Four months ago, I said of House GOP prospects:

We are probably looking at another year of a net gain of 30 seats for Democrats, and perhaps more than that depending on how the public mood changes over the summer with gas prices continuing to rise. 

In light of the financial crisis, McCain’s worsening numbers and intense anti-GOP sentiment, it seems that my guess of a 30-seat loss was probably far too conservative.  We are now looking at losses in many districts that were once considered Republican-leaning or even safe.  Losses are more likely to be in the neighborhood of 40-48 seats thanks in part to erosion of Republican support in such reliably safe seats as NM-02 and Michelle Bachmann’s self-immolation.  Disaster scenarios might involve net losses of 70, but that is not all that likely. 

Regardless, if Virgil Goode, the representative in my old stomping grounds of Prince Edward County in Virginia, is considered vulnerable, the GOP is in truly desperate straits.  It’s strange to think that Goode only ten years ago starting making his journey from being a Democrat to independent to Republican, only to find himself on the verge of being thrown out for identifying with that party.  If anything, from what I understand this new Politico story is understating the extent of Republican problems.  This does not begin to address the difficulties that some ostensibly favored California and Arizona Republicans are facing.  Lungren, once considered the rising star of the California GOP not that long ago, may not be re-elected in CA-03; Rohrabacher, a fixture of the California right, is also vulnerable in CA-46.  Obviously, the possibility of Shadegg’s defeat in “reddest” Arizona is startling.  Even the few pick-up opportunities in districts lost in ‘06 because of scandal will barely offset the huge losses that are coming.  The Senate elections are looking similarly bleak, but will probably result in no more than a net gain of eight seats in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire, Alaska, Oregon, Minnesota and North Carolina.  My guess is that Wicker, Chambliss and McConnell squeak out victories despite their many difficulties, but not by much.  The disaster scenario entails all eleven vulnerable seats flipping.  This would mark something as close to total repudiation of a major party as any we have seen in two consecutive postwar election cycles.

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The last two months have been instructive about what many people on the right choose to call elitism and populism.  We have learned that expecting public officials to answer questions from the press on a regular basis is a function of media elitism; a candidate’s lack of transparency and availability for press conferences is proof of populist disdain for elites.  Fortunately, it has been made clear that a supporter of the bailout and a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants is the populist firebrand, while opponents of both who point out her utterly conventional establishment views are deeply out of touch with “the base” whom she somehow champions.  When a politician abuses her office and violates state ethics rules, that is evidently just another example of sticking it to the system, while attempting to hold her accountable for her misleading and false statements about her record is proof that we dastardly elitists are deeply out of touch.  So according to these standards, populism is unreflecting attachment to the status quo wrapped in secrecy and misrepresentations, and elitism is defined by efforts to hold politicians accountable to their constituents and to demand that they serve the interests of those constituents.  No wonder people hate those lousy elitists.        

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Conor responds to Ledeen:

It isn’t healthy when you’re country is fighting a war, and the bulk of the population can forget about it entirely, though it is costing them blood, treasure and foregone opportunities to make us safer from other threats. But isn’t it a bit odd to say the media aren’t reporting on Iraq because “it’s good for Bush” when in fact the Iraq War is a winning issue for Democrats?

This is related to what I said below.  One of the things that I found a bit baffling about McCain’s ability to keep the race competitive for as long as he did was that the public had overwhelmingly rejected continuing the Iraq war in 2006, yet McCain made the “surge” one of the central planks of his campaign.  Indeed, McCain made a point of bragging about his desire to keep the war going as long as necessary and he kept reminding voters that if Obama had had his way the war would already be over by now.  He didn’t put it that way, but that was the message he was delivering.  It is pretty rare when your opponent makes it one of his main preoccupations to remind voters that you share their view on a major policy question.  This was a colossal blunder on McCain’s part, but it is the kind of blunder that a candidate will inevitably make when he and all of his supporters keep insisting that Iraq is a winning issue for them when the exact opposite is true.  No doubt many of them believe it, just as they genuinely believe that McCain is much better prepared to be President–that’s why they’re McCain supporters.  (There has to be some reason for it, I suppose.)  But the certainty that Iraq and the “surge” are winning issues is just like the certainty that Palin is and will continue to be a sensational, popular national candidate or the certainty that Joe the Plumber/”spread the wealth” are a killer combination or the certainty that more aggressively tying Obama to past associates will bring him down: the people who already believe this seem to assume that a majority of the public will respond to each of these things more or less as they do, and they begin to interpret everything from media coverage to campaign tactics to daily events accordingly.   

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Ross remains convinced that Biden’s remarks were a gaffe and a very bad one at that:

He specifically highlighted Obama’s youth as a reason to expect a “generated crisis to test the mettle of this guy,” and specifically compared him to John F. Kennedy - whose perceived inexperience (and poor initial impression on the world stage) was supposedly one of the contributing factors in the Russian decision to send missiles to Cuba. It’s true that all Presidents should expect to get their mettle tested in their first year in office, and it’s true that John McCain’s years working on foreign-policy issues in Washington won’t exempt him from that rule. And maybe that’s what Biden meant to say. But the words he actually uttered seemed intended to cite his running mate’s youth and relative inexperience as a reason why Obama, in particular, would be likely to face an international crisis in his first six months.

I will grant that Biden wasn’t making a generic statement that Presidents often face international challenges early in their first year, but was making the (overconfident?) claim that because Obama is about to be elected we can expect President Obama to face such a challenge.  This still seems unremarkable considering the instability in a number of regions where Washington either does or claims to have an interest.  He also said that Obama is 47 years old (this is true) and brilliant (many people would agree), so Biden probably thought the latter was reassuring to anyone concerned about Obama’s inexperience.  Before that, though, he compared him to Kennedy.  The Kennedy comparison is where things get tricky.  It’s a bit like comparing Bush to Truman in that the comparison is either a gross insult or a huge compliment depending on your opinion of Truman. 

If you believe the hype about Truman, it means that Bush will one day be regarded as a wise and far-seeing President who laid the foundations for the prosecution of the so-called Long War, or if you judge Truman primarily on his generally poor decisions in office you will regard Bush as Trumanesque in the worst sense, a failure and an embarrassment.  In this case, I expect that Biden embraces the mythology about President Kennedy as much as most Democrats, so that when he compares Obama to Kennedy he likely does not have the failed summit in Vienna or the Bay of Pigs in mind, and he is probably not thinking of how the Vienna summit and failed Cuba attack directly invited and led to the Missile Crisis.  In this mythology that Biden is repeating, ”the world” just decided to test Kennedy, as if his actions had nothing to do with bringing on that test. 

The funny thing about this mini-controversy is that McCain has reacted with incredulity that Biden would have said this and seems horrified that this has not become a bigger problem for Obama.  In McCain’s eyes, Obama is the erratic, inconsistent one, so why would you want him to be President at a time of crisis?  Of course, that’s the central argument of McCain’s entire campaign: he is the steady, experienced hand who will pilot the ship safely through the storm.  The trouble is that he has repeatedly shown that this isn’t true.  McCain can insist all he likes that his election will not invite international challenges, but the far more troubling thing about McCain is that fewer and fewer people trust him to respond responsibly if those challenges were to arise.  Had Biden said these things two months ago, they might have had some impact.  However, after having compared the responses of the two men over the last two or three months to at least a couple major crises, a majority would probably prefer a President who will be challenged and proves to be better-suited to that challenge than a President who is able to get by on bluster and reputation for a year or two but is completely unsuited to leading in a crisis when it comes.  Of course, none of that guarantees that Obama will be successful, but there is more reason to think that of him than about his opponent, and one way to make that contrast without attacking McCain by name is to remind his audience that the world is volatile and dangerous.  

The interesting thing about what Biden said is that it reinforced the contrast between the two candidates in a way that undermines McCain’s central argument, because only McCain’s loyal partisans now believe him to be the safe pick who could offer reassuring, stable leadership.  This reminds me of one of the striking things about Obama’s selection of Biden and Obama’s campaign for the last year and a half: Obama has made the Democratic ticket the ticket focused on foreign policy and national security to a much greater degree than past tickets, and he has campaigned throughout the cycle on the assumption that foreign policy is actually one of his strengths despite his lack of experience.  Whether he meant to or not, Biden has done something unusual for a Democrat in emphasizing the dangers and potential threats in the world, which reflects a similar sort of confidence that the Democratic ticket is simply better when it comes to foreign policy. 

This is virtually incomprehensible to the GOP candidates and their supporters, who keep assuming that this is a major liability for Obama.  In a lot of the news and blog reaction to this story, you can see many journalists and liberal bloggers getting back into the “defensive crouch,” as if to say, “Don’t talk about foreign threats, you idiot!  We always lose when we talk about that!  Don’t remind people how inexperienced Obama is!”  Perhaps in a very different world, they might have a point, but this mini-controversy is electorally much less important than it might otherwise be because national security voters make up a much smaller portion of the electorate than those voting on economic issues.  Most of the national security voters had already reflexively aligned themselves with McCain long ago (which I suspect is a function of how many Republicans place national security as their top priority, rather than being a result of any obvious McCain edge on this subject), so it’s not as if Biden is going to drive away any votes by saying this.  Even Rasmussen’s latest finding, which does show that 59% are concerned about a crisis early in an Obama Presidency, shows that the public is evenly divided on who can be trusted more in an international crisis: 49% say McCain and 48% say Obama.  If it were at all obvious that McCain is better-suited to handling international crises, the numbers would not be that close and then Biden’s remarks might have been significant enough to be worth spending all this time discussing.      

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The conservative movement at the time was disillusioned, and fearful that they’d need “time in the wilderness” in order to rethink and reform itself. Reagan was viewed as a mixed success at best — really! [bold mine-DL] The book’s third chapter is titled “The Failure of the Reagan Gambit,” and it details all the ways in which Reagan, the supposed small-government hero, disappointed conservatives by failing to reduce the size of federal government. Frum’s criticisms of Reagan aren’t quite as harsh as current complaints about Bush II, but they’re eerily similar. ~Peter Suderman

Peter’s own description of Reagan as the “supposed small-government hero” is telling, because it shows the degree to which we have reconciled ourselves to the reality that Reagan the Goldwaterite got lost along the way or perhaps was never as intent on shrinking the size of the federal government as many of his supporters hoped.  Reagan was a mixed success, which was a lot better than some of the failures and complete wrecks that have followed since, but I think this is even more readily apparent to us today than it was in the ’90s when the Reagan mythology was already being constructed.  The power of that mythology and the Reagan nostalgia that has gripped the GOP and conservatives since his passing have served to discourage reflection and self-criticism, as if all we needed to do was to get right with Reagan and then all would be well.  To a large extent, that ignored the extent to which Reagan the President had not been right with the Reagan the Myth.  

As with Bush, one of the main things conservatives could look back on with satisfaction was the reduction in income taxes, which was obviously much more dramatic and significant under Reagan.  In foreign affairs, it was truly a mixed bag, and this would be true regardless of which side of the debate you were on: nuclear arms reductions went along with needless deployments, questionable backing of guerrilla forces in various flashpoints around the globe and rather dodgy arms deals took place alongside some important public diplomacy and covert support for dissidents.  On immigration, Reagan signed off on a disastrous amnesty that Bush was not able to repeat; in this one respect, Reagan was demonstrably worse than Bush.  That being said, Reagan left office as a popular President presiding over generally good economic times who quickly became a widely-respected former President, and most of the conservative discontent in the early ’90s was focused on his rather squishier successor in the midst of an economic downturn.  Things are clearly much worse for the GOP and conservatives today than they were in 1992.  Management, competence, responsibility–all of these words that might have once been associated with the GOP no longer are, and Republicans find themselves largely discredited in the eyes of the majority in both foreign affairs and economic policy. 

It is fair to say that Republicans–and conservatives–have not faced a situation like this one since the eve of the 1964 landslide loss.  While the result will not be that lopsided, this will probably be the second-worst defeat of a Republican presidential ticket since WWII, and it will be the first time in over a century that Republicans are not going to win an open presidential election.  Unlike Goldwater 1964, however, McCain has no coherent message and leaves no legacy to be seized on later.  There are times when parties lose elections badly but find a coherent set of arguments that can make them competitive soon thereafter, and then there is the case of the Tories after 1997 as they stumbled and bumbled from one leader to the next as obsessed with Europe as McCain and the rest of the GOP leadership have been obsessed with earmarks.  The GOP’s alienation of the rising cohort of 18-29 year olds, which it was always going to have difficulty with because of demographic and cultural changes within that cohort, is going to reverberate for decades to come, even though it is the youngest voters who have the greatest incentives to respond to a new agenda of entitlement reform and fiscal responsibility.  The GOP is going to find itself increasingly saddled with ageing Boomer voters who will reject the kind of policy innovation that is needed to offer a coherent alternative.  

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There seems to be an emerging consensus that Biden said something that was both obviously true and supposedly very politically damaging when he warned/predicted/promised that there would be a serious international testing of Obama once he becomes President.  Via Ben Smith, Biden said:

It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.” 

At first glance, this seems wholly unremarkable, as there are several places around the world where such a crisis might occur (e.g., Pakistan, Iraq, etc.), and several others where an opportunistic foreign government or terrorist group might think it has a window of opportunity to take advantage of the transfer of power (e.g., North Korea, FARC in Colombia, etc.). New administrations in the recent past have had to face serious crises within the first six to twelve months of taking office.  Within three months of becoming President, Mr. Bush had been faced with a serious international incident with the Chinese, and by the end of the year the administration was responding to the 9/11 attacks and organizing the military and diplomatic response.  Obviously, the massive security failures that made the 9/11 attacks possible do not inspire confidence in government competence generally, but it is unremarkable to say that there will be a crisis or even a “generated crisis.”  What is a “generated crisis” after all if not another regime or group trying to take advantage of what it sees as an opportunity to gain one of its objectives?

So why is this supposed to be something Biden shouldn’t say?  From what I have seen, Biden’s remarks are supposed to be damaging because they focus the public’s mind on national security, which is still officially McCain’s preferred ground, and because this is supposed to sow doubts in the minds of voters about whether Obama is, in fact, a safe choice and someone capable of handling such a crisis.  This is an odd thing to worry about, since his relatively more measured, sane responses to both the war in Georgia and the financial crisis and his successful handling of foreign policy questions in the debates seem to have removed the doubts from most persuadable voters, while McCain’s bellicose response to Russian actions and his ridiculous flailing in September made clear to most people why they don’t want McCain leading the response in any crisis, generated or not.  So Biden’s gaffe seems “epic” to those who thought that the “surge” was a winning issue for McCain, but not to anyone else.  

Another way of interpreting the remarks is to imagine what might have happened if they had been uttered in a parallel universe.  Here’s Ambinder:

If the economy weren’t collapsing, if Barack Obama’s national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then one can envision a scenario where Biden’s comments would be given a gloss a la Gerald Ford’s freeing Eastern Europe.

So…in a world where everything is different from the real world, Biden’s comments might have caused the Obama campaign a lot of grief.  Possibly.  But why should it matter in electoral terms in this world?   

What is remarkable about what Biden was saying as he addressed a crowd of Seattle Obama fans is that he was telling a progressive crowd bluntly that a President Obama is probably going to use military force in the early months in response to a crisis or foreign conflict.  Biden was telling them that it is going to seem completely unnecessary and contrary to everything Obama voters think they are getting when they elect him.  What could he have meant when he says that the administration is going to need the help of these Seattle progressives (and others like them) “in the community”?  My guess is that he was saying that all of the antiwar progressives who have flocked to Obama are going to be deeply disillusioned by Obama’s response to said crisis and there is a danger that the administration will become politically isolated as Obama’s core supporters lose confidence in him at a supposedly critical juncture. 

Ambinder’s comparison with Ford’s blunder is worth considering a little bit more.  The trouble with Ford’s statement about Soviet control of eastern Europe was that it a) was wrong and b) seemed to confirm the worst interpretations of the administration’s actions at the Helsinki Conference.  It wasn’t just that Ford slipped up and said the wrong thing, but he vigorously defended his claim in his answer to the follow-up question, as if he believed seriously that the Soviets did not dominate their satellites in Europe.  Of course, Ford was attempting to defend the Accords’ language about state sovereignty and territorial integrity and make it seem as if detente did not essentially cede to the Soviets their control over their sphere of influence, when that was, of course, the de facto state of affairs.  The purpose of detente policy was to reduce U.S.-Soviet tensions, which the Helsinki Accords did help in doing, but the trouble that Ford had here was that he was defending quite vehemently a polite diplomatic fiction that everyone knew to be largely meaningless in reality.  Indeed, Ford’s blunder is almost the exact opposite of what Biden has said–Ford blundered politically by maintaining a (necessary?) diplomatic fiction, while Biden rather undiplomatically stated the obvious reality.    
   

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Ross asks:

Another thing on this subject - is opposition to wealth-spreading in principle really now a litmus test for being a conservative? I thought that being on the right meant that you wanted a welfare state that’s small in size and limited in scope - that’s what I signed up for, at least - and the most just and reasonable way to shrink and/or restrain the American welfare state that I can see is to make it more redistributive, rather than less so.

I suppose a friendly way to reply to this would be to say that someone who wants a welfare state that’s “small in size and limited in scope” is on the right, but that is not why he would be identified as being on the right, except by comparison to those who want universal entitlements and who speak of government support in terms of rights.  Nonetheless, Ross’ frustration with McCain’s schizophrenic hatred of socialism (or as McCain has been quoted as saying: “we loves redistribution of wealth, we hates it!”) is understandable.  As I noted before, labeling Obama as the wealth-spreading candidate is not only politically stupid, but philosophically misguided as well.  It used to be that conservatives believed and could articulate the belief that market economies were on the whole better at allocating resources and equitably distributing wealth than economies subject to a great deal of state intervention.  The time was when broad and even distribution of wealth was a Jeffersonian and conservative goal to provide for a broad class of property-holders as the basis for social and political stability.  It was not a description of a left-wing or welfarist plot.  So much for that.      

The bailout was redistributive, McCain’s crazy mortgage bailout pander (which is essentially a gift to lenders) is redistributive, and federal subsidies are classic examples of redistributing wealth, and McCain supports at least two of those three, but when Obama proposes tax credits for low and middle-income taxpayers (even if this results in additional subsidies) that is suddenly unacceptable socialism for McCain.  It’s true that these subsidies are going to be funded out of general revenues, but McCain and a lot of his supporters do not oppose these things in principle.  So what McCain and his supporters have been saying as they parse Obama’s supposed “tax cut for 95%” is the following politically savvy message: “If you are working-class or middle-class and did what you were supposed to do, you’re not going to get back any more of your money from the state, but if you are a financial institution that made bad loans or bought up mortgage-backed securities all the people who played by the rules are going to help you out.”  Solidarity for financiers is not exactly a compelling message.  What is even more incredible is that McCain and Palin have the gall to portray themselves as the ones who want to put the government back “on the side of the people.”     

Bizarrely, rather than focus the attack on Obama’s proposed new entitlement spending or Obama’s raising of the payroll tax cap, McCain and his allies have spent the last week obsessing over the proposed tax credits/subsidies, which also go to those who don’t pay income tax.  It’s not as if McCain opposes redistribution as such, but he does seem to be very much opposed to any kind of relief for most responsible taxpayers. 

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Helen Rittelmeyer responds with a good post elaborating on her earlier argument, and I have to say that I agree entirely with the following:

My “Red Socrates” thesis depends on the claim that cultural libertarianism is ill-equipped to make sense of a tragic universe. Tragedy involves looking at human suffering and saying that it was not only unavoidable but, more importantly, in some sense just and proper. Loyalties come into conflict and people get hurt, but that’s what’s supposed to happen when loyalties conflict!

I would say more than this.  Cultural libertarianism is not only ill-equipped to make sense of tragic universe, but it assumes that a tragic universe–one affected by the consequences of the Fall–does not exist or if cultural libertarians accept that it exists they assume that virtually all troubles can be resolved or at least ameliorated.  I detect an adapted version of Delsol’s Icarus Fallen argument that cultural libertarianism, like liberalism, is intent on trying to eliminate structural realities and burdens in our earthly life that cannot–and more to the point should not–be eliminated.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that cultural libertarianism simply seeks to avoid or ignore these realities.  We cannot escape these realities, and we can at best divert them into new and potentially more dangerous forms, which Delsol dubs black markets.   

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Well, day one, you bring in everyone around that table, too, you bring in the congressional leadership, and, assuming that there will be, certainly, Democrats, at that table, that’s good, too, these are gonna be bipartisan approaches that must be taken, I have that executive experience also having formed a cabinet up there in Alaska that, you know, we’ve got independents and Democrats and Republicans whom I have appointed to our administrative positions to that, we have the best of ideas coming together in order to best serve the people. John McCain, too, he’s been known as the maverick to take on his own party when need be, to reach over the aisle and work with the other party also. Now, Barack Obama has not been able to do that, he’s gone with, what is it, 96 percent of the time with Democrat leadership. Not having that, I think, ability or willingness to work with the other side. So as an executive, we need to create that team that is full of good ideas and not let obsessive partisanship get in the way, as we start taking the measures to shore up our economy, which already Congress is working on with the rescue package, with some of the bailout packages, the provisions in there that can work, too, but it’s gonna take everybody working together. ~Sarah Palin

Got all that?  You need to have the people with the good ideas who will work with others–good call!  She is also in favor of some bailouts, but not those crazy Democratic bailouts:

But now that we’re hearing that the Democrats want an additional stimulus package or bailout package for what, hundreds of billions of dollars more, this is not a time to use the economic crisis as an excuse for reckless spending and for greater, bigger government and to move the private sector to the back burner and let government be assumed to be the be-all, end-all solution to the economic challenges that we have. That’s what’s scaring me now about hearing that the Democrats have an even greater economic bailout package, but we don’t know all the details of it yet and we’ll certainly pay close attention to it.

Yes, this crisis is not something to be used to promote bigger government!  Drawing a line in the sand!  Oh, wait:

Now, as for the economic bailout provisions and the measures that have already been taken, it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in playing an appropriate role to shore up the housing market to make sure that we’re thawing out some of the potentially frozen credit lines and credit markets, government did have to step in there.

Following up on an earlier question that misrepresented an NR article about Palin, Palin offered this remark:

You have that, that combination and I think that some in the media, maybe in The National Review [bold mine-DL], they don’t know what to make of that, they’re like, gee, she’s, you know, where’d she come from, surely, you know, it should be our job I think they assume is to, pick and, and be negative and, and find things to mock and, that’s just I guess part of the political game, I guess.

Not that we should expect Palin to know that some of her most die-hard, adoring fans are at National Review (that would require her either to read NR or be briefed about it at some point), but this exchange is a useful example of a pattern in Palin’s answers that doesn’t get mentioned all that often.  She will latch on to a certain phrase or a detail in something the questioner says and she will use it to elaborate on her response, even though in doing so it underscores how generic and largely meaningless her answer is.  Having been prompted to talk about something in The National Review, as the interviewer made a point of calling it, she came back to it later to fill out another answer, and unintentionally lumped in some of her strongest apologists with her worst critics.  It has ceased being funny and has just become sad.

Palin said later:

Thankfully, too, the American public is seeing clearer and clearer what the choices are in these tickets.

You betcha!

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Currently, 49% of voters express an unfavorable opinion of Palin, while 44% have a favorable view. In mid-September, favorable opinions of Palin outnumbered negative ones by 54% to 32%. Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September [bold mine-DL]. ~Pew

The very high unfavorables among women do not surprise me that much.  From the beginning women have tended to be less favorably inclined to Palin than men, and Palin has done more than enough in the last two months to intensify that negative reaction.  Meanwhile, the overall Obama lead of 14 (among likely voters, mind you) is approximately at least twice of what the normal lead in the Pew poll has been all year and represents an increase of seven points among LVs since last week.       

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Rasmussen’s latest Virginia poll should put an end to any doubts about the outcome we are going to see in a couple of weeks.  Obama has a 10-point overall lead in the Old Dominion, which has not voted Democratic for President since 1964.  Pfotenhauer’s “real” Virginia is getting smaller all the time.  His Democratic support in the state has always been much stronger than it has been in some of the old Border states, but now it is at an enviable 96%.  More important, he leads among independents by 16.  He enjoys a large advantage in fav ratings (64%) over McCain (53%) among independents.  Obama is winning men by three and women by 15.  He barely edges out McCain among married respondents, but then racks up a 39-point lead among singles.  Perhaps we should call it the non-marriage gap instead.  

Even 11% of Republicans and 19% of conservatives back Obama.  Perhaps Ken Adelman (yes, that Ken Adelman) speaks for some of them:

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

What is most telling about this sizeable lead in Virginia is that Obama does not need Virginia to win.  So long as he takes Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he could lose every other toss-up state and still prevail.  McCain must come back, in some cases very dramatically, in all of them.  McCain’s task is virtually impossible.  Perhaps the campaign knows and accepts this, which is why Palin was on SNL over the weekend being made to serve as something of a prop in her own mocking. 

Obviously, if the voting nationwide is anything like this we can expect a result similar to that of ‘96.  I will readily admit that I didn’t think this would happen as recently as six weeks ago, and kept expecting Obama to implode or lose ground, and in this I was quite wrong. 

Update: CNN reports that McCain is giving up on Colorado, and New Mexico and Iowa are essentially out of reach.  The campaign’s focus on Pennsylvania is, it seems to me, not nearly enough in light of the numbers from Virginia and Missouri.  Even if they could win it, which seems unlikely, Pennsylvania wouldn’t get them enough votes on its own unless they could hold all of the toss-ups.

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The Powell endorsement isn’t all that surprising, and like most endorsements it will have no meaningful electoral effect (especially in an election that is almost certainly over), but it is worth considering for what it says about Obama, Powell and the GOP’s encouragement of media adulation over Powell over the years.  As James says, Powell is actually a very conventional figure, and he is also very much an establishmentarian.  Even in his call for a “transformational figure,” he is expressing an establishmentarian hope not so much of transformation but of restoration of establishment credibility. Obama is consensus-oriented and accommodating enough to entrenched interests that he offers the best chance of repairing some of the damage that national political institutions and officials, including Powell himself, have done.  If Obama represents the “sanctification of the status quo,” Powell is one of many establishment figures hoping to participate in that so-called sanctification.   

Powell is a good representative of the moderate-to-liberal Republican Obama voter, and almost the only thing in terms of policy separating him from the Gilchrests and Chafees is that he was a prominent war supporter.  That’s a very significant difference, but it is much more muted now.  Otherwise, he fits the profile of a moderate Republican foreign policy “realist” pushed away by the aggressive posture of McCain and his advisors and the social moderate alienated by social conservatism and vulgar Americanism.  Many of the same social issues that mobilize most rank-and-file conservatives and which acquired such importance in the presentation of Palin as VP nominee are the very issues that have always made Powell an odd fit with the modern GOP and were at the heart of intra-conservative strife over his possible (but never terribly likely) ’96 run.  So long as Powell stayed out of domestic politics, the GOP encouraged the media’s creation of Powell as the personification of officially approved, “respectable” Republicanism.  For his admirers in the press, Powell was Giuliani without the authoritarian impulses and cruelty; for many conservatives, Powell and, at least until this decade, his Doctrine were examples of the GOP’s credibility on national security. 

Now one of their military media darlings has abandoned their other military media darling at the last moment, simultaneously endorsing the (mostly accurate) narrative of a GOP consumed by triviality and bitterness and implying that the party has ceased to be credible on national security, so Republicans are understandably annoyed.  That Powell himself was instrumental in making the GOP less credible on national security is conveniently ignored by all sides.  Indeed, one might wonder why Obama would want an endorsement from Powell, who receives the same kind of curious treatment that McCain has received for most of his career until very recently: yes, he misled the public at a crucial time, and it’s true that he failed to voice the doubts about the war that he had strongly enough, but what really matters is that he had doubts.  Just as McCain’s discomfort telling the whoppers that he nonetheless goes on telling proves that he is somehow a great leader, Powell’s private, unexpressed doubts that might have helped avoid calamity if they had been expressed absolve him of everything he did.     

One reason why some Republicans are insisting that the endorsement was primarily a matter of racial solidarity is that it helps to avoid Powell’s critiques of the campaign and of the party, even when those critiques might be refuted.  It is easier and therefore better at this point in the campaign to dismiss it by saying, “Race is all that matters here.”  It might be that for some Republicans it is genuinely inconceivable that a retired general and former diplomat would throw his support to Obama, as these are the same people who have tried to make Obama out to be a neo-McGovernite peacenik, but it should probably tell them something about where they have gone wrong that Obama keeps racking up such endorsements.  Having invested so much in Obama-as-radical-maniac, Republicans are missing the temperamental similarities between Obama and Powell.  Likewise, Obama’s admirers are probably consciously ignoring those same similarities to the extent that they imply that Obama, like Powell, will go along with prevailing wisdom and establishment consensus, because that is not what they expect from Obama.  Republicans also seem to think that the phrase, ”the Surge is working! the Surge is working!” is a mantra straight out of Oz that will magically transport them back to the salad days of 2002, so they remain baffled by the idea that Obama’s fairly modest withdrawal plan might be appealing to someone like Powell.  The inability, or the simple refusal, to admit that the Iraq war was a costly, disastrous mistake has been dragging down the GOP for the last three years, so there’s no reason anything would change now.   

Domestically, there’s nothing remarkable about Powell’s opposition to more conservative justices on the Court–on several of the litmus test questions, Powell does not agree and never has agreed with conservative concerns.  This is not of the same kind as the pro-lifer’s negative argument for not backing McCain (he might not appoint conservative justices and wouldn’t be able to get them confirmed by a Democratic majority Senate even if he did).  This is an expression of a genuine preference for the sort of appointments that Obama would make.  Again, this sounds unbelievable to many on the right, who conclude that Powell couldn’t possibly believe that, as if it were impossible for a social moderate to find the preoccupation with overturning Roe to be unsatisfying.  Of course, either anti-McCain pro-lifers are right or Powell is, since part of his resistance to McCain is premised on the assumption that conservative justices are guaranteed after a McCain victory.

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