Category Archives: elections

Hello? Karl?

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New evidence of the utter moral bankruptcy of the Bush Administration is coming along to light so fast it’s hard to keep up. This morning’s clue comes to us from Larry Margasak of the Associated Press:

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

Karl? Karl? ‘Zat you, Karl?

The phone jamming scandal goes back to the 2002 midterms, when Tobin’s operation used repeated hang-up calls to jam phones at a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote center. Tobin was working on behalf of then-Rep. John Sununu Jr., who won a narrow victory over Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for a U.S. Senate seat. A week before the election the race had been too close to call.

The prosecutors in Tobin’s case did not make the White House calls part of their case, although the phone records were an exhibit. “The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved,” writes Margasak. Apparently the Bush Justice Department prosecuted the case as narrowly as it could. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee spent millions on Tobin’s defense.

Besides the conviction of Tobin, the Republicans’ New England regional director, prosecutors negotiated two plea bargains: one with a New Hampshire Republican Party official and another with the owner of a telemarketing firm involved in the scheme. The owner of the subcontractor firm whose employees made the hang-up calls is under indictment.

The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004.

The case is back in the news because the Dems are bringing a civil suit alleging vote fraud (ya think?). Republicans say there are always lots of calls flying around between Republicans on election day.

A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls — mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office — between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting.

There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.


Josh Marshall suggests there is “a nexus between the phone-jamming case and the Abramoff scandal,” although it’s not clear to me where the connections are. But check out the TPM “Grand Ole Docket” page.

Update: Why I quit using Google AdSense — The Peking Duck also has a story about Tobin and Phonegate today, but check out the ad in the screen-captured Google adstrip:

Too funny.

A Light Almost Dawns

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Adam Nagourney writes in tomorrow’s New York Times about using the Internets for political campaigning:

Michael Cornfield, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies politics and the Internet, said campaigns were actually late in coming to the game. “Politicians are having a hard time reconciling themselves to a medium where they can’t control the message,” Professor Cornfield said. “Politics is lagging, but politics is not going to be immune to the digital revolution.”

The professional politicians are losing control of the message. This is absolutely the best news I’ve heard in a long time.

I like this part, too:

President Bush’s media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still crucial to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters than it was even two years ago.

“I feel like a woolly mammoth,” Mr. McKinnon said.

The dominance of television and radio ads in political campaigns may be the worst thing that ever happened to American politics, IMO. The need to purchase big chunks of mass media time, as well as to produce slick ads, requires truckloads of money and has thoroughly corrupted the election process. Further, mass media communication is one-way — from the top, down. In the mass media age ordinary Americans lost their voices. Demagoguery got much easier. Smart people figured out how to use media to manipulate truth and manipulate voters — usually by appealing to prejudices and fears — into voting against their own interests. And there was no way to talk back.

The times they are a-changin’.

If you read the whole article is becomes apparent that Nagourney mostly doesn’t get it any more than the woolly mammoth consultants he interviews. Which is essentially the problem with the article. Nagourney interviews the woolly mammoths for their perspective of the cro-magnon cave men, but he doesn’t think to interview the cave men for their views of the woolly mammoths.

If you’re old enough, think back forty years and imagine Lawrence Welk discussing the Rolling Stones. Well, that’s Nagourney on blogging.

Like the old Buffalo Springfield song goes, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear …”

Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

Jane Hamsher adds,

… if Lieberman does in fact get tanked it will be because we’ve become adept at reverberating our message with local Connecticut media, something the Lamont campaign well understands and which the Elmendorfs of the world still charge a high price for having no fucking clue about. Neither, for that matter, does Nagourney. The game has so far outstripped and advanced any knowledge that either of them has of it, let alone the existence of the playing field, it’s rather pathetic.

“Elmendorf” is Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant who told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors “are not representative of the majority you need to win elections.”

John Aravosis has a vigorous response to Nagourney’s calling Lieberman a “moderate” Republican [oops; Democrat. Freudian slip.].

(singing)

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down …

Sorry, I’m having a nostalgia wallow.

Ohio

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George Will is afraid.

Brown is a harbinger of a momentous, and ominous, aspect of the 2008 presidential election: For the first time in living memory, one of the major parties — Brown’s — will be essentially hostile to free trade, the foundation of today’s prosperity. The Democratic Party’s protectionism operates under the dissimulating label of “fair trade.”

“Brown” is Sherrod Brown, whom you might recall is the Democrat running for Senator from Ohio instead of Paul Hackett. Although I like Hackett and was distressed that he felt he’d been shoved out of politics — Sherrod Brown is good, too. He’s real good.

Brown, whose career voting record is, according to the American Conservative Union, more liberal than another Cleveland area congressman, Dennis Kucinich, makes scant concession to conservatism, cultural or economic. He opposes bans on same-sex marriage (DeWine also opposed the ban that Ohio voters overwhelmingly passed in 2004), human cloning and partial-birth abortion.

I think I’m in love.

But he does favor a line-item veto and a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. That amendment, which would constitutionalize fiscal policy, is a terrible idea but a convenient gesture by Brown, who knows it is going nowhere.

Pretty much the same game Republicans played with a proposed balanced budget amendment in the 1980s and early 1990s. What took the wind out of those sails was Clinton’s balancing of the budget.

But back to Wills’s fear that Dems will destroy the economy with “protectionist” policies — I argued here that unfettered globalism is hurting the U.S. more than it’s helping. Members of the investor class, like Will, can’t see it, because their stock portfolios look just fine and the GDP is growing, if not at record rates. But globalism in practice has given us corporate profits based on the exploitation of foreign labor, which in turn is eroding wages and employment standards within the U.S. Robert Kuttner argues that it may be compromising national security as well.

Will continues,

A serious student of trade policy, Brown notes that the trade deficit for all of 1992 was $39 billion, but was $724 billion last year and $68 billion just for January 2006. He wants U.S. trade policy to force “stronger labor and environmental standards” in less-developed nations. He says the point is to “bring up their living standards.” Oh, please. The primary point is to reduce the competitive advantages of nations with lower labor costs and lighter environmental regulations — nations that many Ohioans believe have caused their state to lose 222,800 manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years.

I see it this way — unfettered globalism amounts to importing lower wages and worse working conditions for Americans. We can either passively accept the destruction of a way of life for millions of Americans as the cost of doing business, or we can pro-actively work to export our employment standards to the rest of the globe. This will not only prevent countless Americans from falling out of the middle class, but it will improve the lives of workers everywhere. So corporate profits will be a little less robust — think of it as the cost of doing business.

Put another way — does this glorious global economy exist to serve humankind, or does humankind exist to serve the glorious global economy?

This is a question We, the People and our elected representatives need to be thinking about now, and we need to be very clear in our minds what our answer is. We’ve been stumbling along for the past few years with conservatives and neoliberals selling us a vision of global economy utopia that doesn’t add up. These people should be called upon to show us, in very concrete terms, how washing machines manufactured in Mexico and exported to India are going to enrich American workers. They need to be very specific about where jobs will come from to replace the manufacturing jobs we are losing. Platitudes about boats and rising tides, or band-aid answers about education, are not going to cut it. We need details. We need to see the plan. Now.

It may not have caused Will any inconvenience that Ohio lost 220,000 manufacturing jobs in the past ten years, but I ‘spect lots of Ohioans are keenly bothered by it. And just about every time a citizen of Ohio loses his Union job and health benefits, Sherrod Brown likely gains another supporter.

Colleen Rowley, John Hall in NYC

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[Update: Please note update — admission is pricey.] I just got word that songwriter John Hall, who is running for Congress, New York’s 19th District, and Colleen Rowley, who is running for Congress, Minnesota’s 2nd District, will be appearing at a fundraising event/concert at Crobar, 530 West 2th Street, New York City, on March 14, from 6 to 8 pm. I’ll post more details when I get them.

Update: The event is going to be more expensive than I realized, but if anyone is interested and/or curious drop me an email or leave a comment here and I’ll provide the info.

What We’re Up Against

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I found this paragraph in an Eleanor Clift column crushingly depressing:

A pro-choice Republican who spoke with NEWSWEEK but didn’t want her name used said she is more worried about Alito after hearing him testify, and wishes the Democrats would spend their time finding a candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries “or we’re going to get four more years of judges like this.” She thinks that to win the White House the Democrats need a more centrist candidate than Clinton. “The math is against her.” (That debate is raging within Democratic circles, but no candidate has yet surfaced who could plausibly overtake Clinton, given her rock-star hold on party activists and the esteem in which she and her husband are held by African-American voters, a core Democratic constituency.)

Go ahead and read the whole column — it’s interesting — but let’s look at these “party activists.” There are activists, and there are other activists.

Compare/contrast Clift’s paragraph with this MyDD post by Chris Bowers — “Why The Blogosphere and the Netroots Do Not Like Hillary Clinton.”

… Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the netroots. I can offer loads of anecdotal information to support this, but perhaps the most striking evidence is that despite her large lead in national telephone surveys, she polls around fifth or sixth in our presidential preference polls. The real question we face is to figure out why she is not very popular among this large segment of the progressive activist class.

People will offer lots of reasons for this. In the past, I have done so myself. However, when one understands who actually makes up the blogosphere, a rarely, if ever, discussed reason comes to the fore. Within the progressive activist class, there is also a very real class stratification. While the blogosphere and the netroots may not be “the people” within America or the Democratic party as a whole, within the world of progressive activists, they are definitely “the people,” “the masses,” “the rank and file,” and any other populist term you want to throw out there. I believe the main mark against Hillary Clinton within the blogs and the netroots is the degree to which she is perceived as the uber-representative of the upper, aristocratic classes of the progressive activist world.

I think that’s part of it. See also these December posts by Avedon and Leah at Corrente. It’s not just that she’s unelectable; it’s that we don’t trust her.

Stirling Newberry wrote last November,

Hillary Clinton as a disaster for progressives and ultimately for the Democratic Party.

You want hard reasons? Let me list why I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever support Hillary Clinton, because she cannot ever, ever, ever, ever be trusted not to stab progressives in the back on key issues. She isn’t with us, except long enough to get the checks.

Let me start by way of explanation, when Bill Clinton first ran in 1992, I liked Hillary more than Bill, and even joked that we might be voting for the wrong Clinton. I felt she was smarter and sharper than Bill. She is, but, tin plated candidate that she is, she has no heart.

And she doesn’t like liberals or progressives. That’s a statement reported from several sources. She looks at us the same way that DeLay’s team looks at religious right voters – as stupid cash cows.

Stirling goes on to list concrete reasons why Hillary Clinton is unacceptable to the netroots; the first is “Hillary still supports the war.” He concludes,

Hillary is not politically reliable: she is busy selling progressives out now for her presidential bid. Which means that when she doesn’t need us at all, say the moment she has taken the oath of office and need only get re-elected with no primaries the second time around, we will be worse off than against a Republican, because we will have to sit through at least one Republican president before getting a progressive in the White House. If you don’t want to see a progressive President in your life time, then, by all means, support pro-war, soft on choice, anti-progressive, old top down media politics Hillary Clinton.

I think both Stirling and Chris are right, in different ways. Bottom line, Hillary Clinton is not one of us. She doesn’t represent us. She doesn’t know what we think and has lost the capacity to learn. She’s worked so hard at marketing herself to a mythical “center” that whoever she used to be has been consumed by her packaging. She’s an empty pants suit. As an active netcitizen of the Left, I believe I speak for an enormous majority of us when I say we are just as enthusiastic about a Hillary candidacy as we are about turnips.

Yet here is Eleanor Clift, who’s not a bad sort, writing about Hillary’s “rock-star hold on party activists.” Maybe Clift needs to stop shrieking at Tony Blankley on the McLaughlin Group and get out more.

Chris Bowers continues,

Within the world of progressive activists, from the viewpoint of the working and middle class progressive activists, Hillary Clinton is seen as hopelessly aligned with the establishment activists, with the insider activists, with the wealthy activists, with the well-connected activists, and with every possible progressive activist “elite” you can possibly imagine. Is it thus in any way surprising that the activist base, which is largely on the outside looking in, generally does not harbor much positive feeling toward her? The progressive activist base considers the progressive activist elite to be the main culprit in progressives losing power around the country. We keep losing, and we blame them. Thus, why should it be a surprise to anyone that we dislike the person who is viewed as their primary representative? We literally hold her, and what she represents within the world of progressive activism, to be responsible for the massive progressive backslide that has taken place over the past twelve years.

My cruder evaluation is that the Clintons represent a strategy that won some elections in the 1980s and 1990s but which has exacted a terrible cost on the Democratic Party. Their strategy was to toss enough progressive policy overboard to stay afloat in the Republican-controlled media sea. Bill Clinton made it work for him partly through force of personality — the man can charm the scales off a snake — and partly through co-opting Brand Republican positions; for example, on welfare and the death penalty. In the wake of the Reagan Era, perhaps that was a smart strategy.

But the Clintons, and the Democrats through the 1980s and 1990s, mounted no serious challenge to the GOP’s control of the sea — the VRWC and the Republican Noise Machine. Today the top of the Democratic Party and their “expert” consultants stick to the Clinton strategy, but now the VRWC has learned how to nullify it. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has tossed away so much of itself it’s hard to know what it stands for any more. They don’t call ’em “Republican Lite” for nothing.

Yet time and time again we see that the Republicans have moved far to the right of the American public on many critical issues. The attempt to “reform” Social Security, the Terri Schiavo episode, and, increasingly, Iraq reveal the Republicans to be way out of touch with mainstream Americans (which makes the notion that the Dems need to find a “centrist” candidate rather amusing). I truly believe many not-politcally-active people are growing heartily sick of right-wing extremism. But when they turn on the television or the radio, they don’t see or hear much in the way of an alternative. And so the Republicans win elections, for reasons that have little to do with their accomplishments (which are … ?) or their policy positions.

Chris Bowers argues that the blogosphere is not “the people,” in the sense that bloggers and their readers tend to be more affluent and educated than the population as a whole. But we represent the heart and soul of progressive activism far more faithfully than does the Democratic Party. And I think we represent the Party’s only viable future. The path they are on now leads to irrelevancy — some will argue they’ve already arrived — and to dissolution.

Federal Election Commission Stacked With Bush Cronies

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Here’s a story that just about slipped through the cracks here on The Mahablog — I overlooked it until I saw this editorial in today’s New York Times —

President Bush has announced four nominees for the Federal Election Commission, moving to keep the policing of campaign abuses firmly in the hands of party wheel horses. The timing of the announcement – the president waited until the Senate had gone home – is likely to allow the nominees to avoid the full hearing and confirmation process needed to evaluate them properly.

Holy Diebold!

The most objectionable nominee is Hans von Spakovsky, a former Republican county chairman in Georgia and a political appointee at the Justice Department. He is reported to have been involved in the maneuvering to overrule the career specialists who warned that the Texas gerrymandering orchestrated by Representative Tom DeLay violated minority voting rights. Senators need the opportunity to delve into that, as well as reports of Mr. von Spakovsky’s involvement in such voting rights abuses as the purging of voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 elections.

The nomination of von Spakovsky was announced a couple of weeks ago. I missed it, but John Gideon of the Brad Blog did not:

He is an attorney who is presently the head of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Voting Section. He is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, and joined other Bush cronies in the Florida recount battle in 2000, and he is President Bush’s newest recipient of a crony-nomination.

Yeah, this is exactly the guy we need on the bleeping Federal Election Commission. Voters, we are bleeped.

In addition to nominating four new members, Bush moved up a Republican crony already on the FEC to be head of the commission — Michael Toner, a former attorney for Bush ‘s election and the Republican National Committee. A real impartial guy. Toner was named a member of the FEC by Bush via recess appointment in 2002. As head, he will replace Scott Thomas, a Democrat. The New York Times calls Thomas “the one incumbent praised for his independence by Senator John McCain, who has campaigned for a clean, hack-free Federal Election Commission.” Thomas’s term has expired.

Bush named Robert D. Lenhard to be one of the three Democrats to serve on the six-member board. Lenhard was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. But get this, from Sourcewatch:

“As a lawyer, Lenhard wasn’t able to overturn McCain-Feingold before it took effect, but, as an FEC commissioner, he’ll be able to do the next best thing and try to gut it,” Arianna Huffington wrote December 18, 2005. “But that’s not why I’m obsessing (if I got worked up every time Bush picked a fox to guard a government henhouse, I’d never get anything done!). No, the thing that has my mental wheels in overdrive is the fact that Lenhard is the husband of Viveca Novak — the Time Magazine journalist whose loose lips may end up saving Karl Rove from joining Scooter Libby on Indictment Row.”

Cough. Small world, ain’t it? Mind you, Lenhard is one of the three Democrats on the board who are supposed to be making the board “bipartisan.”

Beside von Spakovsky and Lenhard, the other two nominees are David M. Mason and Steven T. Walther.

Mason, a Republican, has already served one term on the FEC board. He was originally appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in 1998. Before joining the FEC Mason had been a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

News stories identify Walther as a political associate of the Senate minority leader Harry Reid.

“By endorsing them, the president has finally shown his commitment to bipartisanship in the worst of ways: by installing another undistinguished group of factotums to referee the democratic process,” says the Times.

Beside Lenhard and Walther, the other Democrat is Danny Lee McDonald, who’s been on the FEC board since 1982.

See also: Ghosts in the Voting Machine and From the New Deal to the Dirty Deal in George Bush’s America.

Many Happy Returns

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Congratulations to the voters of Dover, Pennsylvania, for booting their entire anti-evolution school board yesterday! Laurie Goodstein writes in today’s New York Times:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Among the losing incumbents on the Dover, Pa., board were two members who testified in favor of the intelligent design policy at a recently concluded federal trial on the Dover policy: the chairwoman, Sheila Harkins, and Alan Bonsell.

The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum. The policy was the subject of a trial in Federal District Court that ended last Friday. A verdict by Judge John E. Jones III is expected by early January. …

… The vote counts were close, but of the 16 candidates the one with the fewest votes was Mr. Bonsell, the driving force behind the intelligent design policy. Testimony at the trial revealed that Mr. Bonsell had initially insisted that creationism get equal time in the classroom with evolution.

(Singing) Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, GOOD BYE.

More good news: Yesterday California voters rejected all of Governor Schwarzenegger’s ballot proposals. Michael Finnegan and Robert Salladay write in the Los Angeles Times,

In a sharp repudiation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Californians rejected all four of his ballot proposals Tuesday in an election that shattered his image as an agent of the popular will.

Voters turned down his plans to curb state spending, redraw California’s political map, restrain union politics and lengthen the time it takes teachers to get tenure.

I liked this part:

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic’s in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger’s defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, “We’re the mighty, mighty nurses.”

I love it. Don’t ever mess with nurses.

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Nicholas and Mark Z. Barabak explain why the sequel failed at the ballot box:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday met the limits of his celebrity: Even a campaign built around his action-star persona could not persuade voters to embrace his “year of reform” agenda.

Worse for Schwarzenegger, the special election he called to cement his power may have diminished it instead. All four measures he brought to the ballot — Propositions 74, 75, 76 and 77 — were rejected.

Schwarzenegger staged a campaign intended to capitalize on his once-robust box-office appeal. He largely shunned unscripted encounters with voters and face-to-face debates with political opponents, sticking instead to friendly exchanges in venues packed with admiring supporters.

His campaign echoed the strategy he employed in the 2003 recall campaign, when the product he was selling was “Arnold,” the outsider determined to “clean up” Sacramento with the same wit and resolve he showed in his movies. …

… The problem, however, was that Schwarzenegger never seemed to make the transition from celebrity to chief executive. The obvious comparison is to another actor-turned-California governor, Ronald Reagan.

Ken Khachigian, a longtime Republican strategist who was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, said of Schwarzenegger’s rhetorical habits: “It was like, ‘OK, we’ve heard that stuff.’ This is different now. This is policy and substance, and the speeches should have used a little different rhetoric.”

While Schwarzenegger’s approach “worked well in the recall,” Khachigian said, “The problem is that it didn’t wear very well over a period of time. After a while he was a governor, not an actor, and it’s quite a different role.”

A Republican strategist and occasional Schwarzenegger advisor put it more bluntly Tuesday, saying privately: “The act is getting stale.”

I guess the Republicans aren’t talking about amending the Constitution so that immigrants can be president any more.

Here’s the good news roundup:

Democrat Jon Corzine beat Republican Doug Forrester in the New Jersey governor’s race.

Democrat Tim Kaine beat Republican Jerry Kilgore in the Virginia governor’s race.

Schwarzenegger was clobbered; see links above.

“Intelligent design” gets the boot in Dover, Pennsylvania; see links above.

Maine voters defeated an attempt to repeal a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. In other words, gay rights, yes; gay hate, no.

In Minnesota, an anti-Bush Democrat will replace a pro-Bush Democrat as mayor of St. Paul.

San Francisco Chronicle: “San Francisco voters took a stand Tuesday against military recruitment on public school campuses, voted to keep firehouses open and approved the nation’s toughest ban on handguns by making it illegal for city residents to possess them.”

Not all voters turned away from the Dark Side. Texas voters approved a ban on gay marriage, and Ohio voters rejected four constitutional amendments intended to reform their corrupt election processes.

The re-election of Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is a wash; Bloomberg is a through-and-through RINO. A “real” Republican couldn’t get elected to squat in New York City.

Today the bobbleheads on the cable TV news shows will be explaining that yesterday’s elections don’t mean the 2006 elections will swing to Democrats. And they may be right. But they’re often wrong, aren’t they?

About Those Results …

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An editorial in Wednesday’s New York Times:

A year ago, George W. Bush said the voters of America had given him political capital that he intended to spend pursuing his agenda. While it’s always dangerous to read national lessons into local elections, everyone from political consultants to the leaders of countries in the remote corners of Asia and Africa are going to assume the same thing from the results of yesterday’s balloting: Mr. Bush’s political capital has turned into a deficit.

The election of Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine in Virginia was a surprise. Virginia has a Democratic governor now, but in national politics it is a safe Republican state. President Bush made a much-publicized last-minute campaign stop there to stump for the Republican, Jerry Kilgore. Everyone who has to make a decision about next year’s Congressional elections – from promising candidates who are mulling whether to listen to their party’s pleas to run to campaign donors – are reading bad omens for the Republicans into what happened after Mr. Bush left.

Can Bush turn it around and save his presidency?

All that could easily change. Mr. Bush could be the catalyst for change, if he had the flexibility and imagination to read the nation’s mood. Whenever this president has gotten into trouble in the past, he has reflexively turned to his right-wing base, or his trump issue of antiterrorism and homeland security. That isn’t working now. In Mr. Bush’s last crisis, over Hurricane Katrina, he made a desperate grab for popularity in the form of sweeping promises of enormous spending to rebuild New Orleans – promises that frightened his party. He is already in the process of backtracking on them.

Big surprise. Not.

William Branigin writes in Wednesday’s Washington Post:

With President Bush buffeted by low job-approval ratings, declining public support for his Iraq war policy and a federal CIA leak investigation that has reached into the White House, the Virginia governor’s race was being watched for any signs that the Republican administration’s difficulties were rubbing off at the local level. Long considered a reliable Republican state in national politics, Virginia has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than 40 years, and Bush won handily in last year’s presidential election with 54 percent of the vote.

It would be a mistake to look at today’s elections only as a referendum on Bush. I don’t know how much anti-Bush sentiment factored into the New Jersey election, although Corzine did run ads linking Forrester to Bush (ouch!). Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election in New York City certainly doesn’t mean New Yorkers are tilting Republican. Bloomberg is a true RINO and more liberal than a lot of Democrats. New Yorkers understand the party affiliation has more to do with political expediency than ideology.

But I’d hate to be a Republican campaign strategist tonight, huh?