Down in Australia, the Labor Party has won a decisive victory over the Liberal/National Coalition that previously ruled the country, and Kevin Rudd will replace John Howard as Prime Minister. Having spent some time hanging out with Australian (and New Zealand) Labor folk last year, I strongly believe that they deserve their electoral good fortune, and will provide a clear breath of fresh air for their country.
Howard has been one of the longest-reigning conservative leaders in the world. He will not be missed.

Michael Kinsley has one of the better msm op-eds of the ’08 campaign this far, “Who Needs Experience?,” arguing that Senator Clinton goofed big time in trying to play the ‘experience’ card with a relatively-weak hand. Not that Senator Clinton doesn’t have good experience on her vita. But, saying “We can’t afford on-the-job training for our next president” was probably asking for trouble. As Kinsley explains in his WaPo/LaTimes column:

With her “on-the-job training” jab, Clinton was clearly referring to work experience. But there is also life experience. Being first lady is sort of half job and half life but good experience in either case.
She has to be careful about making a lot of this. Many people resent her using her position as first lady to take what they see as a shortcut to elective office. More profoundly, some people see her as having used her marriage as a shortcut to feminism. And the specter of dynasty hangs unattractively over her presidential ambitions. In an odd way, the deep unpopularity of George W. Bush has hurt Hillary Clinton, as people think: “Enough with relatives already.”

Kinsley may be on to something here. NH and IA voters sometimes take pride in being contrarians, and such bluster can be made to look really bad in attack ads. Obama has already responded to Senator Clinton’s remark with a pretty good zinger — “My understanding is that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. I don’t know exactly what experience she’s claiming.”
In addition, Edwards and the other Democratic candidates have equally/more impressive life and professional experience as Clinton. This is especially true for the second-tier candidates, Richardson, Dodd, Biden and Kucinich. Clinton would be wiser not to invite comparison of experience with any of the Democratic field. Her strong cards are an ability to talk about the issues with clarity and her portfolio of generally solid policies. To get back on game, she needs to work a little harder to convince voters that she is about the future, not the past. Otherwise, it’s the Clinton years were OK, but ‘been there, done that.’

In just a few hours polls will be opening in Australia for its general election. For some time now, Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party has been favored to ouster John Howard’s long-reigning conservative Coalition party. But on the eve of the elections, at least one poll shows the race too close to call.
One thing’s for sure: turnout will be at levels Americans can barely imagine; Australia’s compulsory voting system assures that.
We’ll have more on the Aussie elections when the results become clear.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for a lot of things that have nothing to do with politics, and thus have no place here. But on the political front, I am thankful that the Great Nominating Contest Calendar Dance of 2007 appears to have ended, with Michigan’s primary being set for January 15, and New Hampshire’s for January 8. The specter of NH and then IA moving up into December has finally been banished.
That means people like me don’t have to completely recalibrate many months of speculation about the dynamics of the nominating process. And more importantly, it means a lot of poorly paid campaign staffers and unpaid volunteers will get to have some sort of holiday season.

Tired of generational analysis of politics? You know, the assumption that this or that pol represents the world-view and/or aspirations of the age cohort into which he or she was born. If so, you’ll love this comment from Dana Goldstein at TAPPED:

Sure, the experience of living through Vietnam and the student protest movement indelibly shaped politicians like Clinton and Mitt Romney. But every generation has its liberals and its conservatives, its hopeful optimists and its hard-nosed power brokers, its intellectuals and its businesspeople. Furthermore, a “generation” is almost impossible to define in any self-contained way.

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Makes abundant good sense, eh? It’s sort of like the reason I’ve always had a hard time taking astrology seriously (apologies if I offend any astrology fans here). I mean, really, I’m supposed to believe I have more in common with a Bangladeshi hemp farmer who happens to be a Virgo than with, say, my Sagittarian father? To a lesser but still significant extent, I have the same objection to generational typecasting.
Moreover, Dana’s right: generational definitions are a little squishy. She notes that Barack Obama, the purported avatar of post-baby-boom politics, is himself a baby boomer, having been born in 1961. When the term “baby boom generation” first came into use, in the 1960s, it was applied to people born immediately after World War II, from 1946 to 1952. At some point it was extended to 1960. Now, apparently, the line between baby boomers and Gen Xers is 1964.
So maybe we need to start defining Barack Obama as a “baby boomer with X rising.” Or better yet, find another way to describe him altogether.

The GOP version of the Washington Post/ABC poll of Iowa is now out, and the storyline is all about Mike Huckabee.
Mike’s now within the margin of error of Romney in this poll (28%-24%). The other candidates are pretty much where they were back in July. More importantly, Huckabee’s base of support seems a lot firmer than Romney’s, as Gary Langer’s analysis for ABC points out:

[A]mong likely caucus-goers who are “very enthusiastic” about their choice, Huckabee leads Romney by 37-25 percent. Among those who say they’ve definitely made up their minds, 34 percent support Huckabee, 24 percent Romney. That makes for a better turnout profile for Huckabee.

This may matter a lot, because this and previous polls consistently show less enthusiasm among Republicans than Democrats in Iowa, which (along with strong indications that independents are likely to participate on the Democratic side) could mean a relatively low turnout.
One factor that doesn’t matter for the GOP is second-choice preferences. Unlike the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, the presidential segment of the Republican Caucuses is a straight straw poll, without all the thresholds and preference reassignments that make the Dem Caucuses so unpredictable. That’s too bad for Huckabee, since every other candidate would love to see him derail Romney in IA. You do have to wonder if they will avoid attacking Huckabee in Iowa between now and January 3, against the wishes of the conservative opinion-leaders who can’t stand him and are beginning to worry that an IA win could catapult him into serious contention down the road.

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.