Via Chris Bowers, I’m happy to report that the latest Gallup Poll shows George W. Bush reaching new lows in popularity, registering a 34/63 approval/disapproval rating, getting him seriously into the bad company of presidents in trouble, from (second-term) Harry Truman, to Richard Nixon, to Jimmy Carter and to his own old man. I’m not so old that I can remember Truman, though I am aware that his deep unpopularity after his upset 1948 election win fed a Republican congressional landslide in 1950, and then the Eisenhower landslide of 1952. But I do remember Nixon’s fall from grace very graphically (feeding the 1974 Democratic landslide and then the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976), and of course the free-fall Bush I went into thanks to his overt confusion and indifference over every aspect of domestic policy. Most of all I remember my fellow Georgian Carter (I was actually a Carter volunteer the first time he ran for governor, in 1966), whose well-earned post-presidential rehabilitation has obscured his own W.-like reputation in the late 1970s for total fecklessness. I will certainly never forget the day after the revelation of the Desert One disaster–the Iranian hostage effort that expired when U.S. helicopters collided en route to an aborted rescue. As it happens, I spoke that morning to my political mentor, a man who had worked for Carter in Atlanta, and who observed: “Well, Jimmy’s just established himself as the first president to screw up a one-car funeral.” George W. Bush has established an equal reputation for incompetence, and unlike Carter, has also richly earned a reputation for lying to the American people on a vast number of issues. He seems to be on a trajectory to combine the worst perceptions of Carter and Nixon: a president over his head, who can’t tell the truth to save his own political life.

The incoherence and attempted demagoguery of the beseiged Republican Party are becoming impossible to overstate. Witness the latest Big Idea on dealing with gas prices, unveiled last week by Senate GOP Leader Bill Frist: mailing $100 checks to 100 million Americans to help them fill up at the pump this summer. Check in with your favorite economist and ask him or her about the genius of this “plan.” It basically involves borrowing 10 billion smackers–yes, 10 billion–and tossing it into the marketplace to subsidize higher gas prices. The Frist “plan,” of course, isn’t intended to do anything serious about rising gas prices. Its rationale is purely political: buying votes just before the midterm elections. There are plenty of bad ideas bouncing around Washington right now about gas prices. As the Progressive Policy Institute’s Jan Mazurek explained last week, all the frantic casting-about for a short term response to higher gas prices ignores, and in some cases cuts directly against, the long-term solutions that the Bush administration and Congress have been rejecting over the last five-and-a-half years, especially a serious effort to build fuel-efficient and cleaner cars. The world’s insatiable lust for oil isn’t going to go away any time soon, and the only sure way to keep petroleum prices from wrecking our economy and wrecking family budgets is to reduce our dependence on this perilous energy source. Throwing money at every gas pump in America is a worse than unserious proposal.

Yesterday’s rally on the National Mall organized by the Coalition for Darfur didn’t break any attendance records, but the remarkable diversity of the crowd did turn a lot of heads. As the Post’s front-page headline put it: “Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur:”

[The rally] brought together people from dozens of backgrounds and affiliations, many of whom strongly disagree politically and ideologically on many issues….Among the speakers were Rabbi David Saperstein; Al Sharpton; Joe Madison, a black liberal radio talk show hose who has been pushing the issue; Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; rap and fashion mogul Russell Simmons; a former basketball star Manute Bol, who is himself Sudanese.

Perhaps most striking of all were two speakers: Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the great living reminder of the Holocaust; and Paul Rusesabagina, the hero who inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda. Said Wiesel: “As I Jew, I’m here because when we needed people to helpu us, nobody came. Therefore, we’re here.” Added Rusesabagina: “As Rwanda has been abandoned, Darfur is also abandoned.”Let’s hope those holding national power within earshot of the Mall were listening.

I don’t have a lot to add to news reporting of the rapidly burgeoning “Hookergate” scandal involving resigned and soon-to-be-hoosegowed Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, a couple of defense contractors, other as-yet-unnamed solons and perhaps major CIA spooks, and some Ladies of the Night. But how rich is it that the alleged scene of the sexual, as opposed to the financial, prostitution scandals involved in this story was the Watergate Hotel? D’you suppose this was some sort of deliberate staging to make it clear that GOPers can break laws exactly wherever they want to? Is this the functional equivalent of George Allen responding to allegations of Confedero-mania by doing an environmental photo op at the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park in Tennessee? The gross nature of the Hookergate violations, if they are true, is pretty astonishing, involving as they do not only bribery and prostitution, but insider manipulations on behalf of a Limousine/”Escort” service run by a guy with a very long rap sheet who somehow landed a giant, $21-million-dollar no-bid contract with those highly competent anti-terrorists over at the Department of Homeland Defense. Every single day, the contemporary GOP makes the Nixon crowd look like pikers at the power-corrupts game.

We’ve probably all had the experience of reading or watching something broadcast to the world, and wondering: “How big an audience could that have?” I remember having this sensation distinctly when I saw the movie “The Rapture” back in the early nineties. This flick, featuring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, is roughly one-half very graphic sex and one-half Book of Revelation. I mean, how many sex-addicted premillenial fundamentalists could there be out there?I had a similar reaction today to a TPMCafe post by Max Sawicky. Ostensibly (and eventually) a negative reaction to Mike Tomasky’s “common good” cover essay in the American Prospect, Max seemed mainly agitated by a brief reference to the famous 1960s New Left group Students for a Democratic Society, which, as “an SDS alumnus,” he considered very off-base. But the fun thing is that Sawicky in passing took shots at several SDS factions.I immediately buzzed my colleague The Moose, who shares my hobby of Marxist esoterica, and got him to read the post. Then, like the Hardy Boys on a mystery adventure, we spent twenty minutes trying to figure out from Max’s angry words which SDS faction he might have belonged to. We decided it had to be either (a) RYM II (for Revolutionary Youth Movement), created when RYM I morphed into the Weathermen, or (b) the Draperites, a Trotskyist offshoot of the better-known Schactmanites (the Moose’s own college fraternity).As we stood in the hallway feeling smug about our sleuthing work, I finally said to the Moose: “You realize what a couple of dorks we are?” He agreed. But thanks to Max Sawicky for an inadvertant bit of Friday afternoon entertainment.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Cass Sunstein have conducted an interesting colloquoy over at The New Republic site about the political implications of a hypothetical overturning of Roe v. Wade in the near future. National Review‘s Ponnuru took on the increasingly popular view that returning abortion policy to the legislative branches of the federal and state governments will be a boon to pro-choice progressives and a blow to the GOP. His main argument was that in a post-Roe world, pro-lifers may well be smart enough (and, if Roe is only partially overturned, may be forced) to focus on popular abortion restrictions rather than the kind of frontal assault on abortion rights that could produce a pro-choice backlash. Sunstein responded that losing Roe would give the pro-choice movement the kind of energy and determination that Roe itself has supplied for abortion opponents over the last thirty-three years.Both arguments have merit, but the debate itself makes an important point that should give pause to those progressives who sunnily forecast happy days in a post-Roe America: nobody knows exactly what would happen, but the one thing we do know is that a reversal of Roe would not create some sort of one-time national referendum on basic abortion rights. As Ponnuru suggests (and as I argued last fall in a public discussion with two leading pro-choice-but-anti-Roe experts, Stuart Taylor and Jeffrey Rosen), barring some highly unlikely preemptive action by Congress, the issue would play out in fifty state legislatures over an extended period of time, on a messy and complex landscape. Abortion would become a perennial, 24-7 issue in many states, dominating political discourse in ways that are easy to envision but hard to exactly predict. Perhaps elevating abortion policy to an overrriding national obsession will ultimately create the kind of decisive pro-choice consensus that Sunstein and others so confidently expect. But I wouldn’t bet the farm (or, if I were a woman, my rights) on it, or look with equanimity at the very real possibility that a lame-duck Republican president will soon give the Supreme Court a fifth vote to overturn Roe.

It’s one of those things you are aware of generally, but it’s amazing to consider, via Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED, the sheer number of major issues on which the Republicans who control the legislative and executive branches of the federal government are gridlocked: immigration reform, lobbying reform, the budget, and the supplemental appropriations bill funding the Iraq and Afghanistan engagements plus Katrina recovery. Beyond Sam’s list, Republicans are battling over how to deal with gas prices and oil company profits, with most opposed to any measures to claw back past subsidies to the energy industry, much less take more aggressive steps.For ol’ folks like me, “gridlock in Washington” is a theme that goes back a very long time. Lest we forget, the two parties shared control of the federal government for 27 out of the 34 years between 1968 and 2002. But the current disarrray within the all-powerful Republican Party in Washington–a party that took power with an extraordinary degree of partisan discipline and ideological unity–is really remarkable.

Y’know, one of the reasons I treasure my friend Josh Marshall is that he’s willing to trade a bit of his popularity now and then for the opportunity to indulge in a bit of pointy-headed esoterica. Sure, he spends most of his time down in the trenches raking the muck and correcting the record and agitpropping with the best of them. But today, in a post on James Baker’s selection by George W. Bush to lead a “fact-finding” tour of Iraq, Josh manages to work in references to both Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of “eternal recurrence.”Kinda reminds me of the scene from Fearing and Loathing on the Campaign Trail when a McGovern staffer in Nebraska quoted Virgil to Hunter Thompson, leading Thompson to wonder for a moment if Virgil was the advance man for Scotts Bluff.Best I can muster in tribute to Josh’s virtuosity is a reference in the title of this post to a relatively obscure Jefferson Airplane album.

I finally got around to reading Michael Tomasky’s much-discussed article in The American Prospect arguing that Democrats should make “the common good” an overarching theme of progressive politics, reigning in the interest-group particularism and individual and group “rights”orientation that have largely dominated liberal thinking since the 1960s. There’s little in Mike’s long piece I would dispute, and it’s heartening to note that it echoes a critique of the interest-group approach that has recently spread, often quite dramatically, from “centrist” precincts into segments of the party normally identified with the Left. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger’s now-famous essay, The Death of Environmentalism, forms a big chunk of the analysis of the Democratic Party in Jerome Armstrong and Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga’s netroots manifesto, Crashing the Gate. Less surprisingly, it (along with “The Reapers'” later research on voter values) has been much discussed and praised in DLC circles as well. It’s important to remember how central the interest group/group rights framework was to the Left until just this juncture of history. Back in 1988, one of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s best known prerorations invoked his grandmother’s beautiful quilts as a metaphor for the Democratic Party, and then proceeded through a litany of “the groups” (everyone from small business people and farmers to gays and lesbians), addressing each with the warning: “Your patch is too small.” I can remember listening to this powerful litany on the floor of the 1988 Convention in Atlanta and thinking: “Is that who we are? Just a bunch of groups linking arms to protect their stuff?” Aside from the fact that this “sum of the parts” orientation eroded any sense of genuine overall purpose, it also led Democrats for decades into the trap of bidding for votes based on encouraging Americans to conduct a personal cost-benefit analysis of their relationship with government, parrying “their” tax cuts with “our” juicy new public benefits. And you know what? We never have, and probably never will, beat Republicans in a competition based on selfishness, because they don’t really give a damn what government does while we, as Tomasky so rightly notes, are really motivated by something higher than the crass appeals to material interest our politicians have too often relied upon. The one important historical note that Mike either missed or decided not to mention is that the debate he is calling for among Democrats was actually the central internal struggle of John Kerry’s presidential campaign of 2004. The argument for a “common good” candidacy was eloquently laid out by Stan Greenberg in his book, The Two Americas, written just as the campaign got underway. Kerry’s campaign book, A Call To Service (disclosure: I had a hand in this little-read book) was heavily based on the very themes and analysis Tomasky talks about. And as Joe Klein details in his new book, Politics Lost, Kerry’s whole nomination campaign was set to revolve around the communitarian theme of “New American Patriotism” (a theme powerful enough that Wes Clark picked it up when Kerry discarded it), until the Shrum/Devine consultant team prevailed on the candidate to go with a more conventional programs-and-sound-bites-that-poll-well approach. Kerry won the nomination without the “common good” theme, but I’m not the only one who thinks he would have won the presidency if he had stuck to it. As Tomasky explains, there is tangibly a deep craving in the electorate for leadership that appeals to something other than naked self-interest and the competing claims of groups. And no matter who our nominee is in 2008, he or she should seize the opportunity to unite the party, and perhaps begin reuniting the country, with an appeal to the very impulses that make most of us progressives in the first place.

I don’t share the WaPo Hatred of some folks in the progressive blogosphere, partially because I don’t think hundreds of thousands of votes move towards the GOP upon every Fred Hiatt editorial, and partially because I grew up reading some really bad newspapers and appreciate the Post‘s general excellence.But I was bemused today at how totally the Post’s editors seem to have bought the “Fall of Rove/Major Shakeup” line about yesterday’s White House personnel announcements. “ROVE GIVES UP POLICY POST IN SHAKE-UP” screamed the banner in the print edition, with the subhed reading: “McClellan Resigns; New Chief of Staff Moves Quickly To Change West Wing.” Such drama! Such dynamism! Such aggressive steps by W.’s team to turn things around! The Post even managed to display a photo of Rove and McClellan–fellow losers in the “shake-up”–dismounting a plane in Alabama, with ol’ Karl looking mighty unhappy at his Paradise Lost-style expulsion from the sandbox of policymaking.I guess I wasn’t the only one who hooted in derision at the Post‘s bait-taking; if you look at the WaPo web page as of mid-day, the breathless tale of Josh Bolten striding like a colossus across the Washington landscape has been demoted to a minor sidebar to a more jaundiced analysis by Dan Balz.Actually, the Post identified the most tangible impact of the “shake-up” in yesterday’s edition, in a Business Section piece by Paul Blustein about U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman’s sudden shift from USTR to OMB:

By switching his chief trade negotiator yesterday, President Bush sent a gloomy signal to many trade experts and policymakers about the prospects for achieving significant gains in trade talks with foreign countries anytime soon….[T]he personnel change comes as global trade negotiations are in serious trouble, with a major deadline just weeks away. The loss of Portman leaves the talks without a chief U.S. negotiator whose genial manner, combined with his political skill and mastery of detail, has impressed counterparts from other nations.

To put it more bluntly, as a knowledgeable colleague of mine did this morning: “This means the Bush administration has shut down trade policy for the foreseeable future.”And for what? Well, according to Robert Novak’s column today, it’s all about getting a budget through the rebellious House Republican Caucus. Quoth the Prince of Darkness:

Control of the budget is necessary for Republicans to restore credibility, as signaled by the appointment of the highly regarded Rob Portman as budget director. Indeed, passing a budget will be Portman’s first task.

The funny thing about this story-line is that the current budget mess developed and blew up on the watch at OMB of the very Josh Bolten who is now being described as the administration’s new mover-and-shaker. Thus goes the latest game of musical chairs in Bushland.