Tomorrow is not only Thanksgiving, but also the 44th anniversary of the assassination of JFK and the 7th anniversary of the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” So after giving thanks for the blessings of family and freedom, be grateful also that you belong to a political party that produced a leader who still symbolizes hope and the promise of democracy for millions worldwide, instead of a party that produces charmers like these chaps.

In a rare development, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post penned a column today that offered a cogent and oriiginal point about a political subject (though maybe I’m just suffering from Column Envy).
All the talk about Mitt Romney’s religion, says Cohen, has detracted attention from the fact that Mike Huckabee is an ordained Southern Baptist minister, which is a relatively unusual phenomenon on the presidential campaign trail. Indeed, while there’s not much evidence that Romney’s faith has any particular impact on his policy positions, Huckabee’s been trading on his evangelical credentials pretty heavily of late. So why, asks Cohen, isn’t anybody asking the Arkansan to do a JFK-style speech reassuring people about his religious views?
It’s a good question, and one that may get asked a lot if Huckabee manages to upset the Mittster in Iowa.

The big buzz today, just over six weeks out from the iowa Caucuses, is a new ABC-Washington Post poll of the Democratic field in Iowa. For casual news consumers, the top line of this poll–Obama up by 4 over Clinton–may seem like a big, exciting shift. But actually, the same poll had Obama up back in July. The more dramatic change is that Obama’s up 8 points over Edwards, though even that difference shrinks to 5 percent among the likeliest voters, and the margin of error is four-and-a-half percent.
Like last week’s CBS-New York Times poll, this one shows Clinton trailing Obama and Edwards in “second-choice” support, though it does not break out supporters of those second-tier candidates who might actually have to make a second choice at the Caucuses.
The internal finding that the Post finds most significant is that Obama’s now no more dependent on first-time Caucus-goers–and thus a big overall turnout–than HRC (though both are significantly more dependent on such voters than Edwards, the candidate who would probably most benefit from a lower turnout).
Meanwhile, there’s a new CNN/WMUR poll of the Republican field in NH, which shows Mitt Romney expanding his lead, Rudy Giuliani and (most calamitously) Fred Thompson declining, and Ron Paul leaping into fourth place. CNN/WMUR’s September poll was the one, you might remember, that sparked a bunch of “Giuliani Catches Romney” headlines. Not so much today, since Romney’s lead over Rudy is 17 points, with McCain actually in second place without adding or losing support since September. Big Fred dropped from 14 percent in September to 4 percent now, and an amazing one-half of poll respondents said they wouldn’t vote for him under any circumstances.
Sic transit gloria, eh Fred?

Emory University poly sci proff Alan Abramowitz has a post at Pollster.com challenging Charles Franklin’s earlier analysis of recent trends in public opinion about the war in Iraq. Abramowitz explains:

The claim that there has been a significant shift in public opinion toward the war is simply not supported by recent polling data. For example, a new CNN/Opinion Research Poll finds opposition to the war at an all-time high of 68 percent. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll finds that 27 percent of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the war, down 3 points from September and almost identical to the levels of support from the first half of the year. This same poll finds that the war remains easily the most important issue in the minds of Americans–26 percent named the war as the most important problem for the federal government to address with health care a distant second at 16 percent.

And this translates into advantage Democrats:

The new ABC-Washington Post Poll finds Democrats favored over Republicans on the war by a 16 point margin, slightly higher than the Democratic margin earlier this year and last year.

Abramowitz concedes a “small uptick” in Americans’ opinion about how the war is going, but concludes:

But this shift is not indicative of any broader shift in public opinion toward the war. Opposition to the war remains as high as ever as does support for a withdrawal timetable. And Iraq clearly remains the most salient issue in the 2008 election.

Franklin makes his case with equal fervor that “partisan persuasion has tilted towards the Republicans and away from the Democrats,” but concedes that Americans remain pessimistic about the war by a 20 point margin. He also notes that “It is too early, and the changes too modest, to declare this a ‘turning point’ in opinion.” No doubt the presidential candidates’ poll analysts will be watching this debate with increasing interest in the months ahead.

Via pollster.com, we learn that Elon University has done a presidential nominating candidacy poll of adults (e.g., no screen for registration or likelihood to vote) in VA, NC, SC, GA and FL.
This is interesting because most prior primary polls in the South have focused strictly on South Carolina and Florida.
Among Dems, Elon has HRC well ahead, at 45%, with Obama at 17% and Edwards at 11%. Front-runner-factor notwithstanding, this is pretty impressive, since Edwards is a southern white male (with his home state and native state in the mix), and Obama is an African-American (the black share of the Dem vote in these states is probably somewhere between a fourth and a third of the total).
On the GOP side, Rudy leads with 25%, with Big Fred at 16%, Romney at 12%, and McCain and Huckabee tied at 8%.
All these numbers are obviously vulnerable in a big way to early state results and regional campaigning. But it does indicate that all the down-ballot-fear-of-HRC stuff we hear about Southern Democrats is an elite, not popular, phenomenon, and that Rudy’s national lead is predictably smaller in the SE, and even more inviting to a candidate who can unite conservatives before the first Southerners vote in SC.

In another sign that the Conservative Establishment is getting worried about Mike Huckabee’s rise towards political viability in Iowa, the Editors of National Review have published a brief piece dissing him on a wide variety of grounds, centering on his “mixture of populism [note: not a compliment] and big-government liberalism.”
But here’s the really interesting thing: NatRev also thinks Huckabee’s advocacy of the so-called “Fair Tax”–a national sales tax scheme that right-wing talk show types love like drunks love cheap hootch–is a really bad idea, too:

This proposal would almost certainly make a presidential nominee unelectable. But even if he got elected, it would be impossible to deliver. To bar the door on the income tax we would need to amend the Constitution. Otherwise we would end up with the income tax and Huckabee’s sales tax. We would call it a pipe dream, if Huckabee weren’t so anti-smoking.

You might want to make a note of this graph, in case Chuck Norris’ buddy takes flight in the Iowa Caucuses. Add in his increasingly strident support for a national constitutional amendment extending the full benefits of the Equal Protection Clause to human embryos from the moment of conception, and you’ve got a potential GOP nominee whose genial personality masks a lot of crazy talk.

As Garance Franke-Ruta has pointed out, Ryan Lizza has an Obama campaign update in the latest issue of The New Yorker which includes a fascinating nugget about its focus on “microtargeting” analysis of the Iowa Caucus-going electorate:

[A] thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., an array of forty-eight computer processors were mining census demographics, consumer-marketing data, and Iowa-state voter files to form one of the most sophisticated and data-rich portraits of an electorate ever created. This is the work of Ken Strasma, who is among the Democratic Party’s most admired numbers gurus. After being pursued by all the major candidates, Strasma, who helped Kerry to win Iowa in 2004, decided to commit his firm, Strategic Telemetry, to Obama.

….

When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.

Iowa, of course, is about getting supporters to show up and stay half the night at precinct Caucuses, as much or more than identifying such voters to begin with. And the section of Lizza’s piece about Obama’s precinct training centers on plans to deploy chocolate chip cookies to deter hungry Caucus-goers from heading off to a drive-thru before the final vote is taken.
Maybe the “demographic DNA” being assembled by Obama’s numbers wizards in Washington can tell precinct captains in Iowa what kind of munchies would work best with each committed and undecided voter.

In today’s USA Today Jill Lawrence adds to the discussion of “electability” as a leading motivating factor for voters begun last week in Adam Nagourney’s article in the New York Timesand extended by The American Prospect’s Terence Samuel. Where Nagourney’s report centered around a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in New Hampshire and Iowa 11/2-11 and Samuel’s piece touched on the psychology behind the ‘heart-head’ choice, Lawrence narrows the focus some to how the candidates are playing the electability card in Iowa.

My post yesterday about the Democratic Left’s “Obama problem” was cross-posted at TPMCafe by that site’s request, and at this point, has attracted more than 60 comments, mostly about Obama’s Social Security rap.
And over at OpenLeft, Matt Stoller takes pretty strong exception to my analysis, primarily, it appears, because he considers discussion of Obama’s framing and rhetorical themes “non-substantive.” He also seems to think I’m poorly qualified for the task of providing insights on “the Left” because I am insufficiently “Of the Left” myself, a point of view that would cast a negative light on a lot of progressive analysis of conservatism and the GOP. He is right that I should have noted some progressive policy disagreements with Obama, such as the Iraq residual troop issue, and maybe his health care plan.
I’ve traveling right now, but will address Matt’s post in greater length later today.

Having watched the CNN Democratic debate last night, and read a lot of the spin, I think Matt Yglesias has far and away the best take on it: The CNN crew, and particularly Wolf Blitzer, distorted the whole event by coming up with bad, “gotcha” questions and then getting hostile when the candidates naturally resisted walking into a trap and instead tried to address the broader issues involved in, say, immigration reform or Iraq.
Add in the weird efforts to restate audience questions, and the exceptionally intrusive CNN branding of the debate (including the clock-chewing basketball-players-take-the-court intros of the candidates, which mainly allowed CNN “analysts” to tell us what we were about to hear), and the generally lame-o post-debate commentary, and you had a “debate” that struggled to overcome its media sponsor.
I also agree with Matt that the whole MSM take on the debate–a media-contrived HRC “comeback” after a media-contrived HRC “stumble”–was news management at its worst. It was hard, though, not to sympathize a bit with Clinton after two straight debates set up as exercises in King of the Mountain.
There were a couple of occasions when Wolf and company made unaccountable omissions in which candidates got to address which questions, probably because of CNN’s self-inflicted time problems. Obama didn’t get to talk about teacher merit play, though he’s the only candidate who’s addressed the subject in anything other than a negative way. And even more striking, the question about the need for bipartisanship was pitched to everyone other than John Edwards, who has made a big deal out of a very contrary attitude towards cooperation with the GOP.
All in all, not a shining moment for CNN, or for the level of political discourse.