Media Matters has a zinger for NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd, noting his prediction last November that, if the Democrats won “control of Congress” and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) became speaker of the House, then President Bush’s “approval rating will be over 50 percent by the Fourth of July next year.”
Well, Independence Day has come and gone, and Bush’s approval ratings have tanked way below 50 percent. More accurately, the Media Matters post, artfully flagged by MissLaura at Kos, cites a recent analysis of national polls conducted 6/11 to 28 pegging Bush’s average approval rating at 30.5 percent.
Just about every journalist who comments on politics for any length of time gets burned for making a silly prediction at some point, and that may be as true for netroots writers as well as the MSM over time. But unlike most political bloggers, the big networks, rags and mags pundits rarely own up or acknowledge their gullibility for GOP spin. Worse, they don’t give the bloggers with better track records any cred for getting it right. A little less hubris and a little more humility would serve us all well.
This incident not only shows the kind of blunders too often made by MSM pundits who have been fed GOP spin; it also shows the importance of progressive bloggers in restoring political balance. What has changed is that the MSM will be more closely monitored from now on — and that’s good for everyone.

For political types, Independence Day is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, it’s a day for national unity. Regardless of party or ideology, Americans generally take some time on the 4th to listen to the same Sousa marches, display the same flag, eat the same grilled food, and mingle at parades and parks and sporting venues, rubbing shoulders with people we might regard, in a different context, as warmongering fascists or baby-killing moral relativists. On the other hand, it’s also always been a day for politicians to make speeches and hold rallies. On this particular Independence Day, for example, many Iowans won’t be able to go outdoors without running into a presidential candidate.
On another level, the paradox is The Point. Whatever your views on the fundamental meaning of The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, or the American Experience, the 4th is one day when we can all reflect, talk and even argue about the relevance of those events to the contemporary challenges facing this country. It’s hard today for Republicans to regard Democrats as flag-despising Francophile elitists. And it’s hard today as well for Democrats to view Republicans as plotting to repeal the Bill of Rights. All our passionate arguments are a bit constrained by the rituals of Independent Day. You don’t have to be a squishy, David-Broder-style antipartisan to enjoy that for 24 hours. Tomorrow we take up the cudgels again, reinvigorated by this reconnection with the American traditions we champion in parades, rallies and songs. I personally have little doubt Our Side is truly in synch with those traditions, but don’t mind being forced to think about it more deeply once a year, when we all wear the same colors.

How broad is the outrage over President Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence? And is the outrage likely to last through November ’08?
No way to gauge the intensity fade factor at this juncture. But SurveyUSA has a new interactive voice response poll conducted on July 2nd, measuring how respondents feel about Libby’s free ride, and Pollster.com‘s Charles has an analysis. He reports that of 825 respondents familiar with the Libby case and presidential commutation,

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There are a ton of stories today about the travails of John McCain’s presidential campaign. He’s sinking in the polls almost everywhere; the second quarter fundraising haul is going to look bad; he’s down to $2 million in cash; and now he’s laying off sizable numbers of staff, asking others to work for less or for nothing, and placing his fundraisers on a strict commission-pay diet.
I’m sure many readers have at some point had the experience of working or volunteering for a doomed political campaign. It’s a bit like watching the slow death of a family member, except that it’s very public. McCain’s campaign has all the classic signs of the long plunge before the final crash, including the brave official statements of eternal optmism contrasted with blind quotes from campaign sources admitting failure, and the money-driven decisions that just don’t make sense as anything other than dire damage control (e.g., McCain is said to be now concentrating on the early states, beginning with Iowa; yet he laid off half his Iowa staff yesterday). The campaign does have the option of extending the agony by accepting public matching funds (sadly, a sign of terrible weakness in this cash-drenched cycle). But as Sammy Youngman points out in The Hill, the spending restrictions that would come with that decision would make it largely self-defeating.
McCain’s downward trajectory hasn’t reached the point where craziness and desperation break out. I was involved in one campaign down in Georgia where the campaign manager, convinced one last ad buy could stop the bleeding, accepted some big checks post-dated until after election day. It didn’t work, of course, and the donors stopped payment on their checks, leaving the candidate with a large personal debt and the campaign manager out of politics.
But strange turnarounds have been known to happen. The absolute worst campaign atmosphere I’ve ever personally witnessed was during a trip to New Hampshire at the beginning of December of 2003, when I spent a weekend hanging out with friends in John Kerry’s operation. The smell of death was everywhere. Kerry was not only running far behind Howard Dean in the Granite State; the Doctor was trouncing him in polls in Massachusetts. I had lunch with some young Kerry staffers, and their supervisor, a friend of mine, had to warn me to stay upbeat. It was exactly like being told “not to upset the kids” during some family tragedy. Sure, everyone knew Kerry had thrown everything into Iowa in a last-ditch effort to jump-start the campaign there, but it seemed at the time like a desperate fantasy. Just a few weeks later, of course, Kerry won Iowa, then won New Hampshire, and was off to the nomination.
There’s nothing about John McCain’s candidacy that would lend much hope for that kind of miracle. His whole gambit of making himself acceptable and then inevitable to a hostile conservative base has been blown up by the immigration fiasco and by the campaign’s very weakness. Maybe he’ll grimly hold on, straining for oxygen as the field winnows out the Tommy Thompsons and the Sam Brownbacks, and praying for a major gaffe by Giuliani or Romney or that other Thompson. Maybe his underpaid and overworked staff will hang on as well, like gamblers so invested in the game that they don’t think twice about maxing out the credit cards and returning to the table with a sick grin.
But with speculation rampant (e.g., at The Corner) about the shape of the “post-McCain” Republican field, it can’t be much fun to be aboard the Straight Talk Express these days.

Guy T Saperstein, a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation, sees a potent wedge issue for Dems opening up in the void left by Republican inaction on key safety and security concerns. Saperstein’s just-posted Alternet article “Fighting the War on Terror: Democratic Opportunity, Republican Illusion” redefines the challenge facing Democrats and rolls out a credible action agenda.
Saperstein backs his case with a generous serving of poll data underscoring the Democratic opportunity, but also warning that Dems have thus far failed to claim ownership of an issue that is almost being handed to them. Saperstein notes for example:

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In light of the president’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, I wanted to quote briefly from an AP story about the administration’s latest crime-fighting initiative, dated June 17:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals.
The Justice Department is offering the plan as an opening salvo in a larger debate about whether sentences for crack cocaine are unfairly harsh and racially discriminatory.
Republicans are seizing the administration’s crackdown, packaged in legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.

As Republicans like to say in defense of the mindless, “tough” sentencing policies that have represented virtually their only criminal justice strategy in recent decades: “You do the crime, you do the time.” But I guess that depends on who you are.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has quite naturally created a discussion of parallels between the former governor of Massachussetts, who’s the first Mormon to run for president, and John F. Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts who was the first Catholic to be elected president. According to the conventional wisdom, JFK’s famous Q&A session with a panel of Protestant clergymen in Houston in 1960 took religion off the table in that campaign. And Romney has often been urged to do something similar. Indeed, Mitt’s whole campaign to become the True Conservative Candidate has probably come down to a Tale of Two Kennedys: overcoming the socially liberal positions he took when running against Ted Kennedy in 1994, and seizing JFK’s mantle as a pioneer who convinced skeptics to accept his specific faith as irrelevant to his candidacy.
Polls have shown significant but declining resistance to the idea of a Mormon President, and Romney has done pretty well in gaining the support of the conservative evangelical Protestants thought to be most concerned about Mormonism. And in fact, his candidacy is providing a fascinating test of the evolution of conservative evangelical thinking. There’s quite a disconnect between the vast gap separating evangelicals and Mormons theologically, and their consanguinity on many cultural and political issues–not to mention the natural admiration of evangelicals for the Godly Commonwealth the LDS Church has built in Utah (I first thought about this when a member of my own extended family, a decades-long Southern Baptist Deacon and inveterate world traveler, came back from a visit to Salt Lake City more enthused than he’d ever seemed after a road trip. “It’s so clean!” he kept saying).
But still, there are lingering doubts among some conservative Christians about Romney and Mormonism, and via Alan Wolfe, it’s interesting to learn that at least one highly influential Christian Right figure has suggested that anti-Mormonism is a legitimate reason for rejecting Mitt.
That figure is Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran-turned-Catholic-priest whose periodical, First Things, has become the most intellectually respectable and ecumenical Christian Right forum. Fr. Neuhaus was the first to popularize, back in his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, the idea that church-state separation represents a secularist assault against the religious liberties of American Christians, now a gospel truth among religious conservatives. He’s also willing to throw bombs, as in the 1996 First Things symposium wherein he roiled conservative circles with his incendiary proposition that “the current regime” in America had forfeited the legitimacy to govern, and the allegiance of its citizens, by its tolerance of legalized abortion and gay rights.
So Neuhaus’ take on Romney and JFK as religio-political pioneers is of more than passing interest.
Contra the conventional wisdom that Kennedy took a candidate’s religious affiliation permanently off the table with his Houston encounter, Neuhaus observes (correctly, if you look at the vast pro-Democratic swing among Catholic voters in 1960, which clearly outmatched any anti-Catholic backlash) that JFK’s Catholicism actually elected him president.
More importantly, Neuhaus argues that a candidate’s religion can and should still matter, and not because he or she is suspected of conflicting loyalties between church and state:

The question is not whether, as president, Mr. Romney would take orders from Salt Lake City. I doubt whether many people think he would. The questions are: Would a Mormon as president of the United States give greater credibility and prestige to Mormonism? The answer is almost certainly yes. Would it therefore help advance the missionary goals of what many view as a false religion? The answer is almost certainly yes. Is it legitimate for those Americans to take these questions into account in voting for a presidential nominee or candidate? The answer is certainly yes.

So according to Neuhaus, it doesn’t matter if Mitt emulates Kennedy by arranging some big speech or forum where he defangs his faith or, like JFK, describes it as “an accident of birth.” If you don’t like Mormonism, and don’t want to see it grow (and it certainly is growing–by some estimates, more than any religious denomination on earth), it’s fine to vote against Mitt Romney.
It will be interesting and important to see if Neuhaus’ advice gets picked up elsewhere on the Christian Right, where Romney is in a white-knuckle competition for support with Fred Thompson and perhaps Mike Huckabee. If it does, not only is Mitt in trouble, but the common assumption that a candidate’s religious affliliation doesn’t much matter any more will take a big and dangerous hit.

It’s safe to say that the character and relative importance of self-described independent voters is one of those topics that endlessly divide political junkies. You hear the wildest array of assertions about indies: they’re the Keys to the Kingdom; they’re irrelevant; they’re confused and conflicted; they’re sophisticated; they’re centrists; they’re a radical fringe; they actually behave just like partisans; they’re the nucleus of a potential third party; they vote; they don’t vote, and so on and so forth, world without end.
Sunday’s Washington Post featured a new survey on independents, done in conjunction with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, and it helps sort through the partial truths in many of these commonly heard descriptions. Pace Matt Yglesias, who dismissed the survey as uninteresting due to the bland generalities in the accompanying cover story, I think it’s rewarding once you drill down a bit.
You should read the whole, elaborate thing, but the great utility of this survey is its typology of independents, who are neatly divided into five “D’s”: Disengaged (24%), Disguised Partisans (24%), Deliberators (18%), Disillusioned (18%) and Dislocated (16%).
The first two categories are self-explanatory. Deliberators are the classic, true swing voters, likely to vote, open to persuasion, and fond of bipartisanship. The Disillusioned are angry at both parties, require persuasion or mobilization to vote, and are the best third-party bait. And the Dislocated are people with well-defined views that straddle party lines (typically social liberals and fiscal conservatives, though some are the opposite).
As a group, indies currently lean Democratic, and voted that way in 2006; they are most in line with Democrats in their disdain for the Iraq War and their interest in issues like health care (they are also significantly closer to Democrats than Republicans on every question dealing with national security). Demographically, they are fairly typical of voters at large, though they tend to be less religious. Unsurprisingly, they are more open to third-party candidacies than regular partisans, though they are not overwhelmingly vibrating at the idea of a Bloomberg presidential run.
In terms of the size of the independent sector, this poll shows 29% of adults identifying as indies, a bit lower than in most recent polls, but closer to the 27% of actual voters who identified that way in the 2006 exit polls. Since nearly half of the indies in the Post-Kaiser-Harvard survey are either likely non-voters or are actually partisan, we’re talking about something on the order of 15% of the electorate that’s truly independent–not a giant segment, but potentially decisive nonetheless.
Though the Post analysis doesn’t get much into the implications of the survey for 2008, the typology suggests a Democratic strategy of attracting the Disillusioned with a strong “change” message; connecting with the Dislocated through sharp contrasts with Republican social conservatism while maintaining fiscal credibility; and winning Deliberators with superior policy ideas for solving big problems, if possible across party lines.
At present, there’s nothing at all about such a strategy that makes it difficult to reconcile with efforts needed to mobilize a highly motivated and partisan Democratic base. But as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira pointed out in their recent American Prospect piece on the Democratic coaliton (“Back To the Future”), there may be significant long-range tensions if Democrats regain power and begin to rub many indies the wrong way with their deployment of government power.
Overall, the survey casts a lot of light on some of the more outlandish claims about indies. They are not frauds or irrelevant, to be sure, but they are also not a centrist monolith that Democrats can win simply by moving to the right on this or that issue. As of this moment, it appears the main indie worry about Democrats is not that they are too dovish on national security, but that they are too reckless fiscally and too much a part of the misgoverning status quo. But by definition, independents are fluid politically, and bear a lot of watching in the months and years to come.

The best time for bridge-building being the weeks after a presidential election, now is not a good time to make nice toward Republicans. All good Dems should instead be creatively visualizing an ’08 landslide of historic proportions, after which we will know just how much opposition support is needed.
Nonetheless, a couple of impressively-credentialed Big Thinkers over at Foreign Policy, Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, have an article “Grand Strategy for a Divided America” that merits a thoughtful read by Dems concerned with post-election strategy. They are especially-sharp on defining the ideological divisions between the parties. For example:

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So exactly how big a fiasco has the immigration reform bill been for the Republican Party?
We already know that the saga has been a disaster for the GOPers who supported the “comprehensive” effort. Moreover, according to most of the right-wing accounts I’ve been reading, the Republican Party isn’t getting much credit for finally rejecting the bill in the Senate. “Amnesty” opponents are congratulating each other for bringing their leaders to heel, with at best patronizing glad-you-turned-out-to-be-gutless expressions of appreciation for the flip-floppers, and probably fantasies about future grassroots efforts to get the compassion out of conservatism.
But as a new USA Today/Gallup poll illustrates, the Bush-Rove strategy of using immigration reform to consolidate a Republican majority among Hispanic Americans is completely in ruins. Only 11 percent of Hispanics now identify as Republicans, as compared with 27 percent for the general public. With leaners assigned, the poll shows 58 percent of Hispanics as Democrats, 22 percent as independents, and 20 percent as Republicans (among all voters, the numbers with leaners assigned are 53 percent Democrats, 9 percent independents, and 37 percent Republicans). If, as Karl Rove long believed, Hispanics have become the key swing voter category for the future, they ain’t swinging right for the GOP.
In a nice illustration of the overall futility of the Bush-led immigration reform drive, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Non-Hispanic Whites have almost identical, and quite negative, feelings about “the government’s recent efforts to deal with illegal immigration in the U.S.”
On the other hand, and this could be important down the road, the USA Today-Gallup survey showed that overall hostility to levels of immigration is actually quite a bit lower today than in the 1993-95 period, and in the immediate wake of 9/11. But I don’t think this is going to matter a lot in 2008.
One other quick note: this poll illustrated Hillary Clinton’s very high popularity levels among Hispanics, providing one reason for her consistently robust poll numbers among Democrats generally despite the loss of a very big chunk of her original African-American support to Barack Obama. At present, she is supported by an impressive 59 percent of Hispanic Democrats, with Obama at 13 percent, fellow-Hispanic Bill Richardson at 11 percent, John Edwards at 7 percent, and the rest scattered over the remainder of the field.