It’s a old maxim that in Washington, when breaking news is anticipated, there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of actual information available and the breadth and intensity of rumors. So it goes with the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation of the Valerie Plame leak.Best I can tell, Fitzgerald’s investigation itself is pretty damn close to leak-proof. Hence, the speculation about its impending fruits is reaching levels of near-hysteria in Washington. Will Cheney be implicated? If so, does his implication implicate Bush himself? Did Rove roll over on Scooter Libby, not only exculpating himself but reinforcing his legend as the guy you don’t ever want to mess with? Will Fitzgerald wind up doing nothing, to the shock and disappointment of Democrats and the great relief of Republicans?Who knows? Nobody knows. The tiny trickle of actual news dribbling out today is tantalizing but inconclusive: reports of Fitzgerald paying a visit to Rove’s lawyer, and of FBI agents creepy-crawling the Wilson-Plame neighborhood to find out if it was common knowledge Plame was with The Company.There’s a general expectation that action will be taken tomorrow, but maybe not until Friday, and of course, Fitzgerald could actually hold over the Grand Jury for another week, raising the rumor noise to a high-pitched chattering whine.This is the perfect atmosphere for the Washington Insider Jiveass, who in the absence of real information, feeds the beast of speculation with wild claims backed by shadowy Sources. My colleague The Moose and I had a semi-serious conversation today about how easy it would be to set Washington on its ear by posting especially lurid speculation of our own: unconfirmed reports of beefed-up security in the office of John McCain, waiting in the wings to replace a disgraced Dick Cheney; Sources describing a stricken president weeping in the Rose Garden at the certain loss of his Pilot, Karl Rove; spot checks revealing a vast and coordinated wave of heavily tattooed bicycle messengers delivering multiple “target letters;” Grand Jurors with relatives in Red States suddenly stepping down. In today’s atmosphere, almost anything would get batted around Washington and beyond.I’ve always defined the Washington Insider Jiveass as someone who constantly seeks to know something unimportant fifteen minutes before anyone else. But when it comes to something important, the Washington Insider Jiveass seeks to convey exclusive knowledge of something unknowable close enough to real news events to get attention, yet far enough in advance to avoid looking stupid when it turns out very differently.That’s why this is the Day of the Jiveass in Washington; indeed, it’s a veritable Jiveass Jamboree.

Here’s how Andrew Kohut describes the latest findings of the Pew Research Center on public attitudes towards major U.S. institutions and their leaders, released today:

Americans express increasingly negative views of a wide range major institutions, reflecting strong discontent with national conditions. Over the past year, ratings have tumbled for the federal government and Congress. And it is not just Washington institutions that are being viewed less positively. Favorable opinions of business corporations are at their lowest point in two decades. And in the face of high energy prices, just 20% express positive opinions of oil companies.Favorable ratings for the federal government in Washington have taken a hard hit, falling from 59% last year to 45% currently. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted among 2,006 Americans from Oct. 12-24, finds that even positive views of the military, while still very high, have slipped slightly (from 87% in March to 82%). Just two institutions are unscathed by public discontent. Ratings for the Supreme Court and the news media were unchanged compared to previous surveys.

All this bad news about public assessments of the folks running the country, and even their corporate sweethearts, should be good news for Democrats, right? Well, it’s more accurate to say that it creates an opportunity for good news for Democrats in the future. As virtually every poll has shown for some time, Pew finds that sinking assessments of the GOP have not exactly translated into rising assessments of the Donkey Party. After three months of trouble in the GOP ranks, the favorable/unfavorable ratio for the Republican Party has dropped from 48/43 in July to 42/49 today. The Democratic Party’s ratio has changed from 50-41 to 49-41 over the same period.This should be a familiar anomaly for Democrats, since it was a central feature of the 2004 presidential cycle. All year long, Kerry strategists (and for that matter, people like me) stared at the stubbornly high “wrong track” numbers and became convinced that eventually all these unhappy campers would drift into the challenger’s column, giving the Democratic candidate a sure boost in the home stretch. And indeed, this belief clearly had an impact on the Kerry campaign message; anodyne slogans like “New Directions for America” and “A Stronger America” were basically just welcome signs for the “wrong track” voters sure to abandon Bush if given a clear alternative.It didn’t happen, probably in part because voters viewed Democrats as much as if not more than Republicans as the “wrong track” party on some issues, including culture, integrity, and “big government,” and because Democrats never offered a tightly constructed argument about exactly how they would do a better job on the most important concerns of wavering voters.We’re at a similar juncture today, except that (1) Republican vulnerability is much greater than in 2004, and (2) Democrats don’t have the focal point of a presidential candidacy to drive home a clear and compelling message.The Democratic ability to overcome this second obstacle will go a long way towards determining whether 2006 is one of those snarling, low-turnout, plague-on-both-houses elections with mixed results, or a 1994-style wave that sweeps Republicans out of office.We now have just over a year to paint some bright and unmistakable signposts that remind voters exactly who built the wrong track this country is on, and point to the path not taken that’s still available with new leadership.

As the Harriet Miers nomination slouches slowly towards the Senate, it’s hard to get a real handle on who, exactly, in the conservative constellation has bitten the bullet–or to put it another way, the hand that used to feed them–and come out against W.’s buddy.Ah, but now there’s a web page, WithdrawMiers.org, that is providing an updated list of organizations, individuals and newspapers which have called on Bush to withdraw the nomination. (It’s not exclusively a conservative list, and may become less so as Democrats begin to weigh in). All the big names you’d expect are on this list: Will, Buchanan, Krauthammer, Frum, Kristol, Schlafly, Bork and Noonan; along with publications like National Review and organizations like the American Conservative Union.Just as interestingly, the page lists those “deeply concerned” about Miers, i.e., leaning against, but not yet off the cliff. And there you find nine Republican U.S. Senators, plus Robert Novak, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council, Grover Norquists’s Americans for Tax Reform, and The Wall Street Journal.These lists show abundantly how much the fault lines on Miers cut across the Cultural Right. James Dobson’s supporting her, but the closely related Family Research Council and its famous former director Bauer are leaning against her. The National Right To Life Committee is on board for Harriet, but the Republican National Coalition for Life is urging her withdrawal. Cultural Right Warhorse Pat Robertson is thundering threats against Senator who dare obstruct her confirmation, but Cultural Right Warhorses Schlafly, Buchanan, and Weyrich appear to be feeding the revolt.Maybe somebody will do up one of those handy-dandy charts that list the major constellations of the conservative universe, and who’s bickering with whom in the same solar system. But until then, WithdrawMiers.org is the place to check for trends.

Amidst this week’s three-ring circus imvolving the Fitzgerald indictment rumors, the Miers fiasco, and Tom DeLay’s court appearance, you may have missed an important GOP sideshow: the collapse of a House Republican effort to patch together an amended federal budget resolution to pay for a small portion of the Katrina recovery effort. Read all about it on the DLC site, and be sure to follow the link to Gov. Tom Vilsack’s op-ed on how to help pay for the Gulf Coast recovery. Vilsack wouldn’t mess with Medicaid or food stamps; does not rely on the brain-dead approach of across-the-board cuts; and while he identifies far more spending savings than the House GOP green eyeshades, he also doesn’t ignore the immorality of implementing new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, either.

Byron York, White House reporter for National Review, put up an online article this afternoon suggesting that the team lobbying for Harriet Miers’ confirmation is “gloomy and demoralized,” not due to external conservative opposition to the nomination, but because her “courtesy visits” to the Senators who will determine her fate are not going well.

Strategists working with the White House in support of the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers are becoming increasingly demoralized and pessimistic about the nomination’s prospects on Capitol Hill in the wake of Miers’s meetings with several Republican and Democratic senators. On a conference call held this morning, they even discussed whether Miers should simply stop visiting with lawmakers, lest any further damage be done — and so that time spent in such get-acquainted sessions will not cut into Miers’s intensive preparation for her confirmation hearing….”The number of participants [in the pro-Miers conference calls] is declining,” says one knowledgeable source. “With Roberts, these calls occurred five or six or seven times a week. Pretty early on, the calls on Miers were scaled back to twice a week. That says something in and of itself.””It’s been a gradual descent into almost silence,” says a second source of the calls. “The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings….””Demoralization and pessimism?” the source continues. “That’s been a constant. We’re in the various stages of grief.”

Now I realize that the magazine Byron York works for is one of the major sources of the conservative revolt against Miers. But he’s a solid, old-school reporter, and moreover, the fact that people involved in the Miers lobbying operation are talking to him, even on “deep background,” is significant in itself. Like John Fund’s leak-fed revelations about the incompetent vetting of Miers in the White House, it shows that Republican discipline has completely broken down. And that has to be freaking out the White House as much as anything else. In any given meeting or conference call to bolster the nomination, the spin team must be constantly asking themselves: Who can we trust?

In response to my last post suggesting that the Miers nomination saga might have taken another strange turn with the revelation of her 1989 support for the Human Life Amendment, I was put in my place by a number of friends and correspondents who reminded me how remarkably uncontroversial support for the HLA used to be in conservative circles; so uncontroversial, indeed, that it didn’t seem odd for a city council candidate to embrace it to get a local endorsement.And in fact, yesterday’s revelation didn’t seem to much impress Miers’ conservative opponents; they’re not even talking about it. Indeed, the only discussion of the material released by the Senate about Miers yesterday on sites like The Corner and Red State involves derisive comments about her answer to the Judiciary Committee question about “judicial activism.” (BTW, the constant use of passive verb constructions indicates that Miers herself, or someone immersed in her Collected Works, filled the thing out).What many conservatives have been talking about, from the very beginning, is a point that Jonathan Chait riffs on brilliantly today at the New Republic site: how little political capital the White House seemed willing to spend on a crucial Supreme Court nomination.There’s an almost universal conviction among conservative Miers-o-phobes that Bush could have rammed a qualified and unambiguously Scalia/Thomas-type jurist through the Senate (probably anybody to the left of Janice Rogers Brown) if he had really wanted to. Sure, it might have required some serious arm-twisting, and maybe a resort to the Nuclear Option, but the deal about Supreme Court nominations is that it requires just 50 of 55 Republican votes to put somebody on the Court for a lifetime. And Bush wouldn’t do it. He came to the eve of the long-awaited Armaggedon, and flinched.As Chait points out, what galls cultural conservatives most about this decision is that it was diametrically opposed to the White House M.O. on economic issues:

When it comes to tax cuts, regulation, or other controversial budget changes, Bush’s Republicans usually muscle their legislation through both Houses of Congress without any votes to spare. (Last week’s House vote to ease oil refinement restrictions-during which the GOP leadership extended a five-minute vote to 45 minutes while they twisted enough arms to prevail 212 to 210–is a typical display). The goal is always to win as many benefits as possible for the party’s business and donor base.

Actually, as Mark Schmitt likes to point out, the GOP often seems determined to win votes without any significant Democratic support, in part because they don’t want to compromise, but also because they deeply believe that maximum partisan polarization is in their party’s long-term interest.So why, ask cultural conservatives, isn’t that the case with their own most important priority? And all the rationalizations the White House has been providing for the Miers choice–Bush’s loyalty to his friend, her “stealth credentials” as an evangelical Christian, Karl Rove’s distractions, Andy Card’s sponsorship, Bush’s low poll numbers, etc., etc.–add insult to injury. On something this big, how was it possible for Bush to stray so far from the obvious course of giving the Right what it wanted and what he had the power to give? That’s a hard question to answer without quickly concluding that Bush just didn’t care enough to get it Right.

Just when you thought you had a handle on the Miers nomination, a document emerged today from her thin dossier that could change the dynamics dramatically. Senate sources released material from a routine questionnaire answered by the nominee, disclosing that as a candidate for Dallas City Council in 1989, Miers informed the local branch of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum that she supported the so-called Human Life Amendment, a constitutional amendment that would endow human embryos with the full protections of “personhood” accorded by every other provision of the constitution, from the moment of conception. The White House quickly issued a statement downplaying the disclosure: “A candidate taking a political position in the course of a campaign is different from the role of a judge making a ruling in the judicial process.” Well, yeah, sorta kinda, but not really, and so what? Yes, it’s theoretically possible to believe that Roe v. Wade is a settled judicial precedent that should be, and can only be, reversed by a constitutional amendment. But let’s remember what the Human Life Amendment (in its most common iterations) was designed to do: not simply reverse Roe and return the subject of abortion to the states and to Congress, but instead to permanently ban any federal or state legislation permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy after conception (with the sole exception of conditions threatening the life of the mother). Arguably, the Human Life Amendment would create a constitutional challenge to laws allowing the dispensation of contraceptives that prevent implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterine wall. It would definitely lead to a judicially-enforced ban on the widespread practice of embryo destruction by IV fertility clinics, not to mention embryonic stem cell research. In other words, support for the Human Life Amendment is the most extreme position imaginable on abortion, and one which–precisely because it reflects the belief that the courts should define the word “person” as contained in the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment as including embryos–is based on an implicit injunction to the most radical form of judicial activism. Indeed, for all the whining about judicial usurpation of legislative prerogatives that’s become so common on the Cultural Right, it’s this–a judicial reading of the anti-abortion movement’s interpretation of the word “person” right into the Constitution–that has long been their ultimate fantasy, abandoned for tactical reasons in favor of the current drive to undermine and then reverse Roe. Who knows, maybe Miers was just checking a conservative box on that Eagle Forum questionnaire, and maybe she didn’t and doesn’t embrace a radical interpretation of what it means in the U.S. Constitution to be a “person.” But aside from its political ramifications, this disclosure means her inquisitors in the Senate Judiciary Committee should not be satisfied with questioning her about the constitutional underpinnings of Roe, such as Griswold and the right to privacy. A belief in fetal “personhood” as a constitutional doctrine trumps all those issues. And unless Miers and her defenders come up with a better explanation than “that was then, this is now,” it could introduce a whole new dimension in a confirmation debate where her lack of qualifications, and her evangelical Christian identity, have been the only issues.

Over the weekend, Markos of DailyKos, pondering his California absentee ballot, posed a very pertinent question: why shouldn’t he vote for Proposition 77, Arnold Schwarzenneger’s redistricting reform initiative? Yes, he suggests, it might have a short-term negative impact on Democratic margins in the congressional delegation and the state legislature, but if it contributes to a national redistricting reform movement, it’s likely to help Democrats nationally, particularly if Democratic-backed reform initiatives in Ohio (this year) and Florida (next year) succeed as well.I can’t answer Markos’ question definitively, but do want to draw attention to peculiarities of the California initiative that make it different from those in the other states. I’ve written about this subject extensively here and here (note that the first piece was written before the Ohio initiative got underway, while the second was written before the California initiative overcame a judicial challenge), so I’ll just hit the high points.Prop 77 relies heavily on the assumption that nonpartisan redistricting is (a) feasible, and (b) will produce a more balanced map. Both these assumptions are very questionable. But that’s why the initiative focuses so heavily on who draws the maps, rather than what criteria they use. The Ohio initiative (and for that matter, the Florida initiative that’s now in a legal limbo) requires use of partisan voter registration and performance data to create an overall redistricting plan that maximizes both competitive districts and statewide partisan fairness, while the California initiative prohibits use of such data and does not make competitiveness or partisan fairness criteria at all. The one state that has successfully applied this take-the-politics-out approach to redistricting is Iowa, but Iowa, with its relatively homogenous population, stable partisan balance, and strong “good government” tradition, is not California, by a long shot. So in the end, Prop 77 is pretty much a leap into the unknown. Thus, for Democrats in particular, the decision on Prop 77 is pretty much a matter of how you feel about the current map and the system that created it. But there’s one major piece of misinformation circulating (it’s very visible in the comment thread after Markos’ post) that needs to be refuted: the idea that the current map is a standard-brand partisan gerrymander that maximized Democratic seats. Not so. For both the congressional delegation and the state legislature, the Democratic leadership pursued an incumbent-protection strategy that all but eliminated competitive districts. Yes, it created a floor under Democratic majorities, but also created a ceiling. In effect, the map traded potential opportunities to win new Democratic seats for the assurance that incumbents wouldn’t have to worry about general elections. (Another motive, according to everybody I’ve talked to, was to enable primary challenges to centrist Democrats in the state legislature, many of which succeeded). California’s situation is in sharp contrast to that of Ohio and Florida, where the reigning Republicans did indeed focus on partisan advantage to the exclusion of virtually every other factor.In other words, the Democratic advantage in California’s congressional delegation and state legislature is the product of an unavoidable Democratic advantage among voters, not of Democratic control of redistricting. And there’s no particular reason to believe the system established by Prop 77 would change that reality. The bottom line for me is that I don’t like the system set out in Prop 77, but I also don’t think partisanship is a good reason for opposing it, particularly since the current map is so egregiously aimed at eliminating competition altogether. I hope this analysis helps Markos and other California Dems make their decision. All redistricting reforms are not created equal; nor is the status quo in Democratic and Republican-controlled states the same. It’s entirely possible to oppose Prop 77 while supporting the initiatives in Ohio and Florida on substantive grounds, but not because California’s current system is particularly good for Democrats, or for democracy.

A Republican gubernatorial candidate in a close race launches a vicious attack on his opponent as a weak-kneed liberal who coddles illegal immigrants and criminals and opposes the death penalty. Where are we? California, circa 1986? Nope, it’s the Commonweath of Virginia in 2005, where Jerry (No Relation) Kilgore is bringing back the cultural wedge issues of a bygone era with a vengeance.The rationale for this atavistic effort is a bit tangled. Kilgore’s big problem is that incumbent Democratic Governor Mark Warner is very, very popular. Democratic candidate and Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine is his designated successor. Having spent four years fighting everything Warner has tried to do, ol’ Jerry cannot exactly claim he’ll build on the Warner legacy. To be sure, Kilgore is more than willing to make spending promises, especially on the critical transportation needs of Northern Virginia, based on using the tax revenues he fought to deny the Commonweath. And he’s trying to coopt the Warner magic in more subtle ways as well. Down in central Virginia, the landscape is covered with big “Sportsmen for Kilgore” signs that are carbon copies of the “Sportsmen for Warner” signs of 2001.But nobody really believes Jerry is a sensible centrist like Warner, so his only option is to claim that Kaine isn’t either.As the Washington Post‘s Robert Barnes noted yesterday:

Kaine has based his campaign on the promise that he is the logical choice to “keep Virginia moving forward” since Warner is barred from seeking reelection. But the Kilgore campaign believes it can break open what both sides describe as an extremely close race by portraying the lieutenant governor as a chameleon who doesn’t share Warner’s middle-of-the-road persona.

The strategy is “separating Kaine from Warner and further making the case he’s not Mark Warner part two,” said a Republican strategist familiar with the campaign who would discuss campaign tactics only on condition of anonymity. “It is probably one of the most crucial elements for success.”

Hence the barrage on old-style cultural issues where Kilgore can claim Kaine diverges from Warner.Kilgore has constantly sought to exploit a local dispute in the Washington exurbs over a day laborer gathering point (which Kaine, accurately, calls an issue not within the state’s power to control) to luridly suggest the Old Dominion is about to be overrun by illegal immigrants and Hispanic gangs, even claiming they are connected to al Qaeda.But ol’ Jerry’s demagogic Big Bertha, which he appears to have kept in reserve for the home stretch, is reflected in the wave of ads he’s running about Kaine’s opposition to the death penalty, which feature relatives of murder victims (include one whose killer Kaine defended as a court-appointed attorney) excoriating the Lieutenant Governor.Kaine has put up an ad offering a dignified response, speaking personally about the basis for his opposition to the death penalty in his Catholicism; making it clear he will enforce the current law if elected; and rather frankly denying there’s any particular connection between executions and violent crime rates, which are, in any event, near historic lows.It’s too early to tell whether Kilgore’s gambit will succeed. If he wins after this low-road effort, the implications will extend well beyond the misgovernment Virginians will be virtually guaranteed for the next four years (not to mention the personal pain I will experience in having my surname tainted).”Off-year” elections are almost invariably over-interpreted by political analysts, and over-imitated by political pros. I can’t imagine anything that would poison this country’s already toxic political climate more than a decision by Republican operatives to supplement the Karl Rove generation of cultural wedge issues with those of the late Lee Atwater.If Jerry loses, on the other hand, maybe this kind of crap can be put in a political Superfund site, roped off with skull-and-cross-bones signs, and buried for a very long time.

As the furor over the Harriet Miers nomination has grown, I’ve been wondering when somebody would finally produce an insider account of how, mechanically, the choice was made. Sure, there are plenty of theories, but not much in the way of actual information.That changed today. While it’s not exactly a tick-tock account, John Fund in the Wall Street Journal provides a peek behind the veil, and in particular helps us understand why the White House seemed to be blind-sided by the powerfully negative reaction.Read it yourself, but the basic story line is this: the moment John Roberts was nominated to become Chief Justice, Bush and his staff decided O’Connor’s replacement would be a woman. Miers started the usual intensive vetting process for the women on the short list. Andy Card suggested to Bush that Miers herself be considered. Bush agreed. Card ordered Miers’ deputy, William Kelley (who had just been hired) to carry out a quiet vetting of Miers “behind her back.” Kelley soon came back with a green light. Card formally proposed her nomination to Bush; POTUS signed off; Laura Bush jumped on board. Card told the rest of the staff, and angrily overrode objections. Total secrecy about the pick was imposed. It was announced according to a rigid schedule, and then all hell broke loose.The two things that really stand out about this account are:(1) Where was the Helmsman, Karl Rove in all this? Fund doesn’t say, though there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence kicking around that the post-decision political vetting of Miers was even more haphazard than the vetting of her qualifications for the Court. Is this because Rove was distracted by other tasks (e.g., overseeing Katrina recovery and trying to avoid an indictment)? Or was it because nobody, even Rove, wanted to raise objections about an appointment to which Bush was very committed personally? Or, worse yet, did Rove simply think he could quickly sell Miers to conservatives on grounds of the usual Machine loyalty, underestimating the growing unhappiness of the Right with W.’s overall performance? All of these factors may have come into play.(2) Card’s back-door vetting of Miers by her own deputy almost guaranteed a sloppy process. As Fund points out, the conflicts-of-interest this step imposed on Kelley were formidable–investigating his own boss behind her back for a position that might pave the way to his own promotion, knowing all the while the risks of becoming the messenger who would be shot for bearing bad news about Bush’s close friend. And presumably, Kelley had to do a lot of this on his own, without the resources or time available to Miers in her own, official vetting process. That’s the big irony here: the famously process-obsessed perfectionist Miers got her big break from a process that glaringly diverged from her own standards.And the price she and the White House are paying for that lapse in discipline grows higher every day.I normally wouldn’t quote from one of those columns now sequestered by the New York Times as “premium content,” but David Brooks today penned a pitiless dissection of Miers’ columns for the Texas Bar Journal in the early ’90s that illustrates the kind of material a serious vetting of her would have revealed. He supplies paragraph after paragraph of samplings from “the largest body of public writing we have from her,” and even aside from Miers’ mangled syntax and a fatal addiction to passive verb constructions, it’s not a pretty sight. (My own favorite: “When consensus of diverse leadership can be achieved on issues of importance, the greatest impact can be achieved.” Word up.)As Brooks himself concludes: “I don’t know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers’ prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided.”And so it goes, another predictably negative revelation about a nominee whose main distinguising features are her work habits, a genial personality, and a devotion to church, family and most of all W.My gut feeling is that Bush let her down by exposing her to this ridicule. And though it’s hard to tell at this point, he may be exposing Harriet Miers and himself to a humiliating experience in the Senate.