe, where there’s an extensive discussion of it, including Bai himself, Mark Schmitt, Joan McCarter (a.k.a. McJoan), Garance Franke-Ruta, Nathan Newman, The Reapers (Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger) and yours truly.
To my surprise, much of the discussion (largely driven by the ever-thoughtful Mark Schmitt) has been not about the internal “argument” among Democrats on the direction of the party, but about the external “argument” Democrats need to present concerning the big challenges facing the country. It’s perhaps the most extensive discussion of a book I’ve seen at TPMCafe, and it’s still expanding. Check it out.

For those of you interested in where the Christian Right winds up in the 2008 presidential campaign, there’s an article by Jonathan Martin up at The Politico that provides an excellent overview.
While Martin frames his piece as a discussion of Fred Thompson’s lost opportunity to become the consensus candidate of the Christian Right (mainly because of his unwillingness to support a constitutional nationwide ban on gay marriages), the sense you get is that this community of would-be kingmakers is in real disarray, united in their opposition to Rudy Giuliani but unable to agree on an alternative. The case for Thompson’s candidacy made by big-time Christian Right activist Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention is revealingly defensive, and, well, about as enthusiastic as Big Fred himself.
There’s not much doubt that a viable Mike Huckabee campaign would be the answer to these folks’ prayers. But it’s not clear they are willing or able to do anything tangible to make that a reality. We’ll know more about the Arkansan’s prospects next week, when the third-quarter fundraising numbers start leaking out. If Huckabee continues to struggle in the money department, then he probably won’t have a prayer of answering the Christian Right altar call.

As Congress continues to debate a sure-to-be-vetoed reauthorization and expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), you have to admire, in a sick sort of way, the audacity of the rhetoric emerging from the White House and its conservative allies on this issue. It was best expressed in this morning’s Robert Novak column, entitled “Socialized Medicine’s Front Door.”
In this column, the Prince of Darkness chops and channels a variety of Republican speeches warning that the S-CHIP expansion represents a “government takeover of health care” (the hardy perennial sound-bite at the center of the successful effort to derail the Clinton health care plan back in 1994), and of course, “socialized medicine” (a term used less successfully a generation earlier by conservative opponents of the original Medicare legislation).
You’d think terms like “socialized medicine” might be reserved for systems in which most health care providers work for the public sector. And “government takeover,” as applied to health insurance, not the health care system itself, is a phrase that might reasonably be applied to a single-payer system that abolishes or radically limits private insurance plans
But in reality, S-CHIP, in the expanded as well as in the existing version, typically purchases private health plans for those it covers. And far from being some Washington leviathan, S-CHIP is run by the states, who make a wide variety of decisions about coverage, and also help finance the program.
When you really think about what Novak and other conservatives actually mean when they talk about “socialized medicine” or a “government takeover of health care,” the terms could and would be applied to any public-sector-financed effort to expand health care coverage, including the one Mitt Romney signed into legislation in Massachusetts. That’s why we should all get used to the anti-socialism campaign unfolding in Washington this week, because we’re going to hear it over and over again on the 2008 presidential campaign trail. And it deserves derision and contempt every time it pops up.

Inadequate disclosure of methodology, as Pollster.com has reminded us, is one common problem with political polls. But another is in how poll results are reported.
CNN provides a good example today, in a story headlined: “Giuliani Has Caught Up With Romney in New Hampshire,” based on a new CNN/WMUR poll of the Granite State conducted by the University of New Hampshire. The underlying data is that Mitt Romney’s nine-point lead over Giuliani in UNH’s July poll is now down to just one point.
So Rudy’s surging in NH, right? Well, not exactly. In July the numbers were Romney 34, Giuliani 20, Thompson 13 and McCain 12. Now they are Romney 25, Giuliani 24, McCain 18 and Thompson 13. So Rudy’s “surged” by four points, in a poll whose margin of error is 5.5%. The real news in the poll is a decline in Mitt’s support, and the most dramatic gainer was McCain, not Rudy.
From a pure horse-race perspective, the CNN story is accurate. But it’s also misleading unless you look at the actual numbers and particularly the margin of error. Still, I’m sure Rudy’s campaign is happy to take the gimme.