Digging In The Dirt

Bill Shaheen, who by the way is the husband of the DSCC's preferred candidate for Senate in New Hampshire (and this is all the more reason to support Jay Buckey over Jeanne Shaheen), just playedsome dirty pool on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Billy Shaheen contrasted Obama's openness about his past drug use -- which Obama mentioned again at a recent campaign appearance in New Hampshire -- with the approach taken by George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, when he ruled out questions about his behavior when he was "young and irresponsible."

Shaheen said Obama's candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions. "It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen said. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

And opening for Democratic dirty tricks, it appears.

Look, Obama's been candid about his prior drug use since before he was a Senate candidate. We have a President right now who is a reformed drug and alcohol abuser, and America has shrugged their shoulders. The President BEFORE that, who happens to be somebody's husband, admitted to smoking pot (but he didn't inhale...). Clinton's base in Iowa is older, and maybe they're playing on images of young druggies to scare people into voting against Obama. That's disgusting.

I think that the Clinton campaign is freaking out because the dynamic of the race is clear. If Obama wins Iowa, he sweeps the early states. Same with Clinton. If Edwards manages to win Iowa, it's a crapshoot, and Clinton probably has the upper hand. The Clinton directive is to stop Obama in Iowa, otherwise their inevitability argument is dead and buried. So they'll go as low as they can to do it, trying to deny students the franchise in the state, and now bringing up the spectre of Obama selling drugs. It's beneath any Democrat, and it's an implicit racial appeal besides. This is an outrage.

Hard To Be Pessimistic

I know that this is very early and polls at this point for elections in November 2008 are pretty meaningless. But there are a host of encouraging signs in the race for the US Senate.

Recent polling shows Democrats in an even better position in the Senate at this point in the 2008 cycle than they were at this point in the 2006 cycle. Here are just some examples:

Colorado: Schaffer internal poll, 8/29/07: Udall (D) 45%-40% Schaffer (R). And this is an internal poll for Schaffer.
Minnesota: Rasmussen, 9/06/07: Coleman (R-inc) 46%--41% Franken (D) / 42% Ciresi.(D)
New Hampshire: CNN / WMUR, 7/09/07: Shaheen 54%--38% Sununu (R-inc. Other Democrats are very close to Sununu-with the margin of error.
Virginia: Rasmussen, 9/05/07: Warner (D) 54%--34% Gilmore (R)
For the sake of comparison, here are the first polls I could find from each of the Senate pickups Democrats made in 2006 (from the subscriber section of Polling Report):

Missouri: Research 2000, 1/18/2006: McCaskill (D) 47%--44% Talent (R-inc)
Montana: Mason-Dixon, 12/15/05: Burns (R, inc) 49%--35% Tester (D)
Ohio: Columbus Dispatch, 11/03/05: Brown (D) 35%--31% DeWine (R-inc) (note: the final poll from this organization, four days before the election, showed Brown ahead by 26 points, even though he only won by 12%. This poll is conducted by mail)
Pennsylvania: Several polls showing Casey (D) up by double-digits over Santorum (R-inc)
Rhode Island: Brown University, 9/11/05: Chafee (R-inc) 38%--25% Whitehouse (D)

We'll know by the end of the month if Mark Warner will indeed jump into the 2008 race in Virginia, and Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire (though I think anyone can beat Sununu, and Jay Buckey is a better choice in my view). If they do enter the race as expected, that's three states with Democrats comfortably in front, as opposed to one in 2006. And there are a number of other places on the board in play. Nebraska will be an open seat with Chuck Hagel's retirement, and if Bob Kerrey gets into the race Democrats may be favored there. And then there's Maine, with Tom Allen going up against Susan Collins. And Minnesota. And an open seat in Idaho. And Alaska with corrupt incumbent Ted Stevens. These races usually tighten with the incumbent weakening as time goes on, not the opposite.

The Senate GOP is already managing expectations.

Anonymous GOP Operative:
"About the only safe Republican Senate seats in '08 are the ones that aren't on the ballot," a GOP operative with extensive experience in Senate races said. "I don't see even the rosiest scenario where we don't end up losing more seats." [Washington Post, 9/2/07]

Unnamed Republican Senators:
"Republican Senators are now talking about losing four seats in 2008." [Evans-Novak Political Report, 8/29/07]

It is shaping up like Republican leadership expects a four-seat net loss to be the best-case scenario. I expect we'll see more commentary from Republicans along these lines as the races further develop.

55 seats would represent the outer edge of what Republicans had during the Gingrich Revolution. That's not only possible, with some luck a filibuster-proof 60 is within reach, certainly by 2010 (when more Republicans are up than Democrats once again).

More And Better Democrats

Joe Trippi came out and endorsed Jay Buckey yesterday for the US Senate in New Hampshire. We all know that the Republican brand is trashed and that 2008 offers a unique opportunity to get elected not just Democrats, but progressive Democrats who aren't wedded to the power structure in Washington. I like anyone's website that has a solar panel on the masthead, and Buckey seems like an intelligent problem-solver who has some good ideas, especially when it comes to technology and energy.

Democrats are not ever going to have the message discipline of the Republicans, nor should we strive for it. A big tent airs their differences in public, and then after the primary process comes together, while still holding the elected officials accountable. Jeanne Shaheen is the prohibitive favorite in New Hampshire (though not yet a candidate, she polls 28 points ahead of incumbent John Sununu), but she supported the war and the Bush tax cuts in 2002. Now, 2002 is a world away from 2008, but it shouldn't be enough just to elect a Democrat. Values and policies should come into play. Otherwise, this moment will have passed with a bunch of Democrats in office who are cautious, nervous, and end up reverting back to the mushy middle. I agree with Chris Bowers that it's hard to know what you're getting into:

One problem progressive, grassroots activists face is that we simply do not always know how the people we help elect will act once in office. In fact, there might not be a way to know that for certain. Campaign rhetoric is often intentionally vague, and policy positions laid out on candidate websites are virtually never exactly like laws that end up being enacted once people are in office. The truth is that it is easy to see what you want in a candidate, and that candidates have a vested interest in trying to look appealing to a wide range of activists and voters with whom they may have actual disagreements. This makes it very easy to think you are, to use unfortunately economic language for a moment, "purchasing" something very different than you actually are with your precious activist time and money. And that goes for a lot of candidates beyond Clinton or McNerney. It often feels difficult to know what you are going to get from anyone you help elect to Congress.

The point I want to make is that this peaks more to the difficulty of figuring out where anyone's "core" is during a campaign than of Democratic candidates flip-flopping. Maybe this is simply what McNerney was like all along, and we just didn't notice (although he did say that he was a Barbara Boxer Democrat during the campaign). Even though I am definitely disappointed, I'm still glad to have helped him, in my own small way, be elected to Congress. I am still trying to both figure out the key signs to know how someone will be "on your side" once s/he takes office and how to blog about elections from a progressive Democratic perspective, and not just a partisan Democratic perspective. I hope to improve on this front, because I believe that choosing progressive candidates in primaries is one key to electing a more progressive governing majority.

This is difficult, but when someone comes out and undermines progressive principles with their rhetoric, you know that they're not likely to do an about-face after the primary. In other words, it's easier to know who your friends AREN'T than who they are. I don't think electability comes into play in this time when Republicans are dead in the water and the progressive movement has the money, energy and ground troops any Democrat would need to help get elected. I think candidates need to be looked at on the merits, and when those like Jerry McNerney stray from those values after getting to Washington, they need to hear about it.