Here's a question. In the world of today's media, you'd think that if a reporter learned that a 52 year old single male member of Congress had sent a 16 year old boy some creepy emails, that would be the makings of a pretty damn big story. So why did the St. Petersburg Times sit on the story for almost a year? (via Cillizza):

The boy, who is not being identified because of his age, told the St. Petersburg Times in an interview last November, when the Times first learned of the e-mails, that he cut off correspondence with Foley. [emphasis added]

What gives? Did the boy ask the St. Pete Times not to print? Why would that be if a) he'd already sent excerpts from Foley's emails back to Congressional staffers and b) he agreed to be interviewed by the paper? Maybe the paper held off purely out a concern about libel, but the suddenness of Foley's resignation (and the fact another page has apparently come forward) suggests this wasn't necessarily the toughest nut to crack. And since Brian Ross and ABC News had no problem breaking the story wide open, the libel argument doesn't seem to hold much water.

So if the St. Pete Times could have nailed the story down a long time ago and didn't, that leads us to two fairly divergent pieces of speculation: Was the paper planning on springing the story closer to the election and got scooped by CREW and ABC News? Or was the paper deliberately ignoring the story in an effort to cover for Foley? Neither seems all that likely to me, so I'm at a loss as to what motivated the St. Petersburg Times to keep a lid on this story for the better part of a year.

UPDATE: Looks like the St. Pete Times may not have been the only group sitting on this story. Josh Marshall asks the same question of the House GOP leadership: what did they know about Foley and when did they know it?

Stan Greenberg and James Carville have released a new strategy memo based on recent polling conducted in the 45 most competitive Republican-held House districts. The full memo is here (pdf) . Full poll results here (pdf) . Those crunched for time can get the gist of the findings from Carville and Greenberg's concluding paragraph:

Democrats are winning the 15 most competitive Republican-held districts by a 3-point margin and have the opportunity to expand their lead further if they develop a sharp critique of Congress. Clearly, this election could break further and most likely for the Democrats.

The AP reports Republican Congressman Rep. Mark Foley of Florida has resigned after questions were raised this week "about e-mails he wrote a former male page, according to a congressional official."

Foley represents the 16th district, which stretches from North Palm Beach on the eastern side of the state all the way across to Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda on the Gulf Coast. The district has a Cook PVI of R+2 and voted for Bush over Kerry 54-46 in 2004 and for Bush over Gore 53-47 in 2000.

Well...whaddayaknow. There ain't no stinkin' 2006 electoral wave.

The conventional wisdom seems to have been wrong. For months upon months (upon months upon months) every pundit was explaining to us that this was a "national" election in which voters would not even be thinking or caring about local issues. They weren't even going to see the names of the local candidates on the ballot. All they would see is "Yes to George Bush / No to George Bush." As Bush is so hated, no Republican would be capable of stopping the tide.

For my part, I have disagreed with this assessment since I first started writing for this site. I have been arguing for months upon months (upon months upon months) that there is no such thing as a nationalized House election -- that, rather, there is at best a localization of national issues. Most voters do not view their votes as proxies on the state of the nation. They view their votes as decisions regarding two individuals. I have been arguing that national conditions mostly set the context by inducing one party to run better candidates.

A quick scan across the electoral playing field indicates that "I" was right. Or, more specifically, a quarter century's worth of scholarly consensus on congressional elections was right. The major effect of national conditions was to induce strong Democrats, but weak Republicans, to declare candidacies. So, we see more Republican than Democratic seats on the table because Republican challengers have short resumes and no funds while Democratic challengers have long resumes and plenty of funds. Nevertheless, almost all of these races are being fought on local issues and local personalities. Look at the polls that show Republican candidates who should be getting bowled over in a wave looking fairly respectable. More importantly, look at the recap of advertisements and campaign maneuverings that the House Race Hotline offers every day -- in district after district, the fight is local. It is all about the personalities in the race, and who would best represent the district's values in Washington.

What, you might ask, about the "wave" elections of 1974, 1982 and 1994? Weren't the rules of the game thrown out then? Nope. They never were. None of those elections were national in the sense that the pundits take them to be. They were all explicable according to this basic "strategic politicians" theory. The only real exception was 1994 -- which is further explicable by arguing that national issues were localized by crafty Republicans who tied Clinton's liberal legislative record to conservative Democratic incumbents.

So -- what exactly has happened in the last month? There are two hypothesis that explain the change in tone. I'll let you pick which one you think is correct.

Hypothesis #1: There was never a wave coming because waves, in the sense that media pundits mean them, do not exist. The appearance of a wave existed because the campaigns had not actually started yet, but the pundits had to write about the campaign. So, all they did was talk up the national data points. They received "confirming" evidence of their theses from meaningless summer polls that queried voters who had not put any independent thought into the election and were just parroting back the media storyline ala John Zaller's RAS theory (i.e. respondents Receive only a little information about politics, Accept the few data points that they manage to pick up, and Sample from those data points to respond to queries by pollsters) . When the campaign actually started, the debate in each election "became" local because that is the way it always is. The candidates change the storyline, voters get different pieces of data, and, ultimately (and once again), everything comes down to voters' evaluations of candidates.

Hypothesis #2: This was going to be the first ever modern nationalized election. For the first time, voters were not even going to be thinking about the candidates. It was all gonna be about the President. But then, around Labor Day, George Bush -- the man whom a majority of the country has tuned out (not to mention the man who was inducing the anti-GOP wave in the first place) -- gave a few speeches about the global war on terror and turned the races local. His job approval ticked up between 3% and 4%, and that was it for the wave.

Some concluding points -- does the absence of a "wave" mean that the Democrats stand no chance to pick up the House? Of course not! As I said, the media-type wave does not exist. Voters do not suddenly, magically switch from voting locally to voting nationally. Most of them always vote by the same method. What changes is almost entirely on the side of the candidates. So -- there really has never been a "wave" in that sense. That's a good thing, too. If you need a "wave" to switch the House, the Federalist Party would still be in charge.

So -- that means that the Democrats do not need a "wave" to take the House. This is what we have to wrap our minds around: the whole Wave = Dem Win/No Wave = GOP Win is a false dichotomy, one that was always going to wind up damaging the appearance of Democratic prospects come Labor Day (Side note: for a long time, I have thought that (a) the media has a Democratic bias, but that (b) this bias damages Democratic electoral prospects more than it helps them. This wave business seems, to me, to be another instance of that occurring. Ultimately, the problem for the Democrats is first that the media understands very little of how American politics operates from a broader frame than just the day-to-day Washington soap opera; and second that since they know so much about the soap opera, they incorrectly presume that they know just as much about the broader frame). The Democrats were always going to win or lose the House depending upon candidate recruitment, candidate fundraising and the quality of their candidates' campaigns. National conditions have aided them greatly in putting together a good slate of candidates. But the GOP has a lot of incumbents running. More than usual for this type of national climate.

So what is going to happen? The truth is that I do not know. As everybody has been shifting their estimates toward the GOP, I have found myself shifting toward the Democrats a bit. The reason is that there are a whole swath of GOP seats where, on an individual level, the party looks obscenely weak. I am thinking (in order of obscenity): TX 22, AZ 08, IA 01, CO 07, OH 18, PA 10, NC 11, IN 09, IN 08, IN 02. That's 10 seats. Half of them look like "gimme's" for the Democrats. That's 1/3rd of what they need. That is a lot. I am starting to think that the performance of stronger-looking incumbents in swing districts -- FL 22, PA 06, PA 07, CT 02, CT 05 -- is not so much a sufficient condition for the GOP to hold the House, but really more like a necessary condition.

And this, of course, was before Foley resigned. Here's a fun question: just how many more Republican congressman are going to resign before Election Day and, as a consequence, essentially cede their seats to the Democrats? At this point, at least 20% of what the Democrats need will come from this type of seat.

Make no mistake -- this is bad news for the GOP. Tim Mahoney, the Democratic challenger, has no experience as an elected official. However, he is self-funding, so he has the cash to capitalize on this. And, as National Review is reporting, Foley's name stays on the ballot (though, according to what they have on their site, any votes he receives goes to whomever the Florida GOP designates as the nominee -- though, if this is not cold comfort for the GOP, that metaphor has no significance whatsoever).

Yesterday, the Waco Tribune-Herald ran an interesting story about the race for Tom DeLay's old seat, Texas 22. The lead:

The national Republican Party has joined the fight to replace former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, donating more than $100,000 to the Republican candidate's write-in candidacy and sending Vice President Dick Cheney to a Houston fundraiser for her next week.

This is interesting -- and a sign that the national Republicans might not have up on Texas 22.

The story goes on to indicate that the money is going to be spent on GOTV operations -- which is consistent with the theory that internal numbers show that in a head-to-head matchup, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs runs well against Nick Lampson, and the strategy is to get her name into voters' minds so that it is effectively a head-to-head matchup.

For those of you who might not know, Texas Democrats challenged the right of Texas Republicans to put a new name on the ballot after Tom DeLay withdrew. The Democrats won in court, and so Democratic candidate and former Representative Nick Lampson is running without major party opposition. The Republicans, meanwhile, rallied around Houston city councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs as their write-in "nominee."

Despite the district's partisanship, which is heavily Republican, most analysts have written off this district. Lampson wins by default, right? However, this thesis seems inconsistent with the GOP sending money to Sekula--Gibbs -- not to mention donating the time of the the Vice President. You do not give sparse resources to a lost cause -- at least not if you are a strategic utility maximizer.

Scholars have found that the national political parties are indeed strategic in their allocation of resources. They tend not to give money to hopeless quests (although they do tend to over-donate to incumbents -- but Seuka-Gibbs is not an incumbent). You get money if the party thinks you can win with their help. What is more, scholars have found that the National Republican Campaign Committe is the most strategic of all the national committees. So, if the NRCC is chipping in $100K, then it must believe that the GOP still stands a chance in the district. How much of a chance is unclear -- $100K is just a drop in the bucket against Lampson's warchest, which by now must be at least $2 million. However, the NRCC doesn't give $100K because you have a pretty face.

Personally, this surprises me. My inference was that the seat was lost when the courts ruled against the GOP, and that the coalescing around Sekula-Gibbs was merely a way to establish a presumptive nominee for 2008. That Governor Rick Perry has scheduled a special election on November 7 to fill the rest of DeLay's seat seemed to me to be consistent with that (though certainly its intention was also to give Sekula-Gibbs a final, in the voting booth, name recognition bump for the general). However, you don't donate $100K of scarce party resources, and send Cheney down to Sugar Land, if your intention is to set yourself up for 2008.

So keep your eye on NRCC and RNC activity here in the next few months. If we see them sending more dollars and fundraisers into the district, then that is a sign that their internal polling is telling them that, even though Sekula-Gibbs is a write-in, she can still win the full seat. $100K is a sign that they think there might be a chance, and is therefore worth spending some dough to take a closer look. It is not, in itself, a sign that they believe victory is possible. If they send more money that way, that will tell you the GOP still thinks the seat is a toss-up.

Again -- this is not enough to allow us to confidently infer GOP intent. There are other red-flags about the seat's actual competitiveness that emerge from this article. Sekula-Gibbs' campaign manager had once boasted that they expected $3 million from the national GOP, which is a sign that the campaign manager might not be all that great. I doubt she heard that. There is no way the national GOP would ever contribute that much. I do not think, given the limitations imposed by BCRA, that such an allocation would be rational. Almost all of that would be bought up in advertisements, which eventually have a diminishing marginal return. Also, the article notes that Sekula-Gibbs is not one of the candidates the NRCC is supporting. An NRCC spokesman claims that this is an oversight, but she is still not up on their page yet. Interesting.

Bottom line -- it might be too soon to write off Texas 22.

Just to add a thought to John's post yesterday about Lieberman's strength in CT. Lamont is certainly hurt by the fact that the Republican in this race, Alan Schlesinger, is a total dog. But he's also hurt by the Democrats' recently improved chances of winning back the Senate.

Connecticut was always a heart vs. head matter to a certain degree, but now it is without question a total waste for Dems to pour resources into this internecine battle when they have real opportunities in Tennessee, Missouri, and Virginia - not to mention they have a candidate fighting for his political life in a must win race in New Jersey. Believe me, Chuck Schumer is not dumb enough to waste money trying to drag Ned Lamont across the finish line when he has a halfway decent chance to win back the Senate.

Lamont claims his fundraising is going well, but earlier this week he had to write his campaign a personal check for $750,000 to keep pace with Lieberman down the stretch. All the big names in the Senate who've said they support Lamont aren't going up to campaign for him (except one, that is, who really, really wants to be President in 2008 and thinks becoming a darling of the nutroots is the way to do it) because they see Lieberman with a good chance of returning to the World's Most Exclusive Club in November. So there are a number of factors working against Lamont that make it really hard to see how he pulls this one out.

I know George Allen wants to fight back against the smear campaign currently being conducted against him, but this strikes me as one of those predictably pathetic gestures politicians turn to when they're in trouble.

Don't pander. Stand up, have a press conference, tell voters what you've done to beneift black Virginians over the course of your career, and bring out some African-American character witnesses to reassure voters that you are who you say you are.

I sat down with Senator John McCain on Wednesday. The following is a transcript of his remarks on various subjects which has been slightly edited for clarity. I began by asking McCain for his thoughts on the leaking of the National Intelligence Estimate:

McCain: First of all, I think the timing has got to be political. It was issued in April, and now here we are in October, September-October, so what do you think? So I think it's clearly political. Also, only parts of it were leaked. And I don't know what the whole thing is still, because the administration released their parts of it, but the casual observer would conclude it's political and designed to damage the administration there's no doubt about that. So when I say that's the only conclusion that I draw.

Second of all, I guess, that there's clearly some validity to the fact that when we have not had the success that we had hoped in Iraq, that always emboldens our enemies. That's what happens in wars. And I would still argue that, if that's true, then it makes a more compelling case for us to succeed in Iraq because if we fail further, then that will embolden them more. So in a way, they bolstered our argument, my argument, that the benefits of success in Iraq are enormous and the consequences of failure are catastrophic.

By the way, I don't mean to stray from the subject but a really entertaining thing happened day before yesterday. The Democrats had this hearing with two generals and a colonel, and it was a Rumsfeld-as-pinata encounter. But the interesting thing is that at the very end they made a terrible, cardinal error: they asked the generals and the colonel what we should do and they answered "stay the course," "more troops," "can't afford to lose." Oops. Hearing over. I thought it was wonderful. I'm sure they weren't pleased to hear the generals say we need more troops and we have to stay the course and we can't afford to lose. I'm sure some staffer probably got reprimanded or fired for allowing such a question to be asked.

So, look, have we got problems in Iraq? Sure. Anyone who doesn't believe that isn't observing events on the ground. Have we made mistakes in Iraq? Sure we have. Have there been significant problems in Iraq? Yes. But, we cannot afford to lose this. The Iraqi army is getting better, that's the good news. The police aren't. In fact Talibani told me that yesterday, for us to say that's not true. I met with President Talibani yesterday, and he complained about the police.

Are some parts of Iraq very much under government control, peaceful, and things are getting better? Sure. Anbar province is a disaster. Parts of Baghdad are obviously at unacceptably high level of sectarian violence. Do we need more troops over there? Hell yes.

RCP: How many more, do you think?

McCain: Oh, I was asked that on Sunday and I said twenty to thirty thousand, but that really translates into closer to one hundred thousand, because if you're going to have twenty or thirty thousand there, you've got to have double that number back in the reserves so you can rotate.

RCP: Do you think the NIE as a political matter, is doing damage at the moment? Or do you think this is this not real news because it was from April?

McCain: It's not real news, but it helps Democrats refocus on Iraq from the war on terror. So that, I think, would probably - an objective might say that part's helped them. But as far all the sudden swinging American sentiment - Americans have pretty well made up their mind about the war.

RCP: Let me ask you -

McCain: But I want to mention this about the war. Americans are frustrated, they're saddened, and they want to get out. But they don't want to get out according to a calendar. They want to get out according to conditions on the ground. And still, significant majorities, although frustrated and may think that we shouldn't have gotten in there in the first place, sill don't agree with this set a date with for withdrawal. Thank God.

RCP: What should be done about the continued leaking of classified information? How would a McCain administration deal with leaks?

McCain: I'd try and enforce the law. I think that there is significant damage done when classified information is leaked. But I want to add, we also have to guard against governments, whether they're Democrat or Republican, classifying everything which does not bear the need or meet the criteria for classification.

RCP: Do you think that's the case now?

McCain: I think that's the case with every administration. By the way, this does not apply to the NIE. The NIE is classified and should remain classified. But there are times when all administrations, because they don't want negative publicity, will overclassify information. That's just reality. So we have to have, I think, some system where somebody says "this doesn't need to be classified." Time after time I've read information over the years that has been declassified for various reasons and the first thing you say to yourself is, "why was this classified to start with?" But having said that, I think, the leaking of classified information is a danger to national security and we should act accordingly.

RCP: So you think the leakers should be prosecuted?

McCain: Yes, and I think they did that in the.... Frankly, I don't know how this Plame case came out. Seems like the leaker is not the one that's in trouble. But, at least they attempted in the Plame case to try to track it down.

Next, we talked about the status of the military commission bill, which was still in flux at the time but ended up passing the Senate yesterday by a 65-34 vote. I asked McCain on Wednesday morning if he was "totally satisfied" with the bill as it stood, and he replied:

McCain: Oh, you know, if I'd have written it all myself? No. But I'm satisfied with the result. It's a process we go through here. Except the one major bump in the road, we've had good faith negotiations with the White House on it. [Stephen] Hadley and [Steven] Bradbury have been honest brokers, and I know that the President directed them to sit down and work this out because we had the same goal.

In picking the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to host the 2008 Republican National Convention, GOP leaders signaled the importance of the upper Midwest to their '08 electoral strategy.

The electorally important trio of Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin combine for a not insignificant 27 electoral votes. Al Gore and Joe Lieberman carried all three states in 2000, but with margins unusually small for Democrats. In 2004 President Bush flipped Iowa into the Republican column for a crucial seven electoral votes. Wisconsin was close but Mr. Bush came up short for the second straight time by a little more than 10,000 votes. With the red-blue divide well entrenched in more than half of the 50 states, each party is already strategizing over such key battlegrounds in hopes of reaching the magical 270 electoral votes needed to win the Presidency.

Iowa's seven electoral votes were huge in 2004, providing the Bush-Cheney ticket with a margin in case Republicans did worse than expected in three western battlegrounds of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Even if he lost two of these states, Iowa would have preserved President Bush's victory. If Republicans in their third shot could finally take Wisconsin from the Democrats, this would provide a cushion against even the loss of the "big" battleground of Ohio. That's why just holding Iowa and flipping Wisconsin into the GOP column would severely complicate Democratic strategy to get to 270 electoral votes.

But the big enchilada for the GOP is Minnesota. The Bush-Cheney ticket won 46% in Minnesota in 2000 and 48% in 2004. Governor Tim Pawlenty faces a tough reelection battle this year, but he's generally believed to have a slight edge. Assuming Mr. Pawlenty can take care of business this fall and remain reasonably popular through the summer of 2008, the 45-year old-will almost certainly be near the top of the short list for the eventual GOP Veep nominee.

Republican wins in the Midwest trio of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa would essentially force Democrats to have to flip both crucial battleground states of Florida and Ohio -- unless they were to make major inroads in the southwest quartet of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona (with 29 electoral votes).

Don't be surprised to see the Democrats settle on Denver for their convention (Denver and New York are the finalists) and also take a long, hard look hard at New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson for VP and maybe Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano if Senator Hillary Clinton is not the Democratic nominee.

Today around 2pm, news broke that Sens. "Smoot" Schumer (D-NY) and "Hawley" Graham (R-SC) gave up for now on their China bashing tariff of 27.5 percent. This is a very good thing indeed.

Placing a huge tariff barrier between American and Chinese trade would have the same effect as imposing a large tax on the consumers, businesses and investors of both countries. It would completely disrupt economic growth worldwide.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson deserves credit for getting this delay and preventing a vote in the Senate that surely would have passed with very bad economic symbolism.

Fortunately, there is no similar tariff bill in the House. Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham apparently will now work through the Senate Finance Committee where Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is generally opposed.

China is far from our best friend in world affairs, but the widening economic links between our two countries is a definite plus for prosperity as well as diplomacy.

There are three new generic polls out today that do not contain good news for Republicans. Hotline's number among likely voters has gone from a 40% - 40% tie in August, to a 13-point bulge for the Democrats, 46% - 33%. A FOX News release today gives the Dems an 11-point edge (49% - 38%) while Zogby has the Dems ahead 42% - 33%. All of this has bumped the RCP Generic Average back up into double digits, giving Democrats an 11.5% edge. This bounce back for Democrats in the generic numbers may be one of the reasons we have seen such little movement towards Republicans in the contested Senate races.

Alan Dershowitz slams The Guardian in today's Jerusalem Post:

The Guardian, which used to be a liberal British newspaper, has become the full-fledged Pravda of the British hard Left, especially when it comes to its one-sided bashing of Israel. Like Pravda, it will not publish alternative points of view, even when the alternative point of view seeks to correct willful mis-statements of fact. It's gotten to the point where a reader simply cannot trust the credibility of the reporting.

I thought the Beeb already held the mantle of being the "Pravda of the Britsh hard left." I guess if you throw in Robert Fisk's home paper, The Independent, there's enough market share to support three Pravdas in the UK.

There has been some talk in the past few days about the Senate - as opposed to the House - switching hands this year. This is an interesting possibility - counterintuitive to the current conventional wisdom, and therefore, as Mickey Kaus noted this week, a strong candidate for the next conventional wisdom.

Of course, this idea has the advantage of squaring with historical precedence. It is always theoretically more satisfying when the most recent observation falls into line with previous ones. And the history of the Senate and House is that the latter only switches when the former does. I made mention of this in the Spring, but in retrospect I believe I made too much of this point. An important factor in Senate elections, one of which I failed to take full account, are the specific seats on the table. Sometimes the class of Senate seats that are up for a vote strongly favor one party over another. This happened in 1986 - which was an otherwise ho-hum year, except that all of the weak candidates who were swept into office along with Reagan in 1980 faced the electorate without the Gipper at the top of the ticket.

What seems to be driving this new intuition about the Senate? Much of it has to do with Virginia and Tennessee both ostensibly on the table. These are new phenomena, though the only truly surprising result is how poor George Allen has been on the campaign trail thus far. A lot of rust has developed since 2000 when he defeated Robb. As for Tennessee, I received a tip-off about it coming on the table after all the complimentary media profiles of Harold Ford over the course of the summer. The press seemed to have been looking for any excuse to get that race into the game. The fact that the more moderate Bob Corker won the GOP nomination dampened the media's hope that this one would be competitive. However, a few late summer robo-polls and...presto! They were back in business! Of course, just as these two races have emerged, so also have New Jersey and Maryland. Thus, the net number of vulnerable seats has remained constant. So, this inclines me to the suspicion that there is something more than numbers moving people to speculate that the Senate is on the table.

Gentleman and scholar David Adesnik of Oxblog responds to my post from yesterday with a post of his own questioning the suggestion that "un-smart partisanship is a problem mainly of the left."

A couple of quick points. First, I think David misses the mark by suggesting what I wrote could possibly be interpreted as "invective" (definitions include: 1) vehement or violent denunciation, 2) a railing accusation; vituperation, 3) an insulting or abusive word or expression). I also think he did a bit of disservice by clipping my quote to exclude the two reasons I list that drive a lot of the current partisan anger on the left. My point isn't that it's bad that the most active partisans on the left have been given a voice, but rather that the circumstances under which that voice has been found - the agonizing losses in 2000/2004 and the war in Iraq - have contributed to the tone of the partisan discourse on the left.

Did I mean to imply this type of "un-smart" partisanship is exclusive to the left? Certainly not. And it's not hard to imagine that if the blogosphere had exploded five or ten years earlier, right wing partisans would have been the ones struggling with the problem of managing their visceral dislike - hatred, even - of William Jefferson Clinton. Some still do.

But it's also hard to dispute that if you compare the largest and most highly partisan sites on both the left and the right, there is an obvious difference in style, tone and substance. Markos Moulitsas and Duncan Black seem to revel in the use of obscenities and of ridiculing people who disagree with them with terms like "wankers." Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake tosses around names like "Rape Gurney Joe" to describe Joe Lieberman - not to mention depicts him in blackface - and occasionally uses language so foul it would make a long-haul trucker blush (see her reference to Ana Marie Cox in this post as one example).

Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin and the guys at Powerline operate at very high-octane levels of conservative partisanship, to be sure, but they almost always manage to do so within the bounds of reasonable discourse. That doesn't necessarily make their ideas or arguments any "smarter" than the ones that appear on left-wing sites, and they are often criticized - fairly in some cases, unfairly in others, in my opinion - for the partisanship of their views. But you certainly won't see Hugh Hewitt featuring a post on his site titled "Wanker of the Day."

David continues in his post to write something on which we can both agree:

After the discussion was over, I went over to Tom and made the following suggestion. Smart partisanship is partisanship that keeps the interest of the other side. Smart partisanship is something you disagree with, but feel that you have to read because you want to know what the best argument is for the other side.

That's the ideal I keep in my head when I blog. When I write, I keep an imaginary not-me on my shoulder that has the opposite opinion about everything. My goal isn't to get him to agree with me, but to prevent him for saying "This is a waste of time."

Of course, this method hasn't prevented lots of dumb partisanship from showing up on this blog. But I do believe that this ideal has helped make OxBlog a site that attempts to engage its critics rather than one that vents its authors' spleen.

Absolutely. I try to keep up with what Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Chris Bowers, Kevin Drum and others write precisely because they try (for the most part) to make smart, interesting arguments. Hopefully, they continue to read conservative-leaning sites for the same reason.

There is smart partisanship on both sides, though as I said it seems to me there is more of the invective filled, less substantive variety on the left these days. In my view that type of partisanship is easier to dismiss and in some ways counterproductive to goals of the people who practice it. But that's just my opinion.

The Des Moines Register reports on the Dems' big push for early voting through absentee ballots:

More than 50,000 Democrats had requested ballots, according to the Iowa secretary of state's office as of Wednesday, compared with just more than 11,000 Republicans, continuing a trend by Democrats in Iowa of emphasizing early voting.

However, later on we read this:

In the past two statewide elections, Democrats have run up early leads with absentee votes.

In 2002, they held on to win the governorship, re-electing Tom Vilsack.

However, their early-voting edge was erased in 2004, when President Bush carried the state in his re-election bid.

"A large part of our effort is turnout," said Cullen Sheehan, executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa. "We're trying to get Republicans to vote.

"If they do it early, that's great. Our success has been to get people out on Election Day."

The Iowa Governor's race between Republican Jim Nussle and Democrat Chet Culver is an absolute dead heat right now.

A new Keystone Poll in Pennsylvania 6 has Rep. Jim Gerlach ahead 44% - 41% among likely voters. This follows on the back of a partisan poll by Public Opinion Strategies showing Gerlach ahead by 11 points. Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum trails in all of the polls in his Senate race, which is what you would expect for the most vulnerable incumbent Senator this cycle. Gerlach is certainly one of the top five House incumbents the Democrats are targeting; and this latest poll showing him running ahead of Lois Murphy is not exactly good news for their overall prospects of winning the House.

Jim Gerlach's is rated the most vulnerable House incumbent on RCP's list and is #1 on the Hotline's Chuck Todd's list as well. If the Democrats expect to take over the House, this is a seat they probably have to win. If Gerlach is 50/50 to win on election day, Democrats are going to be hard pressed to net the 15 seats they need for control.

The recent polling evidence continues to support the point I made earlier this week (which the New York Times echoes today) that the Senate increasingly looks like a better opportunity for Democrats.

Senator Joe Lieberman leads by 10 points, 49% - 39%, over the Democrat Ned Lamont in a poll released this morning from Quinnipiac University. Poll Director Douglas Schwartz says: ""Ned Lamont has lost momentum. He's gained only two points in six weeks. He's going to have to do something different in the next six weeks or Sen. Joseph Lieberman stays in for another six years." In our opinion Lamont peaked about a week before the August primary and has been slowly losing altitude ever since. Ironically, it was Lieberman who came out of the primary with momentum which was hugely important as it served to mute the bump Lamont would have been expected to receive for pulling off the improbable upset.

The number that I find so problematic for Ned Lamont is 5%. That is the horserace number that the Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger has in this latest Quinnipiac. The other polling firms that have the Lieberman-Lamont horserace closer than Quinnipiac still have Schlesinger in the 3% - 7% range; Schlesinger's RCP Avg is 5%. Republicans and registered Independents make up over 65% of the electorate in Connecticut, and given Lieberman won 48% in the Democratic primary, Lamont is going to be very hard pressed to outgun Lieberman when the entire electorate will be voting in November.

The RCP Average in this race shows Lieberman ahead by 6.7%. Pundits can talk all they want about the anti-war sentiment in the Northeast and how Lieberman will lack the party infrastructure so important to getting the vote out, at the end of the day if the Republican nominee can't get into double-figures it is going to be very hard for Ned Lamont to win.

Good news (for a change) for George Allen in his Virginia Senate race. In the first poll in a couple of weeks, a new poll by SurveyUSA for WUSA-TV Washington DC and WDBJ-TV Roanoke gives Allen a five-point lead, 49% - 44%. All things considered this has to be seen as good news for the Allen campaign given the recent news coverage. The poll was taken Sunday - Tuesday while the latest scuttlebutt over accusations that he used the N-word in the 1970's was hitting in the media. Each individual day's polling was all over the place so it is clear there is a tremendous amount of volatility in this race.

But given the news flow for Allen the past month, the fact that Webb has actually lost ground from SurveyUSA's poll taken August 18-20 is not great news for his ultimate prospects in November. Webb can't expect the news flow/press coverage to continue to be this favorable from his point of view from here until the election, especially with Allen having the money to get his message up on air to counter a Washington media that is overwhelmingly hostile to his candidacy. I don't think the Allen people can breath easy though, this is only one poll and I'll be interested to see where some more polling pegs this race.

Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Ben Cardin brought in one of the biggest guns in the country for an endorsement :

"You gotta put this guy in the Senate," [Barack] Obama told a crowd of several hundred at the University of Maryland in the home county of the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black.

With the crowd chanting "U-ni-ty," Cardin appeared with several black officials from Maryland, including Mfume, the former congressman who lost to Cardin in a crowded primary on Sept. 12.

It's interesting to note that the event was staged in College Park and that Reuters reports there were only a "few black voters in the mostly white crowd." That would seem to suggest that the Cardin camp feels Obama's appeal is at least as great among liberal white suburbanites as it is with African-American voters.

Reuters:

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house canceled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.

"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."

Senator John McCain was kind enough to sit down with me for about twenty minutes in his office this morning - no small feat given the Chinese fire drill that's taking place in the Senate right now as Republicans race to finish a number of huge bills by the end of the week, and also because McCain was rushing off to attend the funeral of one of his dearest friends.

We touched on a variety of big issues like the NIE, Iraq, the military commission bill, immigration, and Republican prospects for the coming election. I'm hoping to have the full transcript of the interview available tomorrow.

That's the question we tried to tackle at the Pajamas Media event last night at the National Press Club. The gist of my remarks was that it is a very difficult, if not impossible question to answer. Indeed, I came to the conclusion that it's probably best to fall back on the answer people most often give when asked to define pornography: "you'll know it when you see it." Here are three observations I tried to make last night about partisanship.

In general, I think partisanship is a good thing. As the editor of a political web site whose mission is to seek out and publish the best political commentary, opinion, and analysis across a broad range of viewpoints, partisanship is often what gives force to an argument and makes it compelling.

That said, there is a difference between "smart partisanship" and a much less attractive alternative that relies on invective rather than argument and employs the widespread use of insults and obscenities. This is a problem the left continues to struggle with given that the new media revolution (to use a pretentious phrase) has taken place almost entirely in the last five years under the tenure of George W. Bush and given voice to a core of the most active liberal partisans who A) believe he wasn't legitimately elected in the first place - or legitimately reelected in 2004 - and who B) believe the President and his administration deliberately misled the country into the current war in Iraq.

One reason the question of "how partisan is too partisan" is almost impossible to answer is because the concept of partisanship is itself too subjective. The example I cited last night was the Swift Boat Veterans from the 2004 campaign. Basically half the country - meaning the 48% who voted for John Kerry - viewed the Swift Boat Veterans as an egregiously partisan attack. The other half of the country - or at least a good portion of the 51% who ended up voting for George W. Bush - thought it was perfectly legitimate, indeed newsworthy, that more than 100 of John Kerry's fellow Vietnam vets, including nearly all of his commanders, came forward and went on record to say that he was unfit to serve as Commander in Chief for a variety of reasons.

I think most would agree that if 100-plus members of the Texas Air National Guard had come forward in the same manner to denounce George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004, liberals would have had a much different opinion on the matter - and the media would have covered it extensively.

Another example is to look at what's currently happening in the Virginia Senate race. Many of the same folks who moaned and screeched about the Swift Boat Vets attack on John Kerry two years ago as too partisan see nothing untoward about the attack being leveled against George Allen - which essentially boils down to a "he said-she said" affair between Allen and one person who went on the record (supported by anonymous sources) alleging he used the n-word thirty-five years ago.

The final point I tried to make last night is that naked partisanship, even of the most extreme kind, is preferable to partisanship masquerading as objectivity. I was thinking specifically about Dan Rather's Memogate episode and also the recent "fauxtography" incidents during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. The idea that evidence can be manufactured, images enhanced, and that "fake but accurate" is a new standard for professional journalists are all deeply disturbing and corrosive results of partisanship and bias in the media.

In a broader sense, the whole notion of objectivity in the media has fallen away on partisan lines. Conservatives look at FOX News and find the coverage exactly as advertised ("fair and balanced") while liberals see FOX as a shameless propaganda machine and mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Liberals read the New York Times and believe they're getting an objective take on the news, conservatives see a paper thoroughly riddled by liberal partisanship engaged in an agenda-journalism crusade against the Bush administration.

There aren't any profound conclusions to draw - not by me anyway - except that when it comes to discussing "how partisan is too partisan," the left and the right will have to agree to disagree. It was a great event last night and I was honored to be included among such a distinguished panel of guests.

The April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate - about which there has been much spin and too little factual analysis - was declassified in part Tuesday at the order of the president. It followed the Sunday NYT story which began, "A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks." A more objective reading indicates that the sixteen intelligence agencies agreed that:

* Though US-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged Al-Queda and disrupted its operations the number and geographic dispersion of terrorists is increasing;

* The global terrorist movement is becoming more diffuse, adapting to the methods we're employing to fight it; and

* Europe is judged an important target by the jihadists.

More importantly, at least to the politics of the week, is the one paragraph that deals with Iraq. It says: (1) that the Iraq conflict has become a "cause celebre" for the jihadists; (2) that resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world does cultivate supporters of the jihad movement; and (3) that if jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves and are perceived as having failed, this will reduce or eliminate Iraq as a recruiting tool.

The report also says that the recent condemnations of terrorist actions by Muslim clerics signal a trend that could grow into a religious counter to the jihadist ideology.

In short, the NIE confirms what the president has been saying for months. Iraq has become a central battle in the global war against terrorists because they believe it is one. If we are defeated there, the jihadists will be strengthened enormously and - conversely - if they lose, our strength is enhanced to at least as large an extent. Democrats, such as US congressional candidate Paul Hodes of New Hampshire, are reading the NIE through a politically clouded lens. Hodes is quoted in the Tuesday Washington Post as saying, "The report underscores that the longer Bush and his enablers...keep us in Iraq, the more we undermine our own security." Actually, it says no such thing.

Michael Barone recently penned an interesting piece that amplified a point that I made last week -- that the GOP seems peculiarly strong in some areas where Bush was weak in 2004, and peculiarly weak in some areas where Bush was strong.

Barone offers a tentative explanation that the political divisions that have defined America since roughly 1996 might be in motion. This might be true -- and I personally have thought that the "Red State/Blue State" dichotomy seems hewn into granite only because, in the chaos of the 24 hour news cycle, a month -- let alone eight years -- seems like an eternity. The problem is entirely on the side of the newsroom -- in America, it is very easy to have eight years of a phenomenon that does not amount to an indeliable element of American political existence. (We call that the Eisenhower Administration.) The news media and its pundits might not recognize that, but that's their problem.

I think that Barone's theory is interesting. I do not intend to dispute it here, for I think he might be on to something. My intention is to lay out a causal process that seems to exist in these districts that is independent of Barone's idea (of potential GOP trouble in rural America) or my idea discussed last week (of potential GOP trouble among Republican identifiers).

The set of races that are in conservative districts but are nevertheless on the table are all peculiar. We have IN 02, IN 08, IN 09, KY 04, NC 11, PA 10 and VA 02. Mr. Barone mentions CO 04, but Musgrave's vulnerability is really just due to the fact that she is a two-term representative** who only won with only 51% in 2004 and has drawn a (relatively) qualified and well funded challenger. She is in the lead in a bad year for her party -- which, for an incumbent like her, means that she is not really a peculiarity in need of explanation.

What of these 7 seats? Most of them seem to me to be explicable by the same causal process. On the one hand, partisanship is aiding the Republicans. On the other hand, the lack of a "personal vote" for the GOP incumbent (i.e. the type of vote that the House member enjoys because he/she is well-liked and widely regarded in the district) is aiding the Democrats. Ditto also is the national political environment, which I doubt is influencing vote choice directly in any appreciable manner -- but rather has brought forward top-tier challengers in 5 of these 7 races.

This dynamic seems to be playing out in two broad types of ways. So we'll take each type one at a time.

On the one hand -- in IN 09 and KY 04, former Democratic members of Congress are running to reacquire their seats. These two -- Baron Hill and Ken Lucas, respectively -- lost their seats in 2004. Hill lost outright to Mike Sodrel and Lucas chose to honor a term limits pledge and refrained from running. Both of the seats switched to the GOP because, I think it is fair to say, of the secular shift in rural areas from the "blue dog" Democrats to the Republicans. But they were two of the last seats to shift because of the quality of Democratic incumbents. The Democrats managed to win and/or hold these seats despite the secular trend in American politics. That says a lot about the two Democrats running -- they are of extremely high quality. Hill inherited the seat from Lee Hamilton -- and therefore won an open seat election in a conservative district. Lucas won the seat out from under the GOP when Jim Bunning ran for the Senate. The GOP only picked up the seat because he retired (temporarily, of course) and the Democrats nominated George Clooney's dad. So -- these are extremely high quality challengers.

Thus -- what we have in these two contests are two independent causal factors cutting sharply in two different directions. Sodrel and Davis both enjoy the advantage of district partisanship -- which is what yielded them the seats in the first place. However, they enjoy nothing of the "personal vote" that comes with incumbency because they are running against very strong challengers -- which is why the Democrats were able to keep the seats as long as they did. In the background here, of course, is the negative environment for the GOP -- which is undoubtedly what induced both Hill and Lucas to make another run for their old seats.

As for IN 08, NC 11, PA 10 -- all of these feature exceedingly weak incumbents who have run, in the past, relatively undisciplined campaigns and/or who have been generally undisciplined in their work to retain the steas. John Hostettler in IN 08 insists upon running the type of House campaign that went out of style when people started to buy a second television set. He raises no cash and eschews much of the professional advice upon which incumbents rely today. Charles Taylor in NC 11 has been haunted by ethics queries and is known to take controversial stands in Congress (like opposing a 9/11 memorial). Don Sherwood had an extramarital affair with a woman who eventually came to accuse him of abuse.

I think it no coincidence that the three weakest incumbents in the whole House are all in highly competitive races. There is a margin for error for incumbents in places like this that is greater than in swing or Democratic-leaning districts. You have some wiggle room to "be yourself" (for better or worse!). When your partisanship aligns with your district, there is relatively little pressure upon you. There is also the inclination to not run a full-time campaign and focus extensively upon reelection. This stands in sharp contrast to members like Bob Simmons, Jim Gerlach and Heather Wilson -- all of whom expect strong challengers and tight races, rain or shine. They are in full-time campaign mode and are highly disciplined members of Congress. Reelection stands at the forefront of their minds. Discipline is the name of the game.

But for many members, that is simply not the case. Reelection in a conservative district, after having served for a good long time, is less of a pressing concern for a Republican. I think that might explain the trouble of these 3. None of these men would do anything to intentionally diminish their chances of reelection -- my sense is that they just have not correctly assessed the risks that they could face in any given election, and have not ordered their campaign/governmental/personal existence as well as they should have. They never did the work to develop, or they put at risk, the personal vote that incumbents enjoy -- under the ostensible presumption that district partisanship would see them through.
In other words -- these 3 races, just as the prior 2, are explicable as being as close as they are because (a) the districts are very Republican, but (b) the Republican incumbents, for a variety of reasons, have failed to develop any kind of personal relationship with their constituents that is sufficiently large. The negative political environment forms the context that has given these members strong challenges.

That leaves IN 02, Chris Chocola, and VA 02, Thelma Drake. Both of them lack the kind of personal vote that the average incumbent enjoys, but they do not have the severe types of problems that characterize the members in these other districts. They should seem as safe as Musgrave seems, and right now they do not. Interestingly Moveon.org was in both districts early and seemed to have "softened" Chocola and Drake up. It seems that Drake is rebounding, and therefore we do not need to "explain" her (just as we do not need to explain Musgrave). However, Chocola seems to be faltering. I am not sure why. But, an explanation that captures the variation in 5 out of 6 races is not too bad.

My intuition is that this only offers a partial explanation. Weak incumbents who lack the personal vote should be in trouble - but 5 of these 7 seem to be in an obscene amount of trouble. Here is where Mr. Barone's theory about an emerging GOP problem in rural America might also be having an independent effect. It might also indicate a general softness for GOP candidates nationwide, which is what I hypothesized last week. My theory is still that the consensus estimate relies too heavily on these seats. Either the GOP will come home in sufficient numbers to bail out a few of these fellas, or Republicans in less conservative districts are in more trouble than we might apprehend.

**CORRECTION: The original version of this post incorrectly identified Congressman Musgrave as a freshman. She has been elected twice, in 2002 and 2004.

On the heels of last night's debate between Republican Rick O'Donnell and Democrat Ed Perlmutter in Colorado's 7th Congressional district, KUSA-TV is out with a new SurveyUSA poll showing Perlmutter with a commanding 17-point lead in the race, 54-37. That's a huge jump from the last SUSA poll in August showing the race a 45-45 tie. All caveats about putting too much stock in any given poll still apply, so be on the lookout for further polling to see if this race has really gotten away from O'Donnell.

I confess I don't have the attention span to sift through David Corn's response to Christopher Hitchens on Niger/yellowcake/Wilson/Plamegate and Hitchens' subsequent response to Corn. It sure looks interesting, though.

One noticeable difference this election versus the last cycle is the amount of spin both sides are generating. I'm on the mailing lists for Republican and Democratic Senatorial campaign committees and the Republican and Democratic House campaign committees. The amount of email these folks are sending out this year on a daily basis is staggering. Every possible event, detail, statement or gaffe is immediately pumped out via email under the most dramatic and accusatory headline imaginable.

As one might expect with both sides spinning so hard, every now and then one group will go a bridge too far. Today it happened to the DCCC, which just sent out an email leading off with the following:

"According to a new report by the National Association of Realtors, for the first time since April of 1995, around the time the GOP took over Congress, home prices have declined nationally, and are likely to continue to fall for the rest of the year. [emphasis added]

Presumably, the DCCC is trying to make the fatuous argument that Republicans are to blame for the current drop in housing prices, but instead they seem to have produced an advertisement crediting Republicans for the decade long housing boom.

Apparently, Josh Marshall doesn't think Larry Sabato needs to explain his n-word charge against George Allen, only that Allen needs to respond to it personally. This is NOT the way it's supposed to work, and I'm surprised Josh doesn't know better.

Josh and I graduated from Princeton University together in 1991. I didn't know Josh at all in school, but that hardly matters. Suppose I went on national television tomorrow and said that 15 years ago he had used the n-word in college. And when the interviewer of the show asked me how I knew Josh had used the word, or whether he'd ever used the word in front of me I responded, "I'm not going to get into that."

I'm sure Josh would agree that would be unacceptable. Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting Larry Sabato is lying. What I am suggesting is that Sabato should have to back up an accusation like the one he made, and Josh Marshall should be asking Larry Sabato to produce the goods before asking George Allen to respond to the charge directly.

UPDATE: The USA Today blog reports: USA TODAY political reporter Jill Lawrence spoke with Sabato this morning. She reports he told her that he never heard Allen use the n-word, but believes the future senator did because "people I know and trust" have told him it happened.

The Washington Times offered an article today about improving GOP prospects that, to me anyway, seemed long on conclusions and short on evidence. Their thesis:

There has been a palpable shift in the mood in Washington in recent weeks. No longer are insiders in both parties sharing predictions of a Democratic rout of Republicans.

Some on both sides had expected an election debacle for the Republicans, driven by the Iraq war, high gas prices and the perception that a Republican-led Washington can neither shoot nor spend straight.

Now those perceptions have changed.

First off, let me just note the strategic use of metaphor in this lead. This is metaphor-as-bet-hedging, which is typical of the press. No longer is there going to be a "rout" of Republicans. No longer are people expecting an "election debacle." This is interesting because -- what exactly is a "rout"? Is it 15 or 30 seats? Or 50 or 70? What is an "election debacle"? Is it that the GOP merely loses control? Or is it maybe that they lose control so badly that they cannot reacquire it in 2008? Who knows! What we do know is that nobody can point to anything specific in this article on November 8 and declare that the Times was wrong! Why? Because the Times has chosen to couch its thesis only in metaphor. One thing that has turned me sour about the press and its pundits is this kind of strategic use of the metaphor -- it subtly and quietly introduces ambiguity where clarity is possible and preferable. I think that this happens because no news outlet wants to put itself on the line, but they also do not want to appear as though they are not putting itself on the line. So -- they hedge their bets by way of metaphor.

Anyway, I will get off the literary high horse and get on with the argument. As I said, the evidence that the Times provides does not seem to me to justify the enthusiasm among DC Republicans.

For instance, here is something offered up by Ken Mehlman that the Times accepts without question:

Comparing the 2006 midterm elections to previous major shifts, Mr. Mehlman says he sees none of the signs that preceded those landslides. In 1974, following the Watergate scandal, there was a surge in the Democratic primary-voter turnout and a decline in Republican voter turnout. The reverse was true before the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.

So far this year, there has been no indication of a Democratic surge. In 36 of 39 primaries, the Democratic turnout has been lower than the average of the past 20 years. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Vermont had higher-than-average Democratic turnouts this year.

The Times goes on to imply, though not by way of more Mehlman quotations, that this indicates that Democrats are not activating their base voters as well as they did in 1974. There are two major problems with this. First, they do not need to. They Democrats "only" need 15 seats. Provided that base amplification has a linear relationship with final seat swings, they need to amp the base by a little less than 1/3 the amplification of 1974 or 1994, all else being equal. The Democrats netted 48 seats in 1974, the GOP netted 52 in 1994. The Democrats only need 15 this time around. So -- what the Times notes might actually be consistent with a Democratic takeover.

Second, the argument that low primary turnout is a sign of a relatively placid base does not square with what we know about primary elections. Primaries do not tend to have high turnout because voters are so excited for November that they just have to go out and vote in March. They are not like football preseason. They tend to have high turnout because there are competitive races that attract voter attention. And competitive races in the primary tend to occur when more than one strategic, high quality politician see a good chance at actually getting into Congress, and throw their hats into the ring.

So -- why were Democratic primary races relatively uncompetitive this year? There are at least two reasons, one that favors the GOP and one that favor