Recycling last month's news is better for their agenda

Last month the right got all the headlines going their way. They got to talk about 'the President's plummeting approval ratings, and 'outrage expressed at town halls,' and similar kinds of things to suggest that there was some kind of a national groundswell building for a defeat of health care legislation, which would in turn doom the Obama Presidency. As further evidence they cited the fact that Republican challengers were leading by about fifteen points in Governor's races in both New Jersey and Virginia.

And I agree, it was a bruising August for the President and Democrats' agenda to reform health care.

This month, the news is a bit different.

Let's start with the President's approval rating. Using the RCP average (more accurate because it is a 'poll of polls' while any one poll can be an outlier and be wrong): As of this morning it stands at Obama approval 53.4%, disapproval 41.1%. This is virtually the same as it stood a month ago. In other words, any news about 'plummeting approval ratings' is just plain old news. It declined very slightly between a month ago and Obama's speech to Congress and that slight decline has since been reversed. So if anything about his approval rating is news it is that it is holding remarkably steady, and further that the President has never fallen below 50% support in the RCP average. In addition to that the 53% support he has now is exactly the same support he had on election day. So those who support him by and large still support him, and the reverse also true of those who oppose him (well, not perfectly so, the President's disapproval rate is still five points less than John McCain got on election day so if anything it suggests that the President still rates slightly higher than he did on election day.

What about the 'tea party rallies?' Well, there are some people who have been stirred up like a nest of hornets to attend these events. The town hall I went to held by Congresswoman Kirkpatrick in Holbrook on September 3 included people who have been to more than one townhall with multiple congresspersons (and readily admitted to it.) Well, the memo did say, 'inflate your numbers.' And yes, a crowd estimated at 60,000 to 70,000 made it to Washington on a Saturday to protest. This number was exaggerated by a factor of thirty by some righty blogs (though Michelle Malkin, the most prominent, later published a 'clarification'.) If you really want to see what a crowd of 2,000,000 looked like in Washington look at aerial photos of this year's inauguration. Heck, Obama drew crowds during the campaign (like in Portland Oregon or St. Louis) that were bigger than last week's tea party protest, and keep in mind that he was inaugurated last January. It was a Tuesday (therefore a workday) and really cold and still a real two million showed up. Yes there are some righties who are so outraged they drive to every townhall they can get to so they can go back in and express their outrage again but keep in mind it is mostly the same people, not a 'groundswell of support.'

And Virginia and New Jersey? Well, the Republican candidates are still ahead but both races have now tightened into the single digits. In other words, if there is any momentum in either race right now then it is with Mr. Corzine and Mr. Deeds, not their opponents who have both seen 15 point polling leads cut in half over the past two or three weeks.

That hasn't stopped Republicans like spinmeister Frank Luntz from trying to keep last month's story going with yesterday's article helpfully analying the 'rage,' as if it was sweeping the country right now or Fred Barnes from claiming that Republicans are taking over Virginia again or even in one of the local papers from seeing this story written last week by Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute in which he still uses the term, 'plummeting approval ratings for the President.'

Maybe they are in a time warp. Last month's news is like an aphrodisiac for the GOP and their supporters and it's understandable they'd want to put that news cycle in front of readers and TV viewers again, but well, that's so..... last month.

I've heard of recycling newspapers but I will object when they try to recycle last month's news itself.

Republicans own the Republican budget.

The latest word from the capitol is that the GOP legislature is, as it looked like they might do last week, going to pass exactly the same budget that Governor Brewer vetoed on July 1, and this time she will sign it.

She will blame this surrender, ironically enough on Democrats.

Yes, you read that right. After being frozen out of budget negotiations for months (and the proposed Democratic budget was never considered at all by the GOP leadership, by the way) the only times when Democrats were consulted was when it became clear that the GOP leadership was all tied up in knots with themselves with a deadline looming and they needed one more vote-- and then it was never the Democratic leadership, but individual Democrats (Hale and later Miranda) who they tried to get to defect and vote for a terrible budget for a price, and as I noted they were consulted literally hours before deadlines and not at any other time or with any other Democrat. Luckily neither of those two took the bait.

Zelph at AZ Netroots has a pretty good summary of all the times that Democrats were consulted at all here. As you can see the number of times when even individual Democrats were courted is a short list, and never once did the Governor bring together a 'five party' solution (herself, and the majority and minority leaders from both houses of the legislature,) something Democrats had been repeatedly asking for. You'd think she was superstitious about the number five or something.

Blaming Democrats that a bad budget passes with only Republican support because none of them actually was willing to sell out and vote for the bad budget? That would be bad enough in and of itself.

However we can go further, and point out that this isn't just a bad budget full of budget cuts. It's a bad budget full of tax cuts (especially the permanent repeal of the state property tax.) Asking any thinking person to vote for a sales tax referral when all it will do is backfill a tax cut that mainly benefits the rich and corporations who can pay good lobbyists is a sham in and of itself.

Let's be clear. This is a Republican budget, written exclusively by Republican leaders, passed with only Republican votes in a legislature where Republicans have absolute control, and if it is signed it will be a Republican Governor. This turkey will be their budget, they will own it and there will be no way one could argue otherwise. Democrats can't do anything about this budget because they've been locked out of the room for a long time. Blaming Democrats would be like blaming the person you outbid at an auction if the item you bought turns out to be junk.

But they will try it anyway.

Don't rest, there is still work to be done

Quite a few years ago I played on a rugby team. We had several very good players (note that I was not one of them) but overall lost more games than we won. One time in October 1984 we entered a tournament in Albuquerque, and in an upset beat a couple of teams we weren't supposed to beat. So the championship game was against a team from Holloman Air Force Base, which had also pulled off a pair of big upsets to get there. The game was played in the Albuquerque Sports Stadium. We had beaten Holloman 42-6 just a couple of months earlier and before the game one of our very good players (who had a poisonous attitude however) said, "It's only Holloman" and we laid back a bit and went in with an attitude that we would beat them soundly again. Final score: Holloman 18, Socorro 10. I did learn something that day (everyone did) about overconfidence.

It's a great time to be a Democrat. We've won big in two elections in a row (so that the Bush-Cheney-Hastert-DeLay-Frist cabal that held all the reins of power just a scant three years ago seems like a bad dream from which we-- and the country-- are fully awakened.) Overall, things seem to be going well. President Obama's stimulus plan seems to be starting to take hold as the economy is, though slowly and fitfully, beginning to sputter to life. Such bills as sCHIPS and the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act have been signed into law by President Obama in an even more robust form than the similar bills that President Bush vetoed last year (who says you can't win by losing sometimes.) It looks highly likely that we will have significant health care reform, credit card reform and a national service plan enacted by next year. The outlook for an energy plan is not quite as clear, but even without one there is much in the stimulus and elsewhere that will move us towards a greener future. Even in the states there is progress on what used to be slam-dunk conservative issues, as New Mexico just in the past few months became the thirteenth state to abolish the death penalty and Maine today became the fifth state to legalize any marriage between two consenting adults. We are finally finding out what was done to prisoners 'in our name' and guidelines have been approved to prevent it from happening again. President Obama has stayed at about sixty percent approval since he took office, defying the trend that has hounded former Presidents once they get to and pass their 100th day.

The outlook for Republicans is just as bad. They have pushed moderates out of the party and the result is a party that seems to be running ever more to the right. They seem to be a party of fits and starts that can't figure out how to connect with the American people. As one astute commenter on a blog I frequent pointed out, where are the 'teabaggers' now? Some 'movement,' it's gone within a couple of weeks of their big coming out party. Republican party ID is near an all-time low as people who had assumed they were Republicans have simply left the party and become independents or in some cases even moved over all the way to the Democratic party.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to rain on our parade a bit though. I detect an attitude of "it's only Holloman" running through a lot of Democrats (not so much here in Arizona, where we well know what our task is next year-- elect a sane legislature-- but nationally I detect it.) The truth is that the GOP is still a very dangerous opponent and we had best not rest on our laurels.

There were some unique factors at work in the last two elections that we can't assume will be repeated. The biggest one was simply that Americans were fed up and tired of eight years of failure and incompetence by the Bush administration. As long as George W. Bush was the President Democrats had the perfect foil. But Bush is gone now, along with the rest of that cabal I named that held power before. A second factor this last time around was the we had the most charismatic and telegenic Democratic candidate since at least JFK (and yes, that includes Bill Clinton) and Republicans nominated a guy who matched Bob Dole in the charisma department. President Obama will be running again in 2012 but it's safe to say that the GOP will have probably turned the page from John McCain. Third, we outhustled, outorganized and outraised the GOP (the last largely because the Obama campaign did not accept public financing and the accompanying limits.) The GOP has always held an edge in fundraising until recently so at the very least we can expect that to be much more competitive the next few election cycles. And John McCain depended on just reactivating the Bush ground game from 2004 and got smoked on the ground. Some of the files he was using hadn't even been updated since 2004. I expect that by 2010 and certainly by 2012 the Republicans will be up to speed on their ground game. We can still win it, just as we can still outhustle and outfundraise them, but it won't be a one-sided win if we do.

Now, I still believe that Republicans can only win if Democrats fail to do what we need to in order to win, but we have to be on guard against complacency, or we may be scratching our own heads in a few years asking how the mandate we had and the concentration of power that the voters had given us, had evaporated into thin air (which Republicans today ask themselves when they go back and read posts from three years back.)

Now is the time to go all out and build towards putting the next election away.

The new GOP symbol: the vulture.

Last week, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky had to apologize after predicting the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So then Rush Limbaugh predicted that the health care bill now making its way through the Senate will be called, "the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill."

Excuse me, but both Justice Ginsburg and Senator Kennedy are very much alive, thank you. It is true that they are both battling very dangerous forms of cancer, but with advances in medicine but with advances in medicine it is no longer true that a diagnosis of a brain tumor or pancreatic cancer means a certain and quick death sentence.

At the very least, you'd hope these folks on the right would cool their heels a bit. It's probably asking too much to expect them to have the decorum to not be talking about someone's death while they are still alive but the ease that they seem to have in talking about it makes me wonder whether they are hoping for Justice Ginsburg and Senator Kennedy to die soon.

It certainly reminds me of how a couple of years ago when South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson suffered from a ruptured blood vessel in his brain, within hours right wing news outlets were flooded with pundits reminding us that South Dakota has a Republican governor who would have picked his replacement. Which would have been true, in fact, except for one little detail-- Senator Johnson recovered from his stroke and was just re-elected to the Senate last year. He now has a clean bill of health.

It's bad enough when the GOP calls out the attack dogs, but please at least keep the vultures at home in a cage.

An army of Won.

Barack Obama had a meeting earlier today with a group of House Republican leaders to discuss the proposed stimulus bill.

He did as he had pledged in the campaign, and listened to them and tried to work something out with them. He's already cut down some of the infrastructure spending and as much as one third of the stimulus is likely to be tax cuts. He's spent some of his political capital taking on his own speaker over the issue of whether to repeal the Bush tax cuts or not (she wants to repeal them immediately, Obama in seeking Republican support has said he's not ready to just yet.) But the Republican leaders kept on pushing and pushing and pushing, wanting to change more and more things in the bill and simultaneously hinting that no matter what the bill says they might play hardball in the house and marshall Republicans to oppose it. Finally, Obama could see that unless he practically let them write the bill themselves they wouldn't accept or agree to support whatever he gave them, so he got up, looked directly at them and said, "I won."

It was not a sign of frustration at all. He's reminding them of a simple fact. The American people voted in November and gave him a mandate to change course. His share of the vote and winning margin were both the most any Presidential candidate in twenty years (in fact his share of the vote was the highest for any non-incumbent candidate and non-sitting Vice President running for the top job, in over sixty years.) Add to that the fact that in addition to Obama they voted in seven or eight new Senators (depending on what happens in Minnesota) and twenty-one house members, for a net gain of 54 house seats over the past two election cycles. Republicans put their ideas and candidates out there, and they lost. Pure and simple.

Under the circumstances, President Obama is being very generous and doing something he doesn't have to do, and offering the house Republicans a seat at the table and some input into writing this bill. But the party which not so long ago believed they had a 'permanent majority,' and even over the past two years could usually count on a Presidential veto to back them up in Congress, now has neither.

They need to get used to being the minority party because they lost. We won ('we' instead of 'I' is the only change I believe Obama should have made.) The President has reached out to them and offered them something that quite frankly, President Bush never did anything like that. They can choose between accepting what he gives them or opposing everything. But they no longer have the power and influence to insist on anything.

Boehner having trouble marketing change that isn't really change.

Republicans in the house, still reeling over their defeat in a special election in a deep-red Mississippi congressional district (the third such special election loss this year) that clipped the size of their house delegation to a psychologically demoralizing 199 members, want to adopt a message of change.

Of course there would in reality be no 'change' about it, just the same old, worn-out and failed mantra of 'tax cut, trickle down, deregulate... tax cut, trickle down, deregulate' that has led us to the mess we are now in. But what they want is to put it in a new package, and let the new packaging say, "change."

So, as House Republican leader John Boehner was casting about for a slogan for a Republican 'change' agenda he considered a slogan in which Republicans pledged to give voters "the change they deserve."

Only he can't do that, because the slogan is almost identical to the slogan that pharmaceutical manufacture Wyeth uses to market an anti-depressant called Effexor.

Well, maybe they should take a hint. Republicans in Congress may need an anti-depressant.

Republicans in legislature back up to their old tricks-- but a bad year for it.

Apparently our GOP legislative leaders are back at it. Every year they hold a closed door session, locking out Democrats to produce a budget. It's always one with draconian cuts. Then they either fail to get it passed as some Republicans see the cuts as too drastic, or they pass it and get it vetoed by Governor Napolitano. And every year she makes them look like fools (otherwise explain why her disapproval rating in a poll last year was an astronomically low 9%-- exceptionally low especially for a politician who has made her feelings known by vetoing record number of bills.) Then they have to slap something together in June that they can actually get passed and signed, and it looks like something slapped together at the last minute.

So here they are in their closed room preparing to come back with another sham budget and be made to look like fools again. Which would be humorous, except that this year the state faces real and very serious budget problems-- so the old political gamesmanship, just by virtue of the less time they will have to work on a real budget, is itself going to cost the state a lot of money and be damaging for some citizens.

Time to vote out these clowns and elect a legislature which believes in making use of every day the legislature is in session to seriously address the state's problems.

Final Four-- the Republicans (yawn).

Technically, the Republicans still have four candidates left in the race. Ron Paul is a nutbag who remains in the race mainly because he's got a lot of money to spend courtesy of the internet, but is so right wing that he is left wing on the Iraq war-- a worthy successor to Pat Buchanan but thank God the man will never become President. Mike Huckabee has proven that the vaunted 'Christian Right' has its limitations. He has been fading since Iowa, and remains in the race now (though he won't admit it) as a favor to John McCain (the two of them have become closer on the campaign trail than two candidates running against each other usually become) since he cuts into a base of support that Mitt Romney needs if he is to catch McCain.

However, I will limit this discussion to the top two (as I said in the last post).

Mitt Romney is likely not going to win. And well he deserves to lose. Romney used to be pro-choice, in favor of embryonic stem cell research and gay rights. That is why he got elected Governor as a Republican in one of the two or three most liberal states in the union. But then he decided to run for President and did the crassly political, changing his positions to suit the conservative base of the GOP. Many have remained openly suspicious of him, and rightfully so. I suspect that if the alternative were someone other than John McCain, Mitt wouldn't even have the support he has now. He also has (as a man with hundreds of millions of dollars) done the same thing as Steve Forbes did-- spent enormous amounts of his own money on negative advertising. And like Forbes, he's mostly failed. He lost Iowa and New Hampshire, early states he was supposed to win, and when Rudy Giuiani collapsed in Florida Romney still wasn't able to win despite saturating the air waves with more negative ads. I've watched Romney in the debates and he comes across as every bit as unpleasant in person as his advertising apparently has to early primary voters. I might add that he created 'universal' health insurance coverage in Massachusetts by getting the legislature to pass a law requiring that everyone buy coverage. The problem is that many people who didn't have it before can't afford the premiums and apparently Romney never considered that some people might be too poor to afford the premiums, either because they don't earn enough or because they have health conditions that make it hard to even find anyone who will sell them a policy at any price. Romney must think that everyone else has a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank just like he does (though after this campaign it is likely to be substantially less than that.)

However, Romney will most likely lose to John McCain. McCain has a reputation as a 'maverick' and the distrust of some high profile conservatives because he has disagreed with them on issues like immigration (on which he has the same position as President Bush) and torture (where he has the same position as the Geneva conventions, in contrast to the Bush administration which apparently has the same position as Saddam Hussein.) But being against torture isn't exactly the hallmark of a liberal, it's the hallmark of anyone with any kind of decency at all. Just think that before the Bush administration we all knew, and knew because it was true, that the United States did not engage in such practices. So being against torture is like not being a murderer. Not supporting torture doesn't inherently make you 'good,' because anyone in any civilized nation should take it for granted that their government adheres (as a signatory) to the Geneva Conventions anyway, it's just that those who can't even reach that bar are distinctly 'bad.' The fact that McCain has been attacked for not being willing to, for example, support the waterboarding of prisoners says more about the moral bankruptcy of those who have followed George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez down this medieval blind alley than it says about John McCain. McCain has also been on the sh*t list of conservatives since McCain-Feingold, a law which limits the ability of organizations to run ads targetting candidates by name within a short time before an election. Not that it has been much of a restriction, since they can just start a '527' instead, so that for example McCain-Feingold did not prevent the 'swift-boat' ads, nor has it prevented Romney's monetary bludgeon. Further, McCain, whose election to Congress in 1982 was largely financed by his in-laws' mafia money, and who was one of the 'Keating Five,' is hardly a paragon of virtue when it comes to keeping money out of politics.

To dispel a great myth, let me also say that John McCain is no liberal, nor is he a moderate. He is very conservative, on many, many issues. His voting record has been pretty consistently to the right throughout his whole tenure in Congress.

He is an economic conservative. McCain runs a website where he likes to take aim at what he calls 'pork,' (despite the fact that a lot of Federal spending is an investment in the basic infrastructure of various areas, and that is according to the intent of the founding fathers who created a house of 'REPRESENTATIVES,' tasked with representing the needs of their districts and consituencies and writing it into legislation.) McCain has also made it clear on his own Presidential campaign website (under 'issues,' hit 'read more' under 'health care' and scroll almost to the bottom-- that last link is here) that he wants to "eliminate the bias towards" employer paid health insurance and replace it with a $2,500 tax credit($5,000 for families). Never mind that the average family policy last year cost over $12,000 and that many people have health risks such that they could only qualify for affordable insurance if they are part of an employee risk pool. McCain is against extending unemployment benefits or other programs designed to help people out even during a recession, and has made it abundantly clear that he favors extending the Bush tax cuts (even though he voted against them in 2001.) In 2005 McCain praised President Bush's failed attempt to privatize Social Security.

John McCain is also a social conservative. He has been against gay rights and for banning abortion. He has a 100% anti-abortion voting record both in Congress and in the Senate, and the only time he ever said anything that could be construed as pro-choice was during the 2000 campaign when he was asked before the New Hampshire primary what he would do if his own daughter became pregnant and wanted an abortion and he implied that he would allow it. So John McCain is consistent in that he only favors abortion for his family, but he is against allowing it for women he is not related to. The other day when discussing Supreme Court nominees, McCain said he would nominate justices 'like John Roberts.' Yikes. Roberts has been part of the four staunch conservatives on the court. Some conservative commentators have jumped on McCain because he disparaged Justice Alito for 'wearing his conservatism on his sleeve.' That doesn't matter. Roberts may keep his tucked away in his vest pocket, but the result is the same. With liberal Justice Stevens having regular heart problems, and the SCOTUS balanced right now only on Justice Kennedy's consistent inconsistency, we can't afford for John McCain to appoint another quiet, consistent conservative like John Roberts to the Supreme Court any more than we could afford a sleeve-wearing conservative.

John McCain is also a neo-con. We all know by now that he is invested to the hilt in the Iraq war, and supports the construction of permanent bases in Iraq and recently vowed to stay there for 'a hundred years.' Of course in the Senate, McCain has voted consistently for unlimited and unconditional funding for Iraq (for some reason 'fiscal conservatives' who scowl at a few hundred thousand in the budget for a bridge in America don't bat an eyelash over hundreds of billions every few months to pour down the drain in Iraq.)

But he is a neo-con in more than just supporting the Iraq war. In 1983, a group of Reagan administration officials, embarrassed by former President Jimmy Carter's work in certifying elections in foreign countries as fair (or certifying some as unfair) founded the International Republican Institute, a private organization that is not part of the government. The purpose of this organization is officially to certify elections (as an alternative to the U.N. and other indepdendent monitoring agencies) but it is a sometimes shadowy organization that has been involved with local politics, what could be considered 'nation building' and operating parallel to the offical state department diplomacy throughout the world. During the Bush administration, the IRI has more than once been a key component to conducting the administrations' parallel diplomacy in situations where matters like American law and international law might be 'constraining.' Anyway, a look at the board of directors of the IRI is quite revealing:

Its chairman is none other than John McCain.

Others on the board of the IRI include a virtual who's who of the neo-cons present and past: Paul Bremer (the first U.S. envoy to Iraq), Frank Fahrenkopf (former chairman of the Republican Party), Scowcroft and Eagleburger (the 'Bobsey twins' of Bush I foreign policy, who went to Beijing right after the Tianenmen Square massacre to assure the Chinese that any official criticism was for domestic consumption only), and three other present or former members of Congress (all Republicans.) Former Reagan U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick was a member until she passed away last year. The rest of the membership reads like a laundry list of neo-con priorities, a mixture of movers and shakers of industry (such as the Director of Lockheed Martin Missile Defense Programs), former CIA and state department midlevel managers and others who can be relied on (not a Democrat among them.) Well, you know what they say, "birds of a feather." Well, this is the company that John McCain is keeping these days. Has been since 2003. And Patriot I and Patriot II and all the other domestic spying bills? Yep, McCain supported those too.

So it's really not so surprising that McCain was caught in the famous photo of the Bush hug at the 2004 GOP convention.



On virtually everything that matters, if you want another four years of the Bush administration, then you'll vote for John McCain.

Why is the Republican establishment so afraid of Mike Huckabee?

This week, new GOP co-frontrunner (hard to say who is in front over there) Mike Huckabee has been taking a lot of flak from Republicans. Of course this is to be expected when it is from other candidates, who are competing for the same prize he is (and they have certainly gone after him, especially Mitt Romney, who has seen Huckabee come out of nowhere to suddenly be on the verge of snatching Iowa from Mitt.) One Romney commercial attacked Huckabee's record on pardons as Governor of Arkansas, saying "Huckabee granted more pardons than the previous three Governors of Arkansas combined." Them's fightin' words in a Republican primary, because they well know who one of those former Governors of Arkansas was. And Huckabee probably earned the barbs from Romney after making an anti-Mormon comment during an interview for the New York Times magazine.

What is really different though is that Huckabee has been getting a lot of flak from 'establishment' Republicans, such as Condi Rice (part of the Bush administration) and Rush Limbaugh, who usually either praise or say nothing about candidates in Republican primaries. While Rice was responding to a comment by Huckabee critical of the Bush policy in Iraq to be sure, some of the Bush administration's policies have come in for much harsher criticism during the campaign by other candidates and the administration has chosen to turn the other cheek, so the comment by Rice represents a change from how they've treated other candidates.

It is clear to me why they are suddenly treating Huckabee like a cat in a dog pound.

The truth is, that the GOP establishment has patronized the religious right and their millons of votes sort of like patronizing a crazy old uncle, but they have been careful not to let religious conservatives get too close to the tiller, afraid they will run the party onto the rocks. They promise them the moon, and give them enough bones to make them happy.

Originally the Republican establishment wanted John McCain. He was the early front-runner, and with his traditional appeal to independents they calculated he was the Republican most likely to hold the White House for the GOP. But then McCain ran his campaign into the ground, creating an organization that required more money than he was able to raise. "Mr. fiscal conservative" was embarrassed out of the lead, and dropped into the second tier during the summer as his campaign seemed to fly apart and was deep in debt. So then Rudy Giuliani jumped up as the apparent choice of the Republican establishment. As a social liberal with a base in the northeast, they figured he could be the one who could challenge the Democrats, on their home turf. They even tried hard to sell Rudy to social conservatives as a guy who 'could win,' and Rudy, the pro-choice Republican, promised to only appoint 'strict constructionist' judges. But social conservatives never warmed to Rudy (selling a guy with Rudy's positions and his personal history to the religious right is a little like trying to sell a package of ground beef to a vegetarian.) So then they brought out former Senator and lobbyist (about as 'establishment' as it gets) Fred Thompson to try and appeal to religious conservatives, but the former actor had all the appeal of one of those zombies from, "Night of the living dead." So they went back to trying to sell them on Rudy, even convincing social conservative Godfather Pat Robertson to endorse Giuliani.

But a string of recent scandals has soured many Republicans, not just members of the religious right on Giuliani. So now, McCain (remember him) who has been hanging around on the edges of the race has re-emerged as the apparent choice of the 'establishment.' They don't want Mitt Romney, though they will get behind him if he muscles his way into the nomination (and being worth a quarter of a billion dollars and having shown himself willing to spend freely on his own campaign, Romney has the muscles, at least financially.)

But Huckabee is the guy who scares them to death. He puts exactly the face on the Republican party that they don't want. An ordained Baptist minister, he is wildly popular with social conservatives, but many of his positions (such as wanting to teach creationism in schools) are viewed with skepticism (to put it mildly) by the majority of Americans. Even on areas where he tends to the center he becomes less electable. I personally admire Huckabee for being willing to actually seriously consider his authority as a Governor to exercise pardons (he still did deny 90% of them) even when he runs the risk of what happened, that one of the many people he pardoned subsequently went to Missouri and committed a brutal murder. But it's a very risky position politically, because people will remember (or be reminded of, a la Willie Horton) the one failure and not of the dozens of people who turned their second chance into something good for themselves, their families and society. His record on taxes and spending irks fiscal conservatives (the reason his success elsewhere has not been mirrored in New Hampshire, a state where fiscal, not social conservatives dominate the Republican primary.) Unfortunately for the GOP, fiscal conservatives make the most inviting target for Democrats to appeal for crossover votes. Most national Democrats are diametrically opposed to the position of social conservatives on abortion, gay rights, creationism and other hot-button issues, but it is possible for a Democrat to be nominated who preaches or has a record of fiscal responsibility at least as good as that pushed by most Republicans. Fiscal conservatives are in many cases disillusioned by the Bush administration and GOP Congress that actually accelerated the rate of increase in Federal spending and ran up huge deficits in the process. A Huckabee nomination would make them ripe for the picking if a Democrat was ready to capitalize on this concern, and GOP insiders know it.

For these reasons, they fear Huckabee, or rather they fear that if he is the nominee he could well lead the GOP to a historic landslide defeat. Given that Congress is already firmly in control of the Democrats, and that Democrats will likely gain Senate seats this year, Republicans fear most that there could be a Democratic Presidential landslide, electing a President who had a lot of political capital to push for something like, say, national health care and who would sign all of the bills that Congress has been frustrated with this year, everything from a timetable for Iraq withdrawl to comprehensive immigration reform. There is even an outside chance (though they'd pretty much have to run the table in terms of winnable open seats and knocking off vulnerable GOP incumbents) that Democrats could next year win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This is very unlikely but would become more likely if the GOP suffered a crushing landslide defeat in the Presidential race.

So Huckabee in fact scares the GOP establishment. That is why they tried to establish him early on as 'second tier.' And now that he is clearly up with the raft of candidates they've been pitching to the GOP faithful, they will do anything they can to try and prevent him from actually winning the nomination.

The only candidate that would scare the GOP establishment more than Mike Huckabee if he wins the nomination, is Ron Paul.

GOP has a good thing going in the Ames straw poll; Maybe Democrats should do something similar.

Not often that I approve of something that Republicans do, but I have to admit they have a good thing going with the upcoming Ames straw poll in Iowa.

With the primary season now compacted into less than a month (either that, or the actual Iowa caucus may come before Christmas this year) it is a fact that most Presidential candidates, especially those who lag in the polls but might have something useful to say, just won't have the time or resources to compete and get the necessary press coverage to make their case to the voters.

And one can argue that little is at stake in a voluntary (show up with an Iowa driver's license, claim to be a Republican, pay $35-- I guess that is to keep out the po' folks-- and vote) straw poll, but in fact it does provide an early test of the ability of a campaign to organize and turn out supporters in Iowa, a key to victory with its first-in-the-nation caucuses. More importantly, it will likely give some lesser known candidate a chance to jump up and seize the moment and muscle his (since the GOP primary field, as usual, is 100% white and male) way into contention.

Plenty will be at stake too. GOP candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have both decided to skip the event, in effect conceding it to Mitt Romney. However this is more than as they would tell you, 'a strategic decision;' The underlying fact of the matter is that McCain and Giuliani don't have the organization in Iowa that Romney does, so if they did participate they'd embarassingly lose their first head to head contest; and if they don't build an organization in Iowa soon (maybe even by December if the caucuses move up) then they may well underperform then, and maybe lose to Romney when it is for real. Four or five months is a long time, but not that long.

Among other candidates, many of them have invested heavily in the straw poll. While Romney will win, how big he wins will be an early test of his strength. If he doesn't win by 20 or 30% over his nearest rivals with his main opponents for the nomination skipping the event it could be a sign that his campaign in Iowa isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson has said flatly that if he doesn't finish 'first or second' in the straw poll, he is done. Well, my prediction is that he won't, and he will be gone. Thompson had a chance to be a serious candidate had he run in, say, 1988 or 1996, but he waited to run until his moment had long since passed.

Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback, who have been hitting each other over the head competing for the same group of voters are also trying to finish second. They've pulled out all the stops too, even encouraging supporters of Giuliani and McCain to show up and vote for them. One of them will certainly finish ahead of the other, and will claim a victory (likely he will be the 'minor' candidate who springs into the discussion) while the other will probably discover that he is following the path into irrelevance that was already blazed by Tommy Thompson.

An intriguing question is how well Ron Paul does. Paul's supporters are few but are almost fanatical in their devotion to him. The straw poll will provide an early window on how much they will impact the GOP race. Some Ron Paul sites on the internet are already predicting that the straw poll will be stolen from him, so they plan to conduct an exit poll of participants. It could be fun to watch the fireworks on that one.

Even Republicans want us out soon.

Lost in the furor over the Democratic leadership caving in to President Bush on the Iraq funding bill, is that the recent Democratic debate showed a similar lack of spine. Whether it is Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war and has never apologized for that vote, or John Edwards who voted for the war but has, or Barack Obama, who called Edwards out for his war vote after Edwards lectured him at the debate the other night for timidly casting his vote against the war funding bill without really leading on the war, they seem to be all over each other to straddle the fence.

I'm not sure why. To begin with, Democratic primary voters are overwhelmingly against the war, and have made it abundantly clear that it is our main issue.

But it isn't just Democrats who believe the time has come to get out of Iraq. Though the debate on the Republican side is often dominated by neo-conservatives with loud voices and a lot of control over conservative media, ordinary Americans who happen to be Republicans paint a different picture:

A recent Iowa poll by strategic vision showed (question 5) that among Republicans only, those polled favored getting U.S. military forces out of Iraq within six months, by a 53-37% margin (only five percent of Democrats in the poll think we should remain in Iraq.)

What this shows is that even the President's own party is turning against the war and believes it is time to get out.

I believe that if one of the Democratic candidates would just step up and say that his or her one and only objective is to extracate the U.S. from Iraq, he or she would rise quickly in the polls.

The public is way ahead of the politicians on this one.