The Bush Effect

GOP getting crushed in polls, key races
By JIM VANDEHEI & DAVID PAUL KUHN


John McCain is planning to run as a different kind of Republican. But being any kind of Republican seems like some sort of death sentence these days.

In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.

At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.

In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP — the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.

“The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.

With an environment so toxic, does McCain have even a chance of winning in November?

The McCain camp thinks so — but only if he sands down the “R” next to his name. “Nobody ever gets elected president by running on their party label,” said Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser. “The character, the qualities, the independence — that certainly allows him to rise over the party label. It is more important than usual to rise above the party label.”

This statement seems a little at odds with the current McCain strategy. The presumptive GOP nominee has spent much of the recent campaign fastening himself to the traditional Republican brand and even to Bush himself. McCain’s views on the war, the overall economy (especially supporting the Bush tax cuts he previously opposed), the mortgage crisis and judicial appointments are hardly the stuff of a new kind of Republicanism.

McCain risks looking inauthentic and conventional to both camps if he simply solidifies his standing with conservatives and then races back to the middle to appeal to swing voters.

For now, Republicans are heartened by how well McCain sometimes does in head-to-head polling with Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee. But it’s silly to watch those numbers: They fluctuate and reflect nothing more than momentary feelings about the candidates, and they come at a time when public attention is fixed on the final rounds of the Democratic slugfest.

Right now, most voters with any familiarity with McCain probably know him as a war hero, somewhat of a maverick in the Senate and a pretty affable candidate. Let’s see how they view McCain after Democrats use their decisive money advantage to paint him as a much-older Bush clone who loves an unpopular war and knows little about the economy.

Democrats provided us a look at their polling data from 17 swing states — data they’re using to craft new attacks on McCain as Bush 44. The Democratic National Committee polling, according to a memo it provided, has two-thirds of swing voters expecting McCain to pursue policies very similar to Bush’s. The voters’ top three concerns about McCain: his age, his support for the war and his similarities to Bush.

The latest DNC ad ties two of the three together, slamming McCain over the war and showing a picture of him embracing Bush. Lots more to come on that front, DNC officials said. The DNC will leave the age issue alone for now.

Many top Republicans seem heartened by Obama’s likely victory on the Democratic side. They say they’re confident Obama will pay a big price for his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the persistent questions about his patriotism and his inability to connect with working-class whites in swing states.

These are all big problems for Obama. But he will have a massive cash advantage when it comes time to fight back, and the Republican National Committee’s fundraising edge over the DNC won’t be enough to overcome it. Consider this fact: Since the beginning of last year, Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and the DNC have raised $460 million total — about $200 million more than what McCain, Mitt Romney and the RNC raised together in the same time span.

Rich liberals operating outside the traditional fundraising structure are also in private talks to vastly outspend the GOP on issue ads and voter mobilization efforts.

Still, McCain’s biggest problem is the toxic political atmosphere for his party.

It’s so toxic, some Republicans are pointing to 1976 as a favorable historical comparison. That was the year Gerald Ford ran in the dark shadows of Watergate and lost to Jimmy Carter. Says Dick Wadhams, the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party: “When voters really homed in on the choice between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and what each stood for, Gerald Ford almost won the election despite this horrible environment.”

Almost.

Pander Bear

Pandering vs. Presidential by Byron Williams

Whether your heart lies with Clinton or Obama your head has to know tonight was a night for the junior senator from Illinois. Tonight, Monday Night Football's Dandy Don Meredith returned for a one night performance: "Turn out the lights, the party's over, they all say good things must end."

After enduring the worst period of his presidential campaign, Obama gave uncommitted superdelegates who have been sitting on the fence at least a strong reason to inch toward his direction.

By increasing his delegate and popular vote lead, tomorrow morning brings with it a pressure on Clinton to give some consideration for what is best for the Democratic Party beyond making her nom du famille synonymous with the donkey.

She can pledge to the Indiana faithful to press on, but the numbers don't lie. Though she has vowed to take her campaign to West Virginia and Kentucky, the body language of Clinton, her husband, and daughter Chelsea suggests tonight was a campaign eulogy.

The epitaph on the Indiana and North Carolina primaries could very simply read: "Pandering versus Presidential."

The Jeremiah Wright fiasco clearly knocked Obama off of his white charger of change. But its quite possible Clinton herself came to his rescue by pandering to the public.

Seizing on astronomical gas prices that have caused pain for many Americans, she offered a policy that no reputable economist in the country could support. Moreover, it was a policy that had no feasible way of passing this summer. She did not have the votes in Congress nor a president waiting to sign it. So it was nothing more than rhetorical pandering of the highest order.

Obama took the principled stand by opposing it. It was a substantive issue, offering the road less traveled. It was manna from heaven. Obama was presented with an opportunity to talk about something other than Jeremiah Wright, look presidential, while giving the American people a glance at his leadership style.

Maybe we just became privy to the change that has been promised throughout his campaign -- to disagree with your opponent's ideas while always affirming their humanity.

Meanwhile, Clinton surrogates, in particular James Carville, have reminded many that the win-at-all-cost style, even if it includes crass invectives toward a member of your own party and most likely the presidential nominee, is not beyond the pale.

But other than a farewell tour through West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon and Montana, the race is over. There is no longer any rationale to hammer Obama with negative ads that ultimately benefit McCain.

The person most likely happiest about tonight's outcome is Democratic Party chair, Howard Dean. The results from Indiana and North Carolina primaries lessen the importance of Michigan and Florida thereby making a compromise more likely and less acrimonious.

But it's time for primary redemption within the Democratic Party -- to put aside intramural rivalries in order to prepare for the major intercollegiate event in the fall.

It is not the time for Obama supporters put on the suit of arrogance, demanding Clinton's immediate withdrawal. Magnanimity is as important for the winner, if not more so, as it is for the loser.

An "October surprise" in May notwithstanding, we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, but it is still a long way from November. Tonight, in the words of Winston Churchill, "is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The Intelligence of the Immigration Debate

Anyone else find it funny that the side that wants to deport all illegals and force them to learn english, cannot spell correctly in english themselves? Irony...nice.

Late Night Political Joke Roundup

"MSNBC is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is asking boaters to be on the lookout for terrorists in small boats trying to detonate a nuclear bomb. Fifteen billion dollars a year for Homeland Security and all they can do is come up with three drunks on a Wave Runner?"
---Jay Leno
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"David Blaine today broke the world record for holding his breath, on Oprah---17 minutes, four seconds. Blaine has now frozen himself, he's starved himself, he's gone without sleep for weeks, and deprived himself of oxygen. Today, Dick Cheney said, 'See, it's not torture. It's magic.'"
---Jimmy Kimmel
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"Earlier today, Chinese officials held a ceremony to announce that it's exactly one hundred days until the summer Olympics, and they’re working hard to clean up Beijing’s pollution. Unfortunately, they had to cut the ceremony short because the air caught on fire."
---Conan O'Brien
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"There is one man who has a solution [to gas prices]. John McCain...presented his proposal. He says that over the summer we should have a 'Gas Tax Holiday.' For summer drivers, the 18-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax---he wants that lifted over the summer. Or as it used to be called, 'Grandpa is giving you $5.'"
---Bill Maher
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Bill O'Reilly clip: What kind of judgment allows a sitting senator to attend a church that radical? Why is Barack Obama continuing to go to that church?
Sean Hannity clip: He stayed in the church for 20 years. I just don’t know how you could sit there for 20 years. Let's say he went to the church ten years and then left the church. I think people would've said, 'All right, he was showing better judgment.'
Stephen Colbert: Exactly! When you see or hear things that are bad or going on in your church, you get up and you walk out. That's what Catholics like me and Papa Bear and Sean Hannity understand. You leave that church!! Unless it's, y'know, widespread decades-long rumors of sexual abuse. In that case you gotta give it time. ... The point is, all any Catholic pundits and Catholic politicians who may be criticizing Obama are saying is: Do as we say, not as we didn’t!
---The Colbert Report

Say What You Really Think

What Obama wishes he could say
By JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI

Thrown off his game by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, Barack Obama’s strongest answer to Hillary Rodham Clinton is one he won’t give: Senator, do you really want to get in a contest with me over who has more unsavory personal associations?

For all the coverage about the rising heat between Clinton and Obama, this year’s nomination race still is a mild affair by historical standards — restrained by a powerful sense on both sides that there are lots of things they could say but shouldn’t.

There is one theme, however, that runs through not-for-attribution conversations with both sides: Each candidate thinks the other has unmitigated gall.

The Clintons, to hear associates tell it, are more contemptuous than they ever acknowledge publicly about what they believe is Obama’s breathtaking arrogance — the way he blithely dismisses the ideological showdowns and policy achievements of the 1990s as “old politics,” the way he thinks his thin résumé leaves him qualified to lead the country. Lately, the contempt level on the Obama side toward his rivals likewise has been soaring.

More precisely, things that many people around the candidate have always believed about the Clintons — about their trail of controversies, about their style of politics — have in recent weeks seemed much more relevant. That’s made the temptation to say them in a more public fashion more powerful.

A couple weeks ago, we wrote a column about what Clinton would say if she said what she really thought.

Fairness dictates that we take a crack at the other side of the question: What arguments has Obama taken off the table, even though he thinks they are true?

Like the earlier column, sourcing on this one must stay pretty opaque. And like the earlier column, this one is intended as a reflection, not a validation, of the views expressed in a collection of not-for-attribution conversations with political associates about the behind-the-scenes thinking of the Obama camp.

The one line from the what-Clinton-thinks column that most agitated Obama supporters was our assertion that Clinton, for better or worse, was a known commodity. Her “baggage” has already been “rummaged through.”

All manner of Clinton controversies, Obama partisans argue, have not been fully ventilated.

This includes old issues, like Hillary Clinton’s legal career, which includes lots of cases that never got much public attention even during the Whitewater era.

It also includes new ones, like recent stories raising questions about the web of personal and financial associations around Bill Clinton. Since leaving the presidency, he has traveled the globe to exotic places and with sometimes exotic characters, raising money for projects such as his foundation and presidential library and making himself a very wealthy man.

Which gets us back to gall. In the fantasies of some of his high-level supporters, Obama would peel off the tape to say something like this:

You want to talk hypocrisy? How about piously criticizing me for Jeremiah Wright when you have a trail of associations that includes golden oldies like Webb Hubbell? (‘90s flashback: He was one of Hillary Clinton’s legal partners and closest friends, whom she installed in a top Justice Department job before prosecutors sent him to prison.) It also includes modern hits like Frank Giustra. (In case you missed it: There was a January New York Times story, which did not get the attention the reporting deserved, highlighting how this Canadian tycoon and major Bill Clinton benefactor was using his ties to the ex-president to win business with a ruthless dictatorship in Khazakstan.)

Obama has never pressed Clinton to talk about Marc Rich, even though the former fugitive financier who won a controversial pardon from Bill Clinton gave money to her first Senate campaign.

He has never mentioned her brothers, even though Hugh and Tony Rodham once defied Bill Clinton’s own top foreign policy advisers by entering into a strange investment in hazelnuts in the former Soviet republic of Georgia (they later dropped the deal) and Hugh Rodham took large cash payments for trying to broker presidential pardons.

Obama is likewise galled to be lectured by Clinton for not being sufficiently committed to universal health coverage. Why is it, his team asks, that Democrats have done so little to advance a long-time progressive goal for the past 15 years? The answer has everything to do with Hillary Clinton’s misjudgments when she was leading the reform effort in 1993 and 1994.

Most irritating of all to Obama partisans is what they see as her latest pose: that she is selflessly staying in the race despite the long odds against her because of devotion to the Democratic Party and the belief that she is a more appealing general election candidate.

It is an article of faith among most people around Obama that the Clintons were a disaster for the party throughout the 1990s. When Bill Clinton came to town in 1993, Democrats were a congressional majority, with 258 seats in the House. When he left in 2001, they were a minority with 46 fewer seats. There were 30 Democratic governors when he arrived, 21 10 years later.

As for electability, the Obama side believes — for all his trouble winning lower-income whites in recent primaries — that it is ludicrous to believe she is the stronger candidate in the fall.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found nearly 60 percent of voters think Clinton is dishonest. Think about that: Only four in 10 voters do not think she lies when she needs to. A majority hold an unfavorable view of her.

Will those numbers improve if she wins the nomination and Republicans resurrect the scandals, the Bill Clinton sexual affairs and her Bosnia fib with the same intensity they brought to the Wright uproar? Unthinkable.

Now that the Democratic superdelegates are facing their moment of decision in this close race, you might think it would be time for politesse to give way to an unvarnished discussion about both candidates' real strengths and liabilities.

The Obama side is frustrated with the news media for not carrying more of its argument. His operatives thought a Newsday story looking exhaustively at her legal career — including the revelation that as a young lawyer she attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old rape victim — would provoke a herd of other coverage. It did not happen.

If he really wanted, Obama could generate all the coverage he wanted about Clinton’s past by leveling accusations in his own words. But that is not going to happen.

Politically, he correctly believes that he would be called out as a hypocrite if he practiced the conventional art of attack politics after preaching against it.

And, to view his motives in the best light — a benefit of the doubt extended by his own team — he believes this campaign would also undermine his governing strategy if elected. He has told associates it would be impossible to win support for a progressive agenda unless he assumes the presidency as a uniting figure who can transcend the personality-obsessed brand of combat that has dominated Washington for the past generation.

“I told this to my team, you know, we are starting to sound like the other folks, we are starting to run the same negative stuff,” he told a crowd in North Carolina this week. “It shows that none of us are immune from this kind of politics. But the problem is that it doesn’t help you.”

The Empire Strikes Barack

Most Unpopular President!

Courtesy of CNN:

A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

"No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon (22 percent and 24 percent, respectively) but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," Holland added. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 66 percent disapproval in January 1952."

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, "He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974." President Nixon's disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 67 percent.


The poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war while 68 percent opposed the conflict.

"Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war," Holland said. "In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent."

The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of President Bush's "mission accomplished" moment onboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when Bush proclaimed that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

The record low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president's unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one.

"Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same — bad," Schneider said.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Wednesday, with 1,008 adult Americans questioned. The poll's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.