One of my long-time pet peeves is about how political pollsters often decide to frame important questions in public opinion surveys. Some insist on false choices that simply reinforce stereotypes about candidates and political parties and ignore ambivalent public sentiments that actually influence voting behavior. Some endlessly search for bite-sized policy formulations that poll extremely well, at the expense of larger questions facing the country. And some, in the search for trend-lines, insist on asking the same questions for years even as the context radically changes.It’s this last habit that Chris Bowers skewers at length in an excellent post on MyDD about polling questions on Iraq. Here’s a sample:

Since the start of the war, polling firms have asked the public whether or not they thought the decision to go to war was correct more than five hundred times. Further, in that same time frame, they have asked the public if they approve or disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war more than 1,000 times. By contrast, they have asked the public how long they would like to continue fighting the war only twice. Considering that how long we intend to keep fighting the war is the number one issue when it comes to Iraq right now, it is the responsibility of those who frame the debate to at least pose that question to the American people. That question is a lot more important than whether or not we think what we did two and a half years ago was the right thing to do, because we can’t do anything about that now.

I might add to Chris’ observation that the preoccupation with what we did two and a half years ago isn’t terribly helpful to Democrats, since we were divided on the subject while Republicans were not. Moreover, where you were on the original war resolution isn’t neatly correlated with what you think the U.S. should do today. There are plenty of people who opposed the war but who are reluctant to support a quick withdrawal today. And I personally know a fair number of Democrats who supported the war but now think Bush and Rumsfeld have screwed it up beyond retrieval. I suspect there are a growing number of Republicans who share that view. As Chris says, the only way to find out what Americans want to do now in Iraq is to ask them in a way that explores the real choices.

Word is that Republican mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff may finally get indicted late today or tomorrow on fraud charges related to casino operations. But not for his more famous involvement in casinos, the Indian Casino Shakedown Scandal. No: the impending indictment in Miami relates to alleged bank fraud by Abramoff and several partners in securing a loan to buy a casino cruise company, SunCruz Casinos, which later went belly-up during a legal battle over the deal. The seller, BTW, got murdered in the middle of all this in what authorities called a likely gangland hit. Nice.The incredible and ever-increasing web of dubious activity surrounding Abramoff and his political cronies is evidenced by this deadpan line in the AP story on the probable indictment: “[Rep. Tom] DeLay, R-Texas, was not mentioned in any lawsuits involved in the SunCruz deal.” This disclaimer tells you everything you need to know about how closely DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and other key Republicans are tied to Casino Jack’s not-very-promising fate.

As someone who’s deeply into the Abramoff/Scanlon/Norquist/Reed Casino Shakedown Scandal, I’m aware it’s a complicated game where it’s hard to keep the players straight. That’s why I recommend you read a post by Josh Eidelson up on TPMCafe’s Auction House section that gives a quick but thorough rundown of the key figures other than Casino Jack himself. And while you’re roaming around the Auction House (the site’s forum for news on various House GOP scandals), be sure to read Austin Bonner’s earlier post about Abramoff’s pricey Washington restaurant, which has served as a feedbag and watering whole for those involved in Jack’s various schemes. After all, as they say at the ballpark, you don’t know your players without a program–or in some cases, a menu.

Wow, that was fast. ReformOhioNow, a group that began a late-breaking effort to get a package of election and redistricting reform initiatives on the November 2005 ballot, appears to have succeeded in meeting the state’s ballot requirements by the August 1 deadline.RON filed 520,000 petitions for the ballot measures. If 322,000 of them are valid, then the three initiatives–one on redistricting, one reversing a GOP effort to relax the state’s campaign finance laws, and one stripping election administration from the highly partisan secretary of state’s office–will go before Ohio voters.How big a deal is this? Well, big enough that the Ohio GOP–with backing from Republicans in Washington–is scurrying into court to try to stop the initiative. And it’s apparently the redistricting measure that has them really worried. Here’s what the anti-reform leader told The New York Times:

A former Republican president of the Ohio Senate, Richard Finan, last week filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court pre-emptively challenging the petitions because they did not identify the passages that would be deleted from the Constitution.In a telephone interview, Mr. Finan said if the suit failed, a new group he had founded, Ohio First, would take up the cause with the expected backing of Republicans in Washington. Mr. Finan predicted that if the redistricting amendment became law, Republicans would lose six seats in the House of Representatives and that “you’ll see this idea spread to other states.”

Sounds good to me.

As George W. Bush set a new record for vacationing among American presidents, he sought to gussy up the latest down-time by summoning down to Crawford his “economic team”–i.e., the appointees who can be counted on to grin at the cameras and support the party line that everything’s hunky-dory.I don’t know what these folks did down there. Maybe they helped W. clear the sage brush. But they sure as hell didn’t confirm, adjust, or create any kind of national economic strategy, because we don’t have one.The President of the United States came out from the clambake and said that latest job numbers confirmed his tax cut plan.This photo op was obviously caused by (a) a relatively good job creation month, combined with (b) poll numbers showing Bush’s approval ratings on the economy dropping to 41 percent.The Bush economic plan, such as it is, depends on a cyclical rebound after the dot.com bust and the 9/11 swoon; the short-term stimulus caused by massive public and private debt and federal spending; a surge of cheap imports; and exceptional and dangerous foreign government investment.Our economy is balanced on a pin, and unfortunately, our economy is being guided by empty minds hiding behind empty grins.

It’s now getting pretty obvious that weird things are going on within the Bush administration’s national security apparatus.First, there’s been the peculiar and very atypical open disagreement about what it is the United States is involved in with respect to terrorism, with the Pentagon wanting to drop the Global War on Terrorism (in favor of something called the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism), and Bush rather pointedly repudiating the change of terminology in a couple of public appearances last week.And second, there’s the constant drumbeat of suggestions from the Pentagon that things are going so swimmingly in Iraq that we might be able to begin bringing home troops by next spring–in sharp contrast to Bush’s repeated argument that any talk of withdrawal prior to the military defeat of the insurgency, or a dramatic increase in Iraqi security capabilities, offers encouragement to the enemy.A lot of Democrats think the Pentagon is finally getting out of denial. But on the Republican side of the punditocracy, there’s neoconservative editor Bill Kristol , who thinks Rummy and the boys are turning coat and undermining Bush after having concluded that Iraq is a military disaster that’s redeemable only by an Iraqi government that’s showing us the door, even as Bush still holds out for a U.S.-led victory over the insurgents.Is this, the most “disciplined” administration in memory, about to be torn apart on the issue it has made its very signature? Hard to imagine, but it’s starting to look that way. It would sure be ironic if Rumsfeld finally got the sack not for his incompetent handling of Iraq, but for his belief that a change of course is necessary.

For many younger Americans who may have noted in passing short news reports about the commemorations in Atlanta and elsewhere of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this may seem like a bit of ancient if important history. For southerners of any race who were old enough to know what was going on 40 years ago, this event was as cataclysmic as its more famous antecedents, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The drive for voting rights exposed the fundamental anti-Americanism of Jim Crow society even more decisively than the struggle against segregated schools, buses and lunch counters. For all its immorality, segregation could hide behind the fig-leaf of “separate-but-equal,” and the pretense that African-Americans were somehow protected from the violence that might accompany abrogation of the South’s cultural codes. But the denial of the right to vote could only be defended by lies, or an open rejection of the U.S. Constitution.Over at TPMCafe, I’ve done a post raising some questions about the future of the Voting Rights Act, but here, I simply want to honor it–and its architects, from John Lewis to Lyndon Johnson–as one of the key developments in the moral redemption of my native region.

Americans inveterately use sports metaphors in talking about everything from politics and economics to personal development and sex. But sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a game is just a game.I mention this because John Judis, one of my few journalistic idols, posted a meditation at TNROnline yesterday on Ryne Sandburg’s Hall of Fame induction speech last weekend. Judis’ purpose was to suggest that baseball is falling prey to the same erosion of community and responsibility as corporate America at large.While I agree with Judis’ broader point about the decline of mutuality in the modern corporate workplace, I’m not sure baseball is a particularly apt example of it. For one thing, baseball, as a highly regulated competitive game, has self-correcting features not generally prevalent in other markets. And for another, the game has gone through similar problems many times before.In suggesting the Pastime’s association with the sturdy virtues of the past, Judis says: “baseball itself is a very conservative game.” I disagree. But there’s something about baseball that certainly brings out the conservative instincts of its fans.Indeed, what struck me most about the preoccupation of both Judis and Sandberg with the alleged ruination of the game by one-dimensional sluggers was a strong sense of déjà vu: their complaint closely tracked the very first book I read about baseball, more than a generation ago, My Life In Baseball: The True Record, by Ty Cobb and Al Stump. Cobb and Stump similarly fretted about the domination of the game by “humpty-dumpty strong boys pulling the ball over the fences,” and echoed every old-timer’s paen to the Total Players of the past. As it happens, they were writing near the end of a relatively brief period of home-run-oriented baseball not fundamentally different from the 1990s. By the mid-1960s, pitchers began controlling the game, and soon after, thanks to the construction of large, multi-purpose stadiums with artificial turf, the game devolved back towards something resembling the old-timers’ fantasies, with high levels of stolen bases, sacrifice bunts and other one-run strategies, and strong defenses characterizing many winning teams.Yet baseball “traditionalists” generally deplored those boring, sterile stadiums and the fake grass. In one of the great ironies of the game, the most self-consciously conservative trend in baseball history, the construction of a new generation of intimate, baseball-only, retro parks, did a lot to produce the “ruinous” and revolutionary home run derby of the 1990s. And now, though you wouldn’t know it from the Judis/Ryneberg argument, there’s been another reaction, and home run totals are steadily heading down towards historic norms.The point is that baseball moves in cycles, and it’s only the tendency of so many fans and sportswriters to idolize the real and imagined past that makes the movement look unprecedented and negative.If you want a much more balanced and nuanced view of the game and its development, along with a more measured series of suggestions about current excesses, you should read The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. As James shows, the game has always featured greedy and sometimes stupid owners; narcissistic superstars; cheaters of one variety or another; and over-evaulations of the contributions of one-dimensional players, from sluggers to batting champs to acrobatic infielders to “closers.”And while the economics of the game have indeed gone nuts, the most recent trends in baseball may well be slowly but surely producing a correction. Look at the standings today. Most of the big-payroll, big-market teams are struggling. The hottest team in baseball right now is the Oakland A’s, a team (as detailed by Michael Lewis in his 2003 book, Moneyball) that has applied Bill James’ empirical measurements of player value to win with a relatively tiny payroll. James himself is a consultant to the World’s Champion Red Sox, working for a whiz-kid disciple of his. The most successful franchise in recent history is the Atlanta Braves, who have won 13 straight division titles with stable management, a strong farm system, and a very balanced offense and defense–a very old-timey approach.Perhaps salary insanity and steroids are truly producing an irreversible crisis in baseball, but I doubt it. And while I don’t endorse this regulated industry as a model for American capitalism, I also don’t think it’s typical of capitalism’s worst features, either.Let’s continue to treat baseball as a game; as a metaphor, it’s usually overplayed.

Those of you who frequent the more intensively political regions of the Democratic blogosphere undoubtedly know about Paul Hackett‘s campaign in a special congressional election in Ohio, and his impressive 48 percent showing yesterday. It doesn’t require spin to call this a large moral victory, given the overwhelmingly Republican nature of the district and the difficulty of mounting a successful insurgency in a special election, where turnout is usually abominable. In terms of its broader implications, the result is being widely interpreted as (a) a very good sign for Ohio Democrats looking forward to ’06; (b) a very good sign that Democrats nationally can compete in very red districts in ’06, with the right kind of candidates and committed support; and (c) a vindication of the power of the “netroots,” which raised a lot of money for Hackett and all but coerced the DCCC into a serious effort in this race. Taking these interpretations in order:(a) Absolutely, Ohio Democrats can and should have a spectacular year in 2006. The state’s entrenched GOP leadership, which controls all aspects of state government, has thoroughly worn out its welcome with Buckeye voters, combining bad policies and rampant corruption on a scale that seems to expand endlessly. And Ohio Democrats have properly made reform their mantra. Polls consistently show either of the current Democratic candidates for Governor, Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman or U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, with sizeable leads over the most likely Republican candidates. Sen. Mike DeWine’s increasingly obvious vulnerability will almost certainly attract an A-list opponent in the next few months. The legislature is poised to flip. It’s all blue skies at this point.(b) It’s trickier to assume the Ohio Special is a 2006 bellweather nationally, though I obviously hope it is. As I recall, Dems did pretty well in Specials in 2003 and 2004 as well; Stephanie Herseth won in a South Dakota at-large district that was nearly as “red” as Ohio-2. On the other hand, the Hackett race was much more of a referendum on GOP policies in Columbus and in Washington than those earlier Specials. The real question is whether Dems nationally can win big with the kind of reform/anti-corruption message that worked well in Ohio. Yes, Ohio presents an especially lurid example of the consequences of total Republican control, but Ohio GOPers do live in the same debased moral and ideological universe as their brethren elsewhere, especially in Washington. So it’s definitely worth a try in ’06.(c) The “netroots” deserve a lot of credit for making the Hackett race competitive financially and organizationally, and for drawing larger attention to it. But obviously, a quasi-nationalized Special Election is an almost ideal playing-field for netroots-based fundraising and organizing. Replicating their disproportionate Ohio-2 impact in a national campaign with hundreds of targets and a plethora of local factors won’t be easy. The best sign, IMO, is that all this excitement was generated on behalf of a candidate nicely tailored to a “red” district, whose policy views probably were at odds with those of a lot of the folks generating the excitement and the cash. And I gather the national groups and bloggers involved in Hackett’s campaign let the candidate and his staff call all the important shots. In any event, it was a great effort in tough terrain, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing again soon from Paul Hackett.

Josh Marshall asked today why Ralph Reed’s not in more trouble back home in Georgia for his central involvement in the Abramoff/Scanlon Indian Casino Shakedown Scam. As a native Georgian who’s watched this thing develop for a while, my answer is: Be patient, Josh. Ralph’s political problems may not be shaking, but they’re baking. You have to remember:He’s running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, which may be Ralph’s stepping stone to an eventual presidential run, but is not a matter of gripping interest to Georgians at this point. Indeed, and ironically, Reed’s Republicans stripped the office of virtually all its once-formidable powers in 2003 after taking over the state senate.He may be a legendary figure nationally, but he’s actually not universally known among Georgia voters, and even those who recognize him mostly identify him vaguely with the Christian Coalition, which is rapidly shrinking in the rear-view mirror as a major player in Georgia and national politics. Sure, many Republican activists know he was a spectacularly successful state party chair in 2002, but others remember him as the political consultant whose ham-handed negative campaign for another GOP candidate for Lieutenant Governor, one Mitch Skandalakis, helped take down the whole ticket in 1998. And most of all, Reed’s slow-motion-riot of a scandal is clearly going to be the centerpiece of the primary opponent he wasn’t able to intimidate into withdrawing, state senator Casey Cagle. To be sure, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has given the Tribal Gaming scam a lot of attention, and Georgia Democrats have joyfully piled on, but it’s Cagle’s campaign that’s made it Daily Bread. In fact, the failure, so far, of Georgia Democrats to recruit a truly top-tier opponent for Ralph is not attributable to fear of Ralph, but mainly to the fear that Reed will implode well before the 2006 primary.Personally, if I were a gambling man, I’d bet big money that Ralph Reed is not going to capture the empty prize of the Lieutenant Governorship of Georgia in 2006, much less grab the brass ring of higher office. Beyond that, I don’t know what his future holds, other than to observe that the Lord does tend to reserve special punishment for self-righteous hypocrites.