Today’s news brings glad tidings for Democrats at both the micro and macro levels. The New York Times released a poll of Ohio that paints of picture of utter misery for Republicans. Bush’s approval ratings have tanked in the Buckeye State; he cannot even muster majority approval from white Christian evangelicals (76% of whom voted for him in 2004). Sherrod Brown leads incumbent Senator Mike DeWine by a margin of 48-34 among registered voters; this was a race considered dead even in September. In the gubernatorial race, Ted Strickland leads Kenneth Blackwell 52-39. And Ohioans favor Democrats in a generic congressional ballot test by 50-32, important because there are four competitive House races in the state. On a broader front, you should check out pollster Stan Greenberg’s post today at TPMCafe. Based on his own surveys for Democracy Corps and NPR, Stan suggests the only real mystery left in the campaign for the House is whether Democrats control it by a small or large (say, 25 seats) margin. He thinks the pro-Democratic wave is steadily growing, and that a 1994-style result is probable if national Dems spread some money around to newly-capturable districts. Who would have thunk it a year ago?

Today’s New York Times included an op-ed by Congressional Quarterly editor Jeff Stein that ought to be read by anyone who believes Republicans are the adult party when it comes to national security. Stein reports on his campaign to ask people in the administration and the Republican Congress who have critical responsibilities for the War on Terror if they know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. The answer is: they don’t.I won’t bother to quote from this piece, because the whole thing should be read. The bottom line is that a whole lot of Republicans who have championed, and even helped manage, the post-9/11 fight against jihadist terrorism, and the horriby botched sideshow in Iraq, don’t know a damn thing about Islam. Since even the dimmest Republican has probably on occasion echoed talking points suggesting that we are fighting to vindicate the true and pacific Islamic tradition as opposed to jihadist extremism, this ignorance about the basic divides in the Islamic world is, well, terrifying. It’s all the more alarming given the decisive importance of Sunni and Shi’a factions in Iraq.You don’t have to be a Democrat to be shocked by Stein’s disclosures. Over at National Review’s in-house blog The Corner, hyper-conservative Jonah Goldberg said this:

[I]t seems to me a no-brainer that anybody with serious strategic responsibilities in the war on terror should know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis. One needn’t be an expert on the theological distinctions. But one should know that the distinctions exist and are important. These people could have answered Stein’s question easily if they’d read any one of literally thousands of op-eds or popular magazine articles on the Middle East in the last five years.

No kidding. Jonah does not go the next step to wonder if there’s a connection between Republican policymakers who ignorantly think of all Muslims as essentially the same, and a Republican national security message based on the assumption that Americans in general can’t distinguish Iraqis from Palestinians from Saudis from Iranians.But if you take that next step, it does perversely rebut the notion that Republicans are cynically exploiting popular misapprehensions about Islam and the Middle East. Maybe the GOP, from George W. Bush on down, is essentially no better informed about such nuances as the difference between Sunnis and Shi’a than regular folks who are not charged with responsibility for our country’s security.’That theory would certainly help explain the Bush administration’s disastrous mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere. And just as certainly, it should refute GOP claims that its control of Congress is essential to national security.

On Saturday, my weekend took a turn for the worse when my Georgia Bulldogs managed to lose, at homecoming no less, to the Vanderbilt Commodores (it was their first loss to the ‘Dores since 1994, which also occurred on Homecoming Day). A missed FG, a TD pass dropped in the end zone, and a questionable decision to settle for a FG near the end of the first half, all contributed to the upset, along with an impressive final drive by Vandy. The brightest spot for Georgia was an interception returned for a touchdown by linebacker Tony Taylor, who is busily building All-America credentials. (A loss by the hated Florida Gators at Auburn Saturday night was small consolation).As has often been the case this fall, the political news this weekend was better than the Sports Report. Today a new Washington Post poll showed Jim Webb in a statistical dead heat with George Allen in a VA Senate race that could pave the way to a Democratic Senate. Oddly enough, the Post’s analysis seemed to spin this as relatively good news for Allen, on the basis of a finding that his supporters like him more than Webb’s supporters like his challenger. Well, so what? People vote for a variety of positive and negative reasons, and the national revulsion towards the GOP, which appears to be shared by many Virginians, is a good a motivator on Webb’s behalf as the (to me, at least) inscrutable affection of nearly half of them for George Allen. The CW had it that Allen had finally turned the corner on a campaign previously dominated by coverage of his mean-spirited ethnocentrism or worse. Doesn’t look that way right now.Moreover, DKos reported new media polls in four gubernatorial races showing a significant Democratic trend. Two races polled as ties in September now appear to be breaking towards the Dem: IA, where Chet Culver leads Jim Nussle 46-39, and MN, where Mike Hatch leads incumbent Tim Pawlenty 46-37. In MI, two new polls have Jennifer Granholm, often considered the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent governor, up 8 over Dick DeVos. And another vulnerable Dem, Rod Blagojevich, now seems to be expanding his lead (to 14, in the latest poll) over Judy Baar Topinka.The evidence continues to mount that this could be a historic year for Dems, but there’s too much time left in the electoral season–or even the football season–to make any firm predictions. Go Dems. Go Dogs.

The big political news in Washington today was Mark Warner’s surprise announcement that he was not running for president in 2008, citing concerns about the impact of a campaign on his family. Naturally, hundreds of political operatives and would-be pundits got on the phone with each other to see if anyone knew the “real reason” for Warner’s decision. But best I can tell at this point, we should all take Warner’s word for it that he and his wife had agreed on this fall as a failsafe point, and after taking a long look at what a presidential run–or for that matter, a victory–would do to their lives, took a pass. This happens pretty often, actually. Sure, there are always some Big Dogs in Washington (e.g., Wilbur Mills, John Connally, Phil Gramm, Orrin Hatch) who delude themselves into thinking they are presidential timber, until they crash and burn on the campaign trail. But almost every cycle, there are potentially strong candidates who just don’t run. Until (and for that matter, after) he finally ran in 1980, Ted Kennedy was perenially regarded as a proto-candidate. Mario Cuomo and Sam Nunn famously didn’t run in 1988 and 1992. Bob Kerrey surprised a lot of people when he announced he wouldn’t run in 2000. And sometimes candidates go back and forth. Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan both foreswore a run in 1968, before jumping in late. And in 1992, Ross Perot set a new standard for irresolution by running full-tilt for president, withdrawing, and then re-entering the race. The most renowned statement of non-candidacy was, of course, William Tecumsah Sherman’s terse announcement prior to the 1884 presidential election that “if drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.” Indeed, my former boss Sam Nunn often avoided a definitive statement of non-candidacy by remarking: “As a Georgian, I would never make a Sherman Statement.”But my personal favorite in this genre was Fritz Mondale’s comment, after abandoning a 1972 run, that he “didn’t want to spend the next year living in Holiday Inns” (this was back in the day, before the willingness to become a quasi-resident of Iowa, and consume vast quantities of that state’s fine pork products, became the threshold issue for potential candidates). Reminded of this disclaimer when he accepted the vice-presidential nomination in1976, Mondale allowed as how the Holiday Inn chain had made a lot of improvements in the intervening four years. Warner’s announcement of non-candidacy will not be the last of this cycle, but no one really knows who may drop out or drop in exactly when. I know very smart people who are convinced Hillary Clinton won’t run, and/or that Al Gore will, against all the current evidence. Among Republicans, you hear that Rudy Guiliani is definitely in, or definitely out. The only sure drop-out among the frequently named is George Allen, whether or not he survives his rolling disaster of a Senate re-election campaign. But I think it’s both wise and decent when a potential candidate drops out to give him or her the benefit of the doubt and accept that mere personal reasons are always sufficient to justify a statement of non-candidacy. For all the allure of the power and influence associated with becoming the Leader of the Free World, getting there is a brutal business indeed, and as President Al Gore and President John Kerry can tell you, in our system there ain’t no consolation prizes for valiant near-misses.

The evidence that the Republican Party is in a public opinion freefall is getting so thick you can’t stir it with a stick. The USA Today/Gallup poll, which had the two parties tied in the generic ballot as recently as September 17, now shows Dems with a staggering 23 point advantage (59-36). According to the poll analysis:

Government corruption, Iraq and terrorism were the three most important issues to poll respondents. They said Democrats would do a better job on all three. The party had a 21-point advantage on handling corruption and a 17-point advantage on Iraq. A longstanding GOP advantage on terrorism vanished; Democrats had a 5-point edge.

A new WaPo/ABC poll didn’t have quite that dramatic a gap in the generic ballot (Dems lead 54-41), but showed the same sort of broad trends:

When asked which party they trust to handle various issues, Democrats lead on every subject, with margins ranging from 33 percentage points on health care, 19 points for ethics, 17 points for the economy, 13 points each for Iraq and immigration.Even on terrorism, which Republicans hoped to turn into a powerful issue this fall, Democrats are trusted by six percentage points, reversing an seven-point deficit in the September poll.

Obviously, national polls can’t be translated into a partisan advantage in midterm elections fought in specific states and districts, but there, too, there’s big movement. As TPMCafe’s Election Central site has reported, the two most respected nonpartisan analysts, Cook Political Report and CQPolitics, have both published new ratings over the last few days showing a major shift of House and/or Senate races in the direction of Democrats.The most exciting news for Democrats is that control of the Senate is no longer a long shot, though it is still a reach. Of the eight toss-up races (according to Cook’s Jennifer Duffy), seven are in Republican-held seats. If Bob Menendez can hold onto New Jersey, Dems would need five of the seven to retake the Senate, and they’ve held consistent recent leads in four of them (RI, PA, OH and MT). Put some national wind behind the Donkey’s back, and it starts looking very doable.While the Foley scandal has obviously contributed to the GOP free fall, the broad-based antipathy to the governing party evident in every poll indicates that this is just a clincher for many voters; I doubt the GOP is going to spring back absent some positive development in its favor. In fact, as Bush’s sagging approval ratings (dropping back into the 30s in all the big national polls) indicate, it’s the September numbers, fed by the GOP Terror Offensive, that look like outliers today.It ain’t over til it’s over, but given the GOP’s record, it’s a bit hard to see where they’re going to find a net, much less a trampoline, between now and election day. Expect some serious nastiness as Republicans begin to panic.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Before I get to posting about the political news this week, I have to report that I attended the Georgia-Tennessee football game on Saturday. Until just before the half, Georgia led 24-7, and I sorta wish I had left at that point and gotten ahead of the insane traffic back to Atlanta. Instead, I watched Tennessee outscore the Dawgs 44-9 the rest of the way, as Georgia made a variety of offensive miscues (most notably two deep-in-own-territory INTs and a blocked punt in the end zone) while its vaunted defense looked helpless against Eric Ainge’s relentless short passing game. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I didn’t see Uga VI leave his doghouse after halftime. I’m guessing he didn’t want to hear Rocky Top played forty times. The season’s only half over, and Georgia can still put itself into the SEC title game by beating Florida and Auburn later in the year and hoping someone else (e.g., LSU or Arkansas) beats the Vols. But it’s a bit unsettling to look at the AP poll today and see Georgia ranked behind the Dirt Daubers of Georgia Tech. Makes you wonder all over again what the Dawgs would be like right now if Calvin Johnson had decided to matriculate in Athens, as he nearly did.

In the wake of the bandwagon of blame-shifting among House Republicans about the Mark Foley scandal, I guess you can’t blame Foley himself from joining the parade. Since his resignation from the House the other day, Foley has let it be known through his attorneys that he (1) is getting treatment for alcoholism, and (2) was sexually abused as a teenager by a “clergyman.”You don’t have to be terribly cynical to suspect that Foley is trying to drown his sorrows in a vast sea of popular media stereotypes and storylines. After all, if Mel Gibson could get away with claiming he drank himself into anti-semitism, why not say that seventh scotch-and-soda drove you to the computer to engage in cybersex with teenage boys? And what better way to make yourself a small part of a big group of victims than to imply you’re one of the thousands of those preyed upon by libidinous priests? (Actually, Foley hasn’t so far identified the denominational affiliation of his alleged abuser, but Foley is Catholic).If the disgraced Floridian wanted to kick it up a notch in his search for victim-status while currying favor with his erstwhile GOP colleagues, he’d let it be known that he got the idea of playing slap-and-tickle with youthful subordinates after obsessively reading and re-reading the Starr Report. Or maybe he could say he was convinced by a therapist to treat his booze-o-holia and teenage traumas by getting in touch with his Inner Liberal. At this point, the only real surprise would be a frank acceptance of responsibility by Foley or the House Republican leadership.

As the Mark Foley scandal continues to wreak havoc in Republican Washington, the primary evasions pursued in GOP/conservative circles have begun to congeal. As Mark Schmitt nicely runs it down over at TPMCafe, the first (which I wrote about yesterday), is the ol’ liberal-culture-of-permissiveness chesnut, according to which the kind of behavior Mark Foley exhibited has been championed by Democrats generally and gay rights activists in particular. The second, which is gaining steam, is that Democrats and/or the liberal media sat on the Foley IMs until this very moment, risking further damage to pages in order to time the scandal for maximum pre-election havoc. According to this masterpiece of fact-free innuendo, the GOP’s enemies knew vastly more than poor old Denny Hastert about Foley’s misdeeds, and are therefore the real culprits here. (Schmitt explodes one variant of this theory very effectively).There’s also a sort of hybrid conspiracy theory in the works, centering on Kirk Fordham, former chief of staff to Foley and (until he was fired today) chief of staff to NRCC chair Tom Reynolds, who’s drawing as much fire as Hastert. Fordham, it transpires, is openly gay. As Michael Crowley explains at TNR’s The Plank, House GOP sources are bruiting it about that Fordham was part of a “gay cabal” of Republican Hill staffers who protected Foley and suppressed information about his behavior towards pages. David Corn reports there is even a list of cabal members circulating around Washington.Fordham certainly raised the stakes on this particular gambit by announcing today that far from protecting Foley, he told Hastert’s staff about Foley’s friskiness towards pages in 2004, long before Hastert was given copies of the “over-friendly” emails that he proceeded to ignore. If Fordham’s allegation can be corroborated, Hastert will probably be forced to resign. But either way, the GOP leadership and their chattering-class enablers will go to almost any lengths to point fingers anywhere other than at themselves. And these are the guys who cheered back in 2000 when George W. Bush kept promising to usher in a “responsibility era.”

When the Mark Foley scandal broke, like a lot of people, I thought it would definitely reinforce negative perceptions of the GOP House, maybe upset social conservatives, and probably cost the Republicans Foley’s own Florida seat. But it’s now rolling through the landscape like a tornado, with incredible velocity and early indications of serious political damage. And there’s no better indication of the potential implications than the immediate infighting the scandal has produced among Republicans themselves.House Majority Leader John Boehner is explicitly laying responsibility for the failure to investigate Foley on his putative chieftain, House Speaker Denny Hastert. The head of the House Republican campaign committee, Tom Reynolds of New York, has been implicated as an early recipient of info on Foley’s indiscretions, and you better believe all those hungry GOP recipients of NRCC cash will be distancing themselves from the money man pronto (Reynolds himself is now probably in trouble in his own district, which could be a mite distracting).But the really big sign of GOP chaos came in today’s Washington Times, which editorially called for Hastert’s immediate resignation as Speaker.Those of you who have never lived in the Washington area may not be familiar with the WaTimes. Its publisher is none other than the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. But its basic function in Washington is to serve up the reddest of partisan red meat for the Emerald City’s Republicans. In many ways, it’s a throwback to the political press of the nineteenth century, with blatant editorializing of news content and relentlessly partisan headlines. A whole generation of Democratic political operatives in DC (myself included) have learned through painful experience to ignore phone calls from WaTimes “reporters” like Don Lambro, whose special talent is to turn even the most careful and benign comment into a “Dems in Disarray” piece. Compared to these birds, the talking heads on Fox News are indeed relatively “fair and balanced.”So when the WaTimes calls for Hastert’s head, it really is news. And though I may be wrong about this, it’s hard to imagine that this thunderbolt was not telegraphed in advance to the White House and other GOP poohbahs (either way, it’s not how the Right-Wing Machine usually works, is it?)Sure, serious movement conservative types have never much liked the ol’ wrestling coach. He was fine as the bumbling, avuncular front-man for Tom DeLay, but ever since the Hammer went down, there’s been barely submerged grumbling on the Right that House Republicans can and should do better. A lot of observers figured that the House GOP would probably dump Hastert after the elections, blaming him for Republican losses, even if they held on to control. This is not something you want to do in the homestretch of a midterm campaign, particularly when your national message is that Republicans are sober and resolved and united, as compared to those crazy and fractious Democrats.No matter what happens to Hastert, the Foley scandal has clearly scrambled the legendary talking-points unity of the GOP. My personal favorite comment was Newt Gingrich’s suggestion on Fox News Sunday that his successors sat on the Foley scandal because they were afraid they’d be accused of “gay-bashing” if they dimed out the frisky Floridian.This is certainly an interesting take on the situation, since (a) who knew that the eager gay-bashers of the House GOP leadership were worried about being suspected of gay-bashing? (b) this line of reasoning implies that Hastert and company should have known there was a gay sexual subtext to Foley’s emails, which is precisely what they are all denying, and (c) the Newtster also seems to assume that people who support gay rights approve of a 52-year-old Member of Congress propositioning minors who also happen to be the lowest and most vulnerable of congressional employees.But maybe I’m selling Newt short here, since implication (c) was explicitly advanced by none other than the Wall Street Journal editorial board today.

[I]n today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys.

So perhaps the current disarray is temporary, and this is where the conservative zeitgeist is going next: Foley was a fifth-column Liberal and Sodomite in the GOP ranks, a crypto-Democrat in fact; Hastert’s big mistake was in tolerating such deviants; and the real fault lies in the godless, relativistic culture that would openly rule Washington if Democrats regain Congress.If this story-line seems exceptionally perverse (and it is), it’s no more perverse than the argument of some conservative Catholics that the clerical sexual abuse scandal is attributable entirely to a gay cabal in Catholic seminaries.It will be very interesting to see over the next few days if Republicans continue to fall out like thieves, or fall into a line of attack that sacrifices a few colleagues to the broader effort of demonizing Democrats and absolving the GOP of any sins other than insufficient fidelity to the right-wing cause.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Well, a congressional session rightly adjudged as one of the most futile in memory finally limped to the finish line over the weekend. And its record was so bad that even the non-judgmental Reuters news service could barely suppress a sneer of contempt:

Leaving behind a pile of unfinished work, members of the scandal-rocked U.S. Congress adjourned and went home on Saturday to ask voters to re-elect them in five weeks.With polls showing President George W. Bush’s fellow Republicans could lose control of Congress in the November 7 contests, their leaders even decided to depart a week early to give members more time to campaign.”It’s been a ghastly congressional session, particularly the last year,” said Stephen Hess, a congressional scholar the Brookings Institution. “They figure the best thing to do is get out of town. They aren’t doing anything here.”

No kidding. The eruption of yet another Republican ethics scandal, and yet another Republican ethics scandal coverup, seemed to put an appropriate exclamation point on the session, and on what the country can now demonstrably expect from single-party GOP rule in Washington. And Republicans know it. That’s why they continue to signal that their campaign to hold onto power will not focus on their accomplishments, such as they are, but on smearing Democrats. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the sleazemeister who is about to become Republican leader in the Senate, put it succintly: “A lot of Americans have forgotten what Democrats do when they are in the majority. We are going to remind them.”If this tactic works, it will require a national short-term memory lapse of historic dimensions.