Lost amidst the manufactured outrage over John Kerry’s study-hard-or-go-to-Iraq line has been the genuine outrage that Americans ought to feel about the president’s and vice president’s coordinated message two days ago that essentially said a vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorism.It’s odd: the Washington Post played up this story in a banner front-page headline, but it hardly got picked up anywhere else in the major mainstream media. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t see the explosion of anger in the progressive blogosphere that I expected, either. Indeed, about the only sharp reaction I saw was from the Democratic Leadership Council, whose New Dem Dispatch tore Bush and Cheney new ones for arguing that their national security failures meant that American voters had lost their right to hold them accountable for their vast series of mistakes.Here’s a sample of the DLC take:

After botching the Iraq War about as thoroughly as possible, and refusing to admit errors, change strategies or hold anyone responsible for their incompetence, the Bush administration is now arguing that the American people don’t have the right to hold them responsible, either, since a Democratic victory would cheer terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. In effect, Bush and Cheney are trying to hold America hostage to their own mistakes.This breathtaking line of “reasoning” is all the more deplorable because it expresses a sense of complete U.S. helplessness in the struggle against jihadist terrorists. We can’t change direction because that would be a victory for our enemies. So they effectively control us. Given the administration’s obsession with denying there are any practical restraints on U.S. freedom of action in Iraq or anywhere else, that’s an especially ironic point of view.

Check it out and pass it on. As Michael Crowley observed over at The Plank, Kerry may have bungled a joke, but Bush bungled a war. And that’s why the gleeful right-wing assault on Kerry may backfire: it reminds voters of the issue on which they have already decided to repudiate the administration and the GOP. In the end, the joke may be on Republicans.

I found today’s weirdest news on the National Review Corner site (via Kos):

Harrisburg – During a radio interview late yesterday in Harrisburg, former Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) formally kicked off Democrats for Santorum, a statewide coalition of Democrats dedicated to Senator Santorum’s reelection effort. Over 7,000 members strong, Democrats for Santorum is a coalition of Pennsylvanians who share Senator Santorum’s commitment to national security, lower taxes, and less government regulation.

You can just feel the excitement, eh?In case you haven’t been following the Santorum-Casey race, the junior senator from PA, who had been mulling a presidential run, is tanking really badly. By all accounts, he’s been left for dead by national GOPers. But to read this press release, you’d think he was boldly picking up vast Democratic support en route to a smashing victory. You have to wonder why the Santorum campaign thinks flying in Zell Miller, who is neither a Pennsylvanian nor a Democrat, to launch “Democrats for Santorum” is going to do any good. Maybe they’ve bought into the old jibe (often attributed to James Carville) that Pennsylvania is composed of two cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between (hence the sobriquet, “Pennsylbama” or “Pennsyltucky”).Miller’s decision to play this bizarre role in a losing effort is equally puzzling, but I’ve long given up trying to figure out my former boss’ recent behavior. Maybe he’s going through some sort of Robert E. Lee delusion, invading Pennsylvania only to suffer defeat at Gettysburg. His last high-profile political gig was his unsuccesful effort to get Georgia Republicans to nominate Ralph Reed for Lt. Governor. Ending the cycle by weighing in for another doomed Republican has the virtue of consistency, I suppose. While I cannot muster any sympathy for a nasty piece of work like Santorum, I do, however, appreciate the agonies of his staff, having been involved in a couple of campaigns over the years where the smell of death was everywhere during the home stretch. You know you’re going to lose, but you go through the motions: planning events, putting out press releases, spreading rumors of The Greatest Upset in History, lying to donors about that Last Ad Buy that will turn everything around (Santorum has one up right now that appears to suggest that North Korea will immediately launch a nuclear attack on the Keystone State on the first news of a Casey victory). So probably what happened is that some lowly staffer had been beavering away for weeks on a plan to launch a Democrats for Santorum group; suggested a Zell Miller appearance would get news; and the campaign brass, spending most of their time working on their resumes, thought: “Why the hell not? Couldn’t hurt.”And thus, I suspect, the supply and demand curves met, and a politician with nothing to do came in to “help” a politician with nothing to lose. Lord knows the Santorum campaign wouldn’t have done anything really crazy like invite George W. Bush to come in.

It’s been obvious for a while that a panicked Republican Party would get down and dirty in an effort to win a few close House and (especially) Senate races, and the GOP is definitely living down to that expectation. Aside from the tawdry crap they’ve been throwing at Harold Ford in Tennessee, we now have the ripe example of George Allen’s efforts to lift a few shocking sex scenes from Jim Webb’s war novels to paint him as some sort of mysoginistic pervert.I haven’t read the books in question, not being a big fan of war novels (The Caine Mutiny being the one exception). But my colleague The Moose has not only read a number of Webb’s novels, but is familiar with Webb’s rationale in writing them, and with the original conservative reaction to them.I know some of my regular readers are Moose-o-phobic, but I encourage you to read his latest post on this subject. He reminds us that (a) Webb wrote his novels in no small part to provide a grunts-eye-view of the Vietnam War to a generation of peers who were in the habit of disparaging those who served; (b) conservative commentators generally gave these novels, “shocking” content and all, rave reviews when they actually appeared; and (c) Webb is an authentic war hero whose own service, and his searing accounts of what it entailed, should command great respect, particularly from an ostensibly pro-military GOP.Beyond that, there’s something particularly disgusting about this sort of attack on Webb emanating from the campaign of George Allen.For one thing, Allen (like me) could have served in the Vietnam War, but didn’t, getting past it on a student deferment. As an enthusiast for the war in Iraq, and contributor to the argument that Democrats generally and Webb in particular are “weak on national security,” he has a special responsibility to steer clear of attacks on Webb for anything related to his rival’s war service.More fundamentally, Allen’s own background ought to make the implicit anti-intellectualism of his campaign’s attacks on Webb’s fiction truly objectionable.I know the conventional wisdom is that the revelations about Allen that have emerged during the current campaign turn on his alleged racism, dating from his peculiar obsession with the Confederacy during his high school years in Southern California. That’s all true.But I personally think the most damning thing about the Allen Story is that he has been exposed as the ultimate Golden State Child of Privilege who has spent much of his life trying to impersonate a dirt-farm, dirt-track Yahoo, mainly by aggressively embracing the underside of Yahoo culture, without the mitigating circumstances of actually growing up that way, or any indication that he shares the positive features of that culture (e.g., a healthy disrespect for economic elites). To put it another way, most true southern white crackers may well have contempt for those well-heeled cultural elitists who look down on them, but they’d also kill to give their kids the kind of advantages that George Allen had, and, if confronted directly with the full Allen Story, would probably consider his efforts to remake himself as a ‘bacca-chewing, thuggish redneck the ultimate insult.It’s also illustrative that when Allen decided to relocate himself to his vicarious southern homeland, he chose to attend the University of Virginia. Having lived near Charlottesville off and on for a good while, I can personally verify what anyone familiar with The University would say: this is a place where anyone affecting a Yahoo world view–much less the Yankee son of a national celebrity with a French mother–would stand out like a sore thumb. UVa is arguably one of the two or three best public universities in America, but it’s also arguably one of the two or three snootiest public universities in America. Whether or not George Allen routinely used the “n-word” while at UVa, or pulled Klan-style “pranks” on black residents of Louisa County, there’s no question his whole pick-up-truck, Dixified persona in Charlottesville was weird on every level. And in many respects, Allen has remained, ever since college, the Wahoo Yahoo–the guy who perpetually combines inherited privilege with a willful determination to refute it by aping what he understands to be the culture of “real people.”By now, I assume many of you are thinking that the Allen Story closely resembles the Story of the President of the United States, on a smaller scale of privilege and pretense. And you’re right: George Allen is sort of a George Bush Mini-Me. No wonder he was the early favorite for ’08 among many Bush loyalists who can’t abide John McCain.And the parallels and ironies extend to the current campaign. Remember that moment in 2004 when the Bushies went after John Kerry for his goose-hunting photo op, supposedly exposing him as a uppercrust quiche-eater pretending to be a Real Guy? Well, George Allen has spent much of his adult life as an uppercrust quiche-eater longing to appear to be a Real Guy–and not a particularly admirable Real Guy at that–without Kerry’s history as a war hero and genuine outdoorsman. He even shares Kerry’s odd experience in learning on the campaign trail that he had a hitherto unknown Jewish ancestry. I don’t recall that Kerry responded to this thunderbolt like Allen, who immediately started talking about his abiding affection for pork products.Have any of the Republicans encouraging Allen’s smear campaign on Webb mocked the Wahoo Yahoo like they mocked Kerry? Of course not.Allen’s bigger twin, George W. Bush, is probably capable of the sort of anti-intellectual assault that his Mini-Me has launched on Jim Webb. But at least W. has hired a few smart people over the years, most notably the brilliant wordsmith Mike Gerson, who have helped him pay lip service to the idea that national leaders ought to take ideas seriously. If George Allen has ever exhibited interest in a political discourse more advanced than the endless repetition of football metaphors, I’ve somehow missed it.That’s why Allen’s latest gambit, in the end, is so nauseating. I don’t like to throw around Nazi analogies; they tend to devalue the unique nature of the Third Reich, and also ignore the abiding civilized values that unite both parties and most Americans, no matter how much and how vociferouly we disagree on this or that topic. But everything about George Allen’s effort to beat Jim Webb by quoting stupidly from his novels is reminiscent of the quote often attributed to Herman Goering: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”Allen’s ad attack on Webb’s novels represents the Wahoo Yahoo’s willingness to look the cultural products of a war hero and genuine cultural conservative right in the face, and reach for his gun.I hope and pray Virginians vote for the real representative of their values, and not the cynical pretender whose abasement of those values is best illustrated by how he has chosen to save his political hide.

The gubernatorial and Senate campaigns in Maryland this year are presenting a nice example of one of the major subthemes of Election 2006: the overwhelming price that Blue State Republicans are finally paying for the sins of their national party. Maryland GOPers went into the home stretch of this general election feeling pretty good about their prospects. Incumbent Gov. Bob Erlich had relatively high approval ratings, huge sacks of cash with which to impugn the mayoral record of Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley, and a reputation for closing well, given his upset win over Kathleen Kennedy Townsend four years ago. Their Senate nominee, Michael Steele, was perfectly positioned to exploit African-American disappointment with Kweisi Mfume’s Democratic primary loss to Ben Cardin. Steele was also running some of the best ads of the cycle, and doing everything imaginable to distance himself from George W. Bush. A new Washington Post poll of Maryland just out today indicates none of that much matters. Among likely voters, the poll has O’Malley up over Ehrlich 55-45, and Cardin up over Steele 54-43. Almost nobody appears to be undecided, though 15% of voters said they could change their minds. (This led Republicans to challenge the poll’s methodology, though the Post has a track record of very conservative polling techniques, and a low undecided count is not unusual in nationalized midterm elections with well-known candidates). The internals of the Post poll show that a lot of Maryland Democratic moderate voters that Democrats lost in 2002 are returning to the Donkey Ticket, and that Steele is not making much headway at all among African-Americans. There are other polls out there showing both races as closer, but the Post’s relatively large sample and good reputation makes me think this poll is probably spot-on. And given Erlich and Steele’s strengths, this is yet another bad sign for the GOP heading towards November 7. The Republican wave of 1994 depended in no small part on the inability of southern and western Democrats, however well-tailored for their states and districts, to separate themselves from a national party that had lost credibility with local voters. The same thing seems to be happening to Republicans in the northeast and midwest this year.

Struggling to find some political purchase between now and November 7, Republicans from George Bush on down are rushing towards hysteria in response to a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that would require state recognition of legal benefits for same-sex couples. The decision pointedly did not mandate gay marriage rights; indeed, the majority opinion went out of its way to say that’s a question for the state legislature. But nevermind. Campaigning in Iowa, Bush said: ““Yesterday in New Jersey, we had another activist court issue a ruling that raises doubts about the institution of marriage.”GOPers no doubt hope the renewed specter of gay marriage will bestir social conservatives to forget about their many grievances with the Bush adminisrtration and the Republican Congress–not to mention the negative feelings they share with Democrats and independents about the corrupto-ganza in Washington and the mess in Iraq–and dutifully troops to the polls to save the bacon of many an endangered incumbent. More specifically, Republicans think the issue could now help them in two of the three states on which control of the Senate likely hangs–Tennessee and Virginia–where gay marriage constitutional bans are on the ballot.I’m guessing that the fine folks at the RNC are particularly happy with themselves for anticipating the New Jersey decision by lying about Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford’s position on gay marriage. Ford is now having to spend time and money in ads making it clear he opposes gay marriage–and in fact, has said he’d vote for the state ban.It will be interesting to see if social conservatives fish in one more time in the murky waters of the GOP’s tired efforts to exploit cultural fears over the bogus issue of gay marriage. Aside from their well-earned skepticism of empty Republican promises to turn back the clock on gay and lesbian rights, Christian conservatives are no more enamored of the general Bush record than most other voters. The latest drive to make gay marriage a national political issue is a classic example of trying to pour old wine into old bottles. It’s a very sour wine at this point, and I’m hoping it finds no buyers.

For all the talk over the last decade about the political importance of fast-growing suburbs and exurbs, there’s been another story that has often been missed: steady Republican gains in rural and small-town (or micropolitan) America. While rural areas have often continued to lose population, and small towns, overall, have shown little growth, the percentage of the vote given to the GOP in non-metro America has steadily risen. As a new survey done for the Center for Rural Strategies by Anna Greenberg, David Walker and William Greener shows, that trend appears to be reversing itself this year. In 2000, George W. Bush carried rural America by 16 percentage points; his margin increased to 19 percent in 2004. In the new survey, Democrats are leading Republicans among rural voters by 13 points in 41 highly competitive House districts, and by four points in six states with close Senate races. Both findings show a significant trend towards Democrats over the last month. Democratic gains, moreover, are coming mainly from independent and moderate voters. Greener, a Republican pollster, said of this survey: “The numbers in this poll have to be disturbing to any Republican involved in the upcoming election.” And Center for Rural Strategies president Dee Davis noted that the current trends among rural voters resembled those that immediately preceded the elections of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992.If countrified voters are abandoning the GOP this year, then Republicans may truly be country fried on election day.

You’d think Republicans would be satisfied to stand on their merits in the Senate race in TN, where Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker is running even or ahead of Rep. Harold Ford in most polls.Instead, the Republican National Committee is running ads against Ford that range from despicable and quasi-racist smears to basic lies about his voting record.If you read a lot of blogs, you probably know about the so-called “bimbo” ad that the RNC ran and then was forced to take down. If you haven’t seen it, follow the link; it’s truly breathtaking. Nestled amidst several mischaracterizations of Harold Ford’s voting record, you see a trashy-flashy white woman who leeringly says she met Harold at “the Playboy Party,” presumably a heavy-handed allusion to Ford’s meaningless drive-by appearance at a 2000 Democratic Convention event sponsored by the Bunny Empire. And at the very end of the ad, the self-same trashy-flashy woman re-appears to wink and say: “Call me, Harold.”In case you didn’t know this, Harold Ford is a good-looking young African-American man. Thus, this ad was about as subtle as a Klan cross-burning. As a southerner, I really hate this kind of crap, and thought it had been buried decades ago. Apparently not.After pulling down the “bimbo ad,” the RNC immediately put up a new ad that avoids the overt racism, but that’s full of lies and distortions about Ford’s record, suggesting he is the champion of rampant pornography, state-sponsored teen abortions, and gay marriage.Anyone who has followed Ford’s career or his campaign understands that his voting record and his campaign message diverge from the RNC smears by about 180 degrees. Hell, my colleague The Moose, the very scourge of Democratic cultural liberalism, has suggested Harold Ford could and perhaps should become the first African-American president.I hope and pray that these attacks on Harold Ford will backfire, not just because Ford is a bright young rising star in the national Democratic constellation, but because his national and Tennessee GOP opponents have gone so far over the line to try to defeat him. Tennessee voters have an unparalleled opportunity to let the whole world know that the worst political wedge tactics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries won’t work, even in a culturally conservative red state. Personally, I’ll renounce my own Georgia-based prejudices and sing a couple of choruses of Rocky Top on Election Night if the Volunteer State sends Harold Ford to the Senate.

Sorry for the absence of posting, but I’ll make up for it between now and election day.I rarely if ever use the overworked Note-ish term “must-read,” but you really should check out two bookend pieces in today’s Washington Post. The first is Dan Balz and Jon Cohen’s write-up of the latest Post-ABC national poll. Here are the nut graphs:

Independents are poised to play a pivotal role in next month’s elections because Democrats and Republicans are basically united behind candidates of their own parties. Ninety-five percent of Democrats said they will support Democratic candidates for the House, while slightly fewer Republicans, 88 percent, said they plan to vote for their party’s candidates.The independent voters surveyed said they plan to support Democratic candidates over Republicans by roughly 2 to 1 — 59 percent to 31 percent — the largest margin in any Post-ABC News poll this year. Forty-five percent said it would be good if Democrats recaptured the House majority, while 10 percent said it would not be. The rest said it would not matter.

You will hear a lot before and after election day about relative turnout patterns of the Democratic and Republican “bases,” and they definitely matter, but let’s not forget that in many of the Republican-leaning districts and states, Democrats cannot win without sizable margins among independents. And it looks like they are getting them.The second must-read, by E.J. Dionne, explains the larger meaning of this collapse of GOP support among independents:

President Bush’s six-year effort to create an enduring Republican majority based on a right-leaning coalition is on the verge of collapse. The way he tried to create it could have the unintended consequence of opening the way for an alternative majority.This incipient Democratic alliance, while tilting slightly leftward, would plant its foundations firmly in the middle of the road, because its success depends on overwhelming support from moderate voters. That’s why a Democratic victory in November — defined as taking one or both houses of Congress — would have effects far beyond a single election year.The strategy pursued by Bush and Karl Rove has frightened most of the political center into the arms of Democrats. Bush and Rove sought victory by building large turnouts among conservatives and cajoling just enough moderates the Republicans’ way. But this approach created what may prove to be a fatal political disconnect: Adventurous policies designed to create enthusiasm on the right turned off a large number of less ideological voters.

In other words, the Rovian politics of polarization, along with the failed policies it produced, are in ruins. And the long-term choice facing Democrats after this and (if we win) the next election is whether we pivot to a governing agenda that restores the confidence in progressive government that was becoming evident during the Clinton years, or go down the same road to perdition the GOP has followed, with disastrous results for their party and the country.

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.