Just in time to offset the negative buzz from the new Des Moines Register poll showing Barack Obama narrowly ahead of her in Iowa, two new polls came out today showing Hillary Clinton leading among likely caucus-goers in the state. A Pew/AP poll put her ahead of Obama 31%-26%, with Edwards trailing at 19%, and more strikingly, an Iowa State University poll had her with a comfortable 31%-24% lead over Edwards, with Obama third at 20%. Pew also showed Clinton as having robust leads in NH, SC and nationally.
But these two new polls of IA have to be reported with an asterisk: some of their data is a bit old. The ISU poll was conducted from November 6-18 (as compared with November 25-28 for the Register poll), while the Pew survey (see a discussion of the unusually long field range for this survey at Pollster.com) was run from November 7 until November 25.
On the Republican side, the ISU survey had Romney leading Huckabee 25%-22%, with the same asterisk. I’m sure that both Obama’s and Huckabee’s handlers will say the poll missed their candidates’ most recent surges.

We’re now one month out from the Iowa Caucuses, and it’s no longer possible to say it’s “too early” to get a handle on what may happen on January 3. That’s why yesterday’s new Des Moines Register poll of likely Democratic and Republican caucus-goers is worth a look. (Another reason is that Iowans pay a lot of attention to Caucus coverage by the Register; more than you might think in this post-print-media era. The Register‘s own candidate endorsements, likely to come out on the eve of the Caucuses, could actually matter, as evidenced by the boost the paper gave John Edwards in the Des Moines area in 2004).
The poll confirms Barack Obama (leading Clinton and Edwards 28-25-23) and Mike Huckabee (leading Mitt Romney 29-24) as the “candidates on the move” in Iowa. It also indicates that lower-tier candidates in both parties aren’t in a very good position to make a last-minute surge (among Democrats, Richardson’s stuck at 9% and Biden at 6%, and among Republicans, Giuliani, at 13%, is the only other double-digit candidate), at a time when caucus-goers are likely to begin firming up their preferences.
Typically, the Register isn’t very forthcoming in releasing internal poll findings, though sometimes they publish them later. According to a David Yepsen column, Obama’s now leading Clinton among women, and has apparently moved ahead of Edwards among those most likely to participate in the Caucuses. And another Register article tells us that on the Republican side, Romney’s more dependent than Huckabee on support from the younger voters who are traditionally least likely to show up.
Yepsen makes the obvious point that the unprecedented proximity of the Caucuses to the holidays could have an inhibiting effect on negative advertising. But the more salient fact is probably that a high percentage of Iowans will be spending a lot of time in front of the tube in the period between Christmas and January 3, and many will also be off work and at home to take or ignore campaign robo-calls.
Speaking of television, my favorite question in the Register poll asks likely Caucus-goers if they are “tempted” to stay home and watch the Kansas-Virginia Tech Orange Bowl game on the evening of January 3 instead of bundling up and discharging their civic obligations. Only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats report that they are struggling with this decision, which would be a huge factor if an Iowa team was playing in Miami. Maybe regional solidarity will convince a few Iowans to watch the Jayhawks play, and you have to figure that Gov. Chet Culver, a former Hokie football player, will be casting a few glances at the scoreboard. But overall, it shouldn’t matter much.

Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel have a L.A. Times op-ed “The Gentry Liberals,” arguing in essence that the Democratic Party is being taken over by wealthy liberal elitists who care little about the concerns of the working class. As the article’s subtitle states “They’re more concerned with global warming and gay rights than with lunch-pail joes.” Kotkin and Siegel explain it this way:

But what kind of liberalism is emerging as the dominant voice in the Democratic Party?
Well, it isn’t your father’s liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable public schools. It also invented Social Security and favored a strong foreign policy.
Today’s ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it “gentry liberalism.” It’s not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy — though it does pay lip service to them.
Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the “financialization” of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

The authors roll out some income by party-i.d.statistics that support their argument and note that “Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.” They also point out that Dems now get more than the GOP in financial contributions from the securities industry, including hedge fund managers. Their argument is somewhat undermined by the fact that no current Democratic presidential candidate can fairly be identified as the standard-bearer for “gentry liberalism.” All of the current Democratic field have strong cred with labor unions, and all are protectionist on trade to one degree or another. Even at the congressional level, the Dems who won Senate seats in ’06 are all strong protectionists. Gentry liberals have been around for a long time in the Democratic Party, but the evidence that they are “ascendant” in running the Party is pretty thin.
Siegel and Kotkin venture out on to even thinner ice in describing the role of the internet as a vehicle for “gentry liberalism”:

Gentry liberalism has established a strong presence on the Internet, where such websites as MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post are lavishly funded by well-heeled liberals. These and other sites generally focus on foreign policy, gay rights, abortion and other social issues, as well as the environment. Traditional middle-class concerns such as the unavailability of affordable housing, escalating college tuitions and the shrinking number of manufacturing jobs usually don’t rank as top concerns.

Here the authors overstate their case. The issues they cite, especially foreign policy, do have a significant impact on the quality of middle class life. I mean, hello, Iraq is kind of important to the middle class. And while both of those websites may not emphasize ‘lunchpail’ concerns as a central theme, they do run some articles on bread and butter issues of interest to working people. In addition, suggesting that HuffPo and MoveOn adequately represent the focus of liberal/progressive websites in general indicates that the authors’ net-surfing habits are a little on the narrow side.
Kotkin and Siegel do better when they turn their focus on the conflict between environmentalists and the economic interests of working people:

But gentry liberalism’s increasingly “green tint” distances it the furthest from the values and interests of the middle and working classes…The gentry liberal crusade to tighten U.S. environmental regulations to slow global warming could end up hurting middle- and working-class interests. U.S. industry needs time and incentives to develop new technologies to replace carbon-based energy. If it doesn’t get them, and an overly aggressive anti-carbon regime is instituted, the shift of manufacturing, energy and shipping jobs to developing countries with weak environmental laws and regulations could accelerate.
Ignoring these potential Third World environmental costs would result only in shifting the geography of greenhouse gas emissions without slowing global warming — and at a terrible cost to jobs in the U.S.

As the environmental crisis accelerates, so will the clamor for action. Democrats will be expected to provide the needed leadership to address global warming and our dependence on mid-east oil with policies that don’t decimate jobs in the process.
Environmental advocates and unions have engaged in conflicts over the employment effects of environmental reforms for decades. Timber workers, auto unions, oil industry employees and other workers have clashed with Greens over environmental reforms, and Democratic unity has too often suffered as a consequence. Environmentalists often argue that reforms they champion produce net job creation. But they miss a key distinction — workers affected by reforms need to know that jobs at an equivalent wage will be secure for them when the reforms are implemented. The smarter Democratic leaders are well-aware of this challenge. Making it policy should be a top priority for Democratic candidates at every level.

Aside from each candidate’s “electibility” as president, a related issue affecting Democratic presidential candidates for 2008 is how each would affect “down-ballot” races for Congress, governorships, and so on. At The New Republic today, Tom Schaller takes on the strong if under-documented belief that Hillary Clinton would be a “down-ballot” disaster for Democrats, particularly in red states or red regions.
As Schaller notes, this belief appears to be based mainly on polls that persistently show HRC with high “negatives,” reinforced by anecdotal evidence (which is everywhere) of the amazing, pathological intensity with which many conservatives hate her.

[W]hile Americans view Clinton about as favorably as they do her two chief rivals, Democrats think she is a better leader, Republicans think she’d make a worse leader, and a greater share of voters who do not approve of her actually disapprove of her–which sounds like a redundancy, but is not when you realize that many voters have neither a favorable nor unfavorable view of Obama or Edwards. If either of them wins the nomination, however, don’t doubt for a second that the Republican machine can’t or won’t ratchet up their negatives later.
Still, is there something unique about Clinton that could put other 2008 Democratic candidates at risk? The strongest claim to that is she’s an uncommonly unifying figure–for Republicans and the right. So while the intensity of Clinton hatred may not multiply a voter’s vote, it could motivate citizens to engage in other ways, such as donating to Republican candidates, walking precincts, or persuading their friends and co-workers to vote against Clinton and other Democrats.

Negative as well as positive enthusiasm towards candidates is often overrated, since “bonus votes” are not rewarded for the intensity of voter preferences. And as Schaller notes, Obama-hatred or Edwards-hatred might well emerge on the Right if either of those men won the nomination. But the anecdotal case you often hear about Clinton is that she is polarizing in an unbalanced way: her nomination would strongly motivate conservatives who think she’s a dedicated socialist and one-worlder, while discouraging progressives who think she’s a warmongering corporate puppet. (You even hear the reverse argument made about Edwards, i.e., that he’s usefully perceived by Republicans and independents as more “centrist” than he actually is).
Interesting as they are, such theories about HRC’s effect on the electorate would have more power if there was any objective evidence for them. So far, polls testing various Democratic candidates against Republican rivals in specific states (mainly those conducted by SurveyUSA) show her doing as well as or better than Obama and Edwards in most states, and doing quite well in red and purple states. To be a “drag” on the ticket down-ballot in a lot of states, you have to actually lose them, and lose them badly. To put it most simply, it’s hard to get too obsessed about the down-ballot “damage” that might be inflicted by a candidate who’s currently running four points ahead of Rudy Giuliani in Kentucky.

Janet Elder’s “On Polling “column at the Grey Lady has a cautionary comment on the pitfalls of recent horse-race poll reporting that should be of interest to readers and reporters alike, “When a Poll Changes the Way People Think About the Race.”
Also at The Times, Paul Krugman’s “Mandates and Mudslinging” column makes a persuasive case that Senator Obama needs to tweak his health care plan to make everyone pay into it and cover everyone and resist the temptation to use Republican arguments against his Democratic rivals.
Bob Moses has an Alternet post addressing a critical question for Democratic strategy “Have Democrats Already Lost Florida?”
The purpose-driven Hillary courts moderate evangelicals, and apparently shows how it’s done, according to Carla Marinucci’s San Francisco Chronicle report.
Chris Bowers has a pair of interesting articles up at Open Left, a report on a new poll of the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual constituency’s political views and a thoughtful look at endangered Democratic Senate seats.

So the big buzz in the progressive blogosphere yesterday and today is about Ben Smith’s story in The Politico revealing that Rudy Guliani billed a lot of travel and security expenses to the City of New York (processed through a vast array of minor agencies) for trips to the Hamptons that might have been associated with opportunities for Private Time with his then-girlfriend, later-wife, Judith Nathan.
You can read about this virtually anywhere (Josh Marshall has gone into major campaign mode on the subject, which is a clear sign the story has legs), but it’s important first to connect the dots. This is a classic example of a development that links a “personal” scandal involving a political candidate–in this case, Rudy’s semi-public adultery, not to mention his serial marriages, the last of which self-excommunicated him from the Catholic Church–with a legitimate public policy issue. It’s an even more lurid version of the “lying under oath” charge that converted many years of smoke about Bill Clinton’s sexual behavor into the fire that got him impeached.
In Rudy’s case, The Nexus between personal and public behavior is particularly strong because it touches on two of his major rationales for candidacy. The guy who ostensibly cleaned up the most corruption-laden and spending-addicted city in America appears to have corruptly spent public money to feather his own nest, so to speak. Moreover, there’s fresh speculation that his decision to site a doomed emergency management command post in the World Trade Center might have had more to do with sexual than with law enforcement logistics.
And then there’s the whole impact of the story on Rudy’s wife. I personally find the whole obsession Americans have about vetting the families of political candidates atavistic, distasteful, and irrelevant, and God alone could fairly compare the Giuliani family’s ethics to those of others. But the fact remains that Republican primary voters probably won’t react very well to information that seems to depict the Next First Lady of the United States as some sort of hoochie mama.
No matter how much of the details of the scandal turn out to be accurate, this story will likely unleash the hounds of hell on Rudy, precisely because the “personal” stories he’s so far brushed off just got very “political.” At this point, his Republican presidential rivals are leaving it alone, but that won’t last, and unless Giuliani comes up with a solid way to squelch the story, he’s in big trouble.

For those of you who missed last night’s YouTube/CNN Republican presidential candidate debate, you didn’t miss a whole lot, other than a predictable escalation of hostilities among Guiliani, Romney and Huckabee, and a few outbreaks of the humma-hummas that rival any stumbling and mumbling among the Democratic candidates on immigration. Huckabee seemed to do himself the most good, and that leads to the really important (if objectively superficial) development in the GOP race, nicely expressed by John McIntyre at RealClearPolitics:

What we have developing is Huckabee stepping in and filling the void in the GOP field that was available to Thompson in the summer – a void that his inept campaign has been unable to fill. So perhaps instead of the Tennessean sinking the Romney campaign it could very well be the Arkansan.
For the Romney campaign the silver lining in Huckabee’s move into the first tier — and it is not an unimportant silver lining — is that Huckabee has totally shaken up the expectations for Iowa on the GOP side. Because of this resetting of expectations in December, if Romney is able to hold off Huckabee in Iowa it will be a huge win for his campaign. A win that would allow the Romney campaign to get the kind of momentum they were looking for when they originally laid out their sling-shot strategy to the nomination. (Win Iowa, win New Hampshire, win Michigan, make it a two-person race against Giuliani, combine the early wins with Romney’s personal wealth to overwhelm Rudy).

I think McIntyre’s got his finger on how the Media Herd is likely to change the expectations game going into the Iowa Caucuses. With Huckabee getting all the buzz these days, Romney, despite his large early lead, his win in the State Republican Straw Poll, his substantial field operation, and his expenditure of a gazillion dollars, is now rapidly becoming the underdog in Iowa. Meanwhile, Huckabee, whose spending in Iowa is pretty much limited to the spare change Romney could find under the seat cushions of his campaign bus, is moving into a position where a second-place finish, which would have been deemed miraculous not long ago, could “finish” him as a realistic candidate for the nomination.
Hardly seems fair, but that’s how the game is played at present.

Most readers are probably aware that there has been a sustained, deliberate smear campaign aimed at Barack Obama over the last few months based on fabricated “information” that he’s a secret Muslim, and/or a graduate of a Muslim “madrassa” in Indonesia.
So it’s not a big surprise that the Washington Post published an article about this phenomenon. But the Post gave Perry Bacon, Jr.’s piece the following headline: “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.”
You don’t have to be a journalist to understand the two problematic words in this headline: “ties” implies there’s something to the idea that Obama’s got a Muslim background, and “rumors” sounds a lot more credible than “lies.”
And this is how “rumors” get started.

There’s a new example available of how different polls of the same category of voters on the same day and in the same place produce strikingly different results. Yesterday both CNN and Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research released polls of likely voters in the Florida GOP presidential primary, conducted over the same two-day period (November 25-26).
According to CNN, Rudy Giuliani has a huge lead in the Sunshine State, polling at 38%, with Mitt Romney at 17%, McCain and Thompson at 11%, and Mike Huckabee running fifth at 9%. According to Insider Advantage (per the Southern Political Report), the big story is that Huckabee’s “surge” isn’t limited to Iowa: he’s running second in FL at 17%, trailing Rudy at 26%, but leading McCain at 13%, Romney at 12% and Thompson at 9%.
The CNN poll has a margin of error of 5.5%, while Insider Advantage’s MoE is 3.5%. But somebody’s just getting it wrong.
BTW, the CNN/Insider Advantage Sunshine Competition continues tonight, as the former sponsors the YouTube GOP presidential debate from St. Petersberg at 8:00 EST, and the latter conducts a snap poll of Florida Republicans on “who won.”

There’s a long-simmering debate going on in progressive political circles about the legitimacy of faith-based political appeals, as reflected in a recent TRB column by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.
But concerns about the religious motivations of politicians aren’t limited to the Left. For one thing, there’s the drumbeat of conservative criticism of Mike Huckabee for espousing views on domestic issues characteristic of the Christian Left (sic!).
Huckabee’s not, it seems, the only major GOP figure that has been led astray into socialism and do-gooderism by Christianity. Check out this uintentionally hilarious post from Andy McCarthy at National Review‘s The Corner blog

When a politician who wants to be president of the United States adheres to them, I don’t see why we should hesitate to ask about what those beliefs are and why he thinks they are sensible. And when a politician holds himself out to be a person of deep religious belief, again I don’t see why we should not probe. I don’t think that’s hostility to religion; I think it’s common sense.
President Bush, for example, is a man of deep religious faith. Faith may be able to move mountains; but it can also substitute hope and blind conviction for experience and hard inquiry. In my observation, the president believes in democracy with a religious zeal that ignores the real limitations of democracy; he sincerely believes in the oneness and dignity of all human beings to a degree that makes him insensitive to the downsides of his proposed comprehensive immigration reform; he sincerely believes in our duty to help our fellow human beings in need with an ardor that makes him insensitive to the limitations of government (and, indeed, to the negative effects of public welfare on the individual). I could be wrong about this, but I perceive a connection between his religious convictions and the things I don’t like about his policies.

Jesus wept.