HALF-FULL REPORT 10/01/10

There’s been too much good news in the Half Full Report of late, so we’ll begin this week’s HFR with bad.

* President Barack Obama drew a monster crowd – police estimated it at more than 26,000 – at a rally on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison Tuesday.  Even embattled Sen. Russ Feingold – who’d been avoiding Zero like the plague – showed up for it.

* Rasmussen indicates Zero’s job approval is rising, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats on his generic ballot is shrinking.

* A Survey USA poll indicated the senate race in Kentucky has fallen into a statistical dead heat.  A poll in California showed the Dems widening leads in the gubernatorial and senatorial contests.

* A Time-CNN poll indicates Lisa (it’s my job for life) Murkowski has pulled into a statistical tie with Joe Miller in the senate race in Alaska.

The good news is the bad news isn’t really so bad. 

* A lot of the kids who went to the Obama rally at the UW won’t vote.

Emily Lawless, a UW-Madison junior from Lakeville, Minn., waited in line five and a half hours for the chance to see the president live.

"You’re not going to remember your accounting class when you’re 40, but you’ll definitely remember this," she said.

Enthusiastic, but will they vote?

But the thrill of seeing the president doesn’t necessarily translate into supporting Democratic candidates during a midterm election. Even Lawless admitted she would likely not vote. "It’s too much work with the absentee ballot," she said.

And a Rasmussen poll released two days after the rally shows GOP candidate Ron Johnson leading Sen. Russ Feingold by 12 points.

Ads like this are part of the reason why:

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post really likes it.

Ron Johnson is a stud.

In the end, the large crowd Zero drew at the University of Wisconsin may do Democrats more harm than good, because it’ll encourage him to campaign harder and more visibly.  He likes to campaign, and he wants to recapture the magic of 2008.

But this plays into the hands of Republicans, who want the midterms to be a referendum on Zero and his policies.  Democrats want the midterms to be a lot of individual races, focused mainly on the foibles, real and imagined, of their GOP challengers.  What Zero is doing undermines that strategy.

* The Kentucky and California polls grossly oversampled Democrats.  The ambivalence of the DSCC about advertising in Kentucky suggests they are not all that confident there.

* The Alaska poll understated the difficulties a write-in candidate faces.  This poll indicates those difficulties.

Charlie Cook, Michael Barone, Dick Morris, Democrat pollster PPP and Obi Wan Kenobe aren’t buying the notion Democrats are making a comeback.

Charlie Cook is considered the leading “nonpartisan” expert on congressional races.  (Charlie’s a Democrat.)  This was his take Tuesday (9/28).

For quite a while, Democrats have waited and desperately hoped that the trajectory of this election campaign would change. They are still waiting and hoping.

While things could change in the next 35 days, they haven’t yet, and every day, the magnitude of events necessary to change the course of this election has to be greater than the day before.

Also on Tuesday, Michael Barone said: (click to view)

For the moment, anyway, the vast expanse of America is hospitable to Republicans while Democrats seem appreciated only in their coastal and campus redoubts.

I think Dick Morris has been much too sanguine about GOP prospects this November, but his credentials as a savvy political operator have been pretty well established. 

Here’s what Dick had to say Tuesday: (click to view)

Republicans are now leading in 54 Democratic House districts. In 19 more, the incumbent congressman is under 50 percent and his GOP challenger is within five points. That makes 73 seats where victory is within easy grasp for the Republican Party. The only reason the list is not longer is that there are 160 Democratic House districts that were considered so strongly blue that there is no recent polling available.

And this is what Tom Jensen of PPP (the pollster for the Daily Kos) had to say Tuesday: (click to view)

Last week someone asked me what poll data I would use to sum up what’s happening in this election in the simplest terms possible. Here it is:

On our last national poll 49% of respondents said the economy had gotten worse since Barack Obama became President.

-The folks who thought the economy had gotten worse who had already decided how to vote in November are going Republican by a 92-8 margin.

If voters think the economy’s gotten worse under a Democratic President they’re going to vote Republican. Add in the Democrats’ enthusiasm issues and you have the formula for the big GOP victory that’s likely on the way.

Obi Wan Kenobe (the mentor of Jim Geraghty of National Review’s Campaign Spot) said he is reassured by oscillation in the polls.

I was waiting for the oscillation. Polling trajectories are like the Dow – nothing linear. We go up. We go down. The oscillations have to happen. So some downside, some voter pullback, some temporary buyer remorse makes you feel at home, you think you know what’s happening.

I mean, the Senate numbers aren’t supposed to keep breaking towards the GOP. We’re not even out of September. And Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Wisconsin look like they are gone for the Democrats? And Washington, West Virginia and Connecticut are already toss-ups? In a normal wave year, that could happen, but you wouldn’t see it for a while. Not till mid or late October.

So I was thinking all the trajectories are just advanced this year and so those polls were possible – it would make sense to see some of the general pullback that in an ordinary year would happen closer to the election.

Geraghty asked Obi-Wan if the Democrats could recover:

Well, not with what we’re seen so far they can’t. From Congress to Obama, everything they do reinforces their own implosion – it looks like McGovern, or the Dukakis campaigns.

The best polling news for Republicans this week is that Rasmussen joins PPP in giving Republican John Raese a slim lead over Gov. Joe Manchin for the senate seat in West Virginia, which a month ago was supposed to be a slam dunk for the Dem, and a Quinnipiac poll puts Republican Linda McMahon within the margin of error against the Dem, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, which a month ago was supposed to be a slam dunk for the Dem.

The downside of the upside for Democrats in having their candidate, Chris Coons, suddenly become the favorite in the Delaware senate race is that now they have to spend money there.

The additional downside for Democrats in the downside of having the senate races in West Virginia and Connecticut becoming tossups is that they now have to spend a lot of money they weren’t planning to spend there.

That money has to come from somewhere.  And money is getting tight for Democrats.  Thanks to the lousy economy and Zero’s Wall Street bashing, the usual suspects aren’t opening their wallets.  The DSCC and the DCCC are squabbling over the big donors who are still willing to give.

One House Democratic fundraiser said that some Senate operatives are telling big donors and union officials, “The House is lost; you have to save the Senate.”

So if the Dems are going to spend more in Delaware, West Virginia and Connecticut, they have to spend less elsewhere.  Admiral Joe Sestak’s campaign is one that is taking torpedoes.
According to a source in Pennsylvania who tracks television advertising by political campaigns, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee bought only $260,000 in TV ads this week–about a 50 percent drop from the $500,000 or more the DSCC has been spending on TV ads each week for the past five weeks.

If I were one of the Democrats running for the open Republican senate seats in Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio (especially Florida, Missouri and Ohio), I wouldn’t count on much from the DSCC in the next few weeks.

James Delingpole of the London Telegraph reports that the world’s most speculated about secret organization, the Bilderberg group, is now talking about global cooling:

Almost every government in the Western world from the USA to Britain to all the other EU states to Australia and New Zealand is currently committed to a policy of “decarbonisation.” This in turn is justified to (increasingly sceptical) electorates on the grounds that man-made CO2 is a prime driver of dangerous global warming and must therefore be reduced drastically, at no matter what social, economic and environmental cost. In the Eighties and Nineties, the global elite had a nice run of hot weather to support their (scientifically dubious) claims. But now they don’t. Winters are getting colder. Fufel bills are rising (in the name of combating climate change, natch). The wheels are starting to come off the AGW bandwagon. Ordinary people, resisting two decades of concerted brainwashing, are starting to notice.

All this, of course, spells big trouble for the global power elite. As well as leading to food shortages (as, for example, it becomes harder to grow wheat in northerly latitudes; adding, of course, to such already-present disasters as biofuels and the rejection of GM), global cooling is going to find electorates increasingly angry that they have been sold a pup.

Reinforcing Delingpole’s point is evidence that before “adjustments,” thermometer readings in the U.S. have shown cooling since 1895, and ocean temperatures have been getting cooler since 2003.

Will the fraud be widely recognized before catastrophic harm is done to our economy and our liberty?

Don’t miss Marco the Wizard’s take on Stuxnet, the computer worm we told you about last week. A more pessimistic take is here. And here is an intriguing clue to its origins.

One of the Justice Department prosecutors who prosecuted former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (his conviction in October, 2008 cost Sen. Stevens his seat) has committed suicide.

A federal judge threw out the conviction in April, 2009, because of prosecutorial misconduct.  Judge Emmet Sullivan then appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Nicholas Marsh and the other two prosecutors.  It isn’t known whether that ongoing investigation played a role in Marsh’s decision to kill himself.

The FBI apparently is investigating former SEIU chieftain and Zero buddy Andy Stern.

WASHINGTON — The FBI and the U.S. Labor Department are investigating prominent labor leader Andy Stern in their probe of corruption at the Service Employees International Union, according to two people who have been interviewed by federal agents.

The two organized labor officials met with federal agents this summer to answer questions about a six-figure book contract that Stern landed in 2006 and his role in approving money to pay the salary of an SEIU leader in California who allegedly performed no work.

Federal law prohibits labor unions from creating what amounts to "no-show" jobs that pay someone for work they do not perform.

Another SEIU official is under investigation for something rather more sinister.

Over the weekend the FBI announced that it was investigating Joseph Iosbaker for possible connections to overseas terror groups. Iosbaker and his wife Stephanie Weiner, both anti-war activists, are suspected of activities “concerning the material support of terrorism.”

If you think the FBI is protecting us from Islamic terror, this story should make your palms sweat.

A known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – Kifah Mustapha – was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI’s training center at Quantico, during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim Community.

We know about this because Ben Bradley, a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Chicago, was also on the tour.  Bradley said:

Sheik Kifah Mustapha, who runs the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, asked some of the most pointed questions during the six week FBI Citizens’ Academy and trip to Washington. He pushed agents to fully explain everything from the bureau’s use of deadly force policy to racial and ethnic profiling. “I saw a very interesting side of what the FBI does and I wanted to know more,” Sheik Mustapha explained after returning from D.C. He hopes the FBI’s outreach runs deeper than positive public relations.

Here’s an ad I enjoyed that GOP challenger Todd Lally is running against Dem incumbent John Yarmuth in Louisville:

The editors of the most liberal newspaper in California can’t bring themselves to endorse Sen. Barbara Boxer for re-election.

It is extremely rare that this editorial page would offer no recommendation on any race, particularly one of this importance. This is one necessary exception.

Boxer, first elected in 1992, would not rate on anyone’s list of most influential senators. Her most famous moments on Capitol Hill have not been ones of legislative accomplishment, but of delivering partisan shots. Although she is chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it is telling that leadership on the most pressing issue before it – climate change – was shifted to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., because the bill had become so polarized under her wing.

For some Californians, Boxer’s reliably liberal voting record may be reason enough to give her another six years in office. But we believe Californians deserve more than a usually correct vote on issues they care about. They deserve a senator who is accessible, effective and willing and able to reach across party lines to achieve progress on the great issues of our times. Boxer falls short on those counts.

If the San Francisco Chronicle won’t back her, then “Senator Ma’am” has got problems.

If you haven’t read the House GOP’s “Pledge to America,” you can read it here!

I wish the pledge were much shorter.  My version would have been:

• Repeal Obamacare
• Retain ALL the Bush tax cuts
• Reduce non-defense discretionary federal spending to what it was in the year before the Democrats took control of Congress.
• Secure the border

But I find nothing objectionable in the pledge as written.  I’m amused by those right wingers who bitch because their pet issue wasn’t included in the pledge, or wasn’t expressed more strongly.  They want House Republicans to do exactly what the Democrats wanted the House Republicans to do: say something that seems extreme that can be used as a club to beat Republicans with in November.

The Pledge is a campaign document.  When Democrats say Republicans have no ideas, they can point to this lengthy document (which hardly anybody is going to read) as proof to the contrary.  And – despite its length — there is nothing in the Pledge the Dems can use as a club.

The Pledge will be as meaningless as the Contract With America proved to be if Republicans don’t follow it if (when) they win a majority.  What Republicans do when they have power is what matters; not so much what they say to help themselves obtain it.

I see the Pledge as mildly beneficial to the GOP.  But it’s not a big deal, one way or the other.  Those who express either high praise for it or high dudgeon about it are wasting breath.

After examining Census data, Election Data Services, a private firm, has estimated the winners and losers in reapportionment of congressional districts.

According to EDS, New York and Ohio will each lose two seats in the House.  Eight states – Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – are expected to lose one.

Texas will gain four seats.  Florida will gain two.  Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington are each expected to gain a seat.

This should remind us of how important gubernatorial and state legislative races are in those states.

If Republicans in Ohio win the governor’s race and retake control of both houses of the legislature, they can pretty much guarantee the two seats lost in the Buckeye state will come out of the hide of the Democrats.  Democrats currently have a 10-8 lead, but the GOP is expected to win back at least three seats this fall.

Republicans need to retake the state senate in New York to keep the Democrats from completely controlling reapportionment in the Empire state.

Fortunately, that’s looking up.

It’s really important for Republicans to win the governor’s race in Florida, because that would give the GOP complete control of reapportionment. 

The same is even more true in Texas, of course, but the governor’s race isn’t as close there.

For the first time in many, many years, California will not gain any seats.  But reapportionment is still a big deal, because population shifts within the Golden state will necessitate redrawing district boundaries.

Republicans got shut out of the redistricting after the 2000 election, because Democrats controlled everything.  They have a lock on the legislature, but if Meg Whitman can be elected governor, redrawn boundaries could produce a GOP gain or two.

There is an initiative on the ballot in November that would put Congressional redistricting in the hands of a nonpartisan citizens commission.  Two years ago, voters approved a similar initiative for the state assembly.  If the initiative passes, that will also be better for the GOP than what exists at present.

Except for Washington, all the states gaining one seat lean Republican.

Five of the eight states losing a seat lean Democrat.  But Missouri, Louisiana and (usually) Iowa lean Republican.

Reapportionment, of course, also causes shifts in the electoral college.  The equivalent of Nebraska or New Mexico is moving from states John Kerry carried in 2004 to states George W. Bush carried.

Many of you have noticed that I rarely let a week go by without saying something nice about the fat Reagan.  This week won’t be an exception. Determined to turn New Jersey’s education system on its head, Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday unveiled a tough-love reform package that will make classroom achievement — not seniority or tenure — the basis for pay hikes and career advancement in Garden State public schools.

Christie is turning his take-no-prisoner’s style to the classroom, demanding a top to bottom overhaul of how New Jersey students learn and teachers teach. And that means undoing tenure, seniority and other union work rules.

Read through the comments on this story.  They’re fascinating.