While the U.S. media focused on the U.N. Security Council's passage of a resolution today, giving Iran until the end of August to suspend uranium enrichment--or face the possible implementation economic and diplomatic sanctions--an equally important story regarding Iran escaped notice.

Today, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, was scheduled to meet with his Lebanese counterpart, Fawzi Salloukh in Beirut. While no one is fooled by Iran's hand in the ongoing crisis, Tehran has so far kept a very low, public profile since it all started three weeks ago.

So why has Iran reared its head in Beirut at this moment? Three reasons: a) To weigh in with the Lebanese government about its interests in the outcome of the conflict as the pace of crisis diplomacy accelerates; b) Show support for--and encourage--its terrorist cat's paw, Hezbollah; and c) Warn the international community that how it deals with Iran's nuclear program, for example at the U.N. Security Council, will affect how Iran deals with Hezbollah and Lebanon. Unfortunately, this means we can only expect more troublemaking from Iran in the weeks ahead.

Heritage Foundation senior fellow, Peter Brookes, is the author of: "A Devil's Triangle: Terrorism, WMD and Rogue States." peterbrookes@heritage.org

Posted by Peter Brookes at 03:16 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Florida Republican Party sends letter to Katherine Harris revoking support, citing the "irreparable damage" faced by her campaign.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 02:00 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Not him, the other one. The Progressive is carrying an interview with Gore Vidal in this month's issue. It's really hard to capture the "unhingedness" of Vidal without reading the entire interivew. He call Bush "a thug", compares the President and the Vice President to monkeys causing trouble, rants about stolen elections, and on and on.

Here is one question and answer worth quoting in full:

Q: You're a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?

Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We've never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It's as though we are evil. We strike first. We'll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It's like a war against dandruff. There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

Read the whole interview and you'll come away with a clear sense of the profound hatred and contempt this man has for America - and for everyone in it who doesn't share his views.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 01:23 PM | Email Author | Permalink

From Roll Call (sub req'd):

Senate Republicans, facing a major political battle and a tight legislative calendar, said last week that there's little chance they can move any of the remaining controversial judicial nominations before the November elections.

Both GOP Senators and aides said the four weeks remaining on the pre-election schedule provides them with little opportunity to engage in a potentially brutal floor fight over a polarizing court nominee.

The ideal time, they said, would be to consider a nomination now, before the Senate recesses for August and before the campaign season heats up. But that window is all but shut.

"If we don't move people before August, it's going to be harder to move them at all," said a Senate Republican aide. "Democrats can dig in, and they have the backdrop of the end of the session."

Another well-placed Republican Senate staffer said the chance of the chamber taking on a controversial nomination before Election Day is "Zilch. Zero."

Robert Novak touched on this issue last week, blaming Senators Frist and Specter for not pushing the issue harder and saying that "it seems too late for a Senate battle to impact the midterm campaign." Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, disagreed, writing in NRO last week that it is "late, but not too late, to focus the public on what is at stake with judicial confirmations."

If Senate Republicans can't gin up a fight over judicial nomations this fall, it will give the Republican base - already suffereing from a lack of enthusiasm - one less reason to get up and go to the polls on Election Day.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 11:09 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Melissa Hart's campaign had to be happy to see this picture of her opponent, Jason Altmire, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday. Hart's 4th Congressional District in Western Pennsylvania leans Republican (Cook Partisan Voting Index R+3, voted for Bush by 9 points over Kerry and by 6 points over Gore) thanks in no small measure to the type of culturally conservative Democrats who can't stand the hard-left wing of the party which Howard Dean so perfectly epitomizes. Altmire's efforts to portray himself as a "centrist" to folks in Pa-4 can't be helped by cruising the district with Dean.

(Photo: V.W.H. Campell, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Posted by Tom Bevan at 10:50 AM | Email Author | Permalink

The New York Times says: "As the 2008 presidential campaign begins to take shape, with Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton at the top of the polls for their parties' nominations, they are increasingly underscoring their differences on issues like the war in Iraq and port security."

Can you spot the inaccuracy?

Posted by Ryan Sager at 04:35 PM | Email Author | Permalink

David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register has a bit of fun today ridiculing the Dems' recommendation to add Nevada as an early caucus state for 2008:

Iowa and New Hampshire should just shut up about this one. If Howard Dean and the Democratic National Committee want to turn to the land of gamblers and brothels for an early test of their candidates' strengths, maybe it's best to let them go ahead. Few may take it seriously.

The party committee could have selected Arizona or New Mexico and created an event that would have posed a real threat to Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, they chose Nevada.

It'll be fun watching the big-city folks in the national media taking the pulse of the "real America" from - Las Vegas.

"Brit, we're standing here outside the Bellagio Hotel and Casino interviewing likely caucus-goers as they head into tonight's Nevada caucuses. Excuse me, Ma'am, could I ask you what issues are most on your mind?"

"Taxes. All this withholding for people with cash incomes is a killer."

"And what do you do?"

"I'm a hooker. Want to go to a party?"

"Back to you, Brit."

Yepsen ends the column on a more serious note, however, suggesting that if candidates and the media start to "treat Nevada as a serious contest," local Dem officials in both Iowa and New Hampshire should move up dates of their respective contents into the first two weeks of January.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 09:09 AM | Email Author | Permalink

On Wednesday David Cloud and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported the details of a draft of legislation proposed by the Bush administration to address the issue of detainee rights in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision last month.

The 32-page memo (available in full as a pdf file here) was drafted by Acting Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury and tagged with a "close hold" designation - meaning the memo's circulation was to remain limited. Still, Cloud and Stolberg report the memo was leaked to the Times on Tuesday by "an official at an agency that is reviewing it."

A source within the military community suggested to me the memo was leaked to the Times so that it could be attacked in an effort to weaken support for it. There is a significant debate raging both in Congress - particularly the Senate - and between uniformed and civilian lawyers in the JAG Corps and the Pentagon whether to pursue a military commission/modified tribunal plan such as the one drafted by Bradbury, or the approach supported by Senators McCain and Graham which would model legal proceedings for suspected terrorists after those provided for a military courts-martial.

The Bradbury draft contains some important points worth highlighting. First, it takes on the heart of the SCOTUS Hamdan ruling by explicitly stating the Geneva Conventions "are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights." In other words, terrorist suspects like Hamdan cannot get access to our court system based on a claim that their Geneva Convention rights have been violated.

Second, the Bradbury draft places a great deal of discretion in the hands of the tribunal judge. The draft stipulates that "statements obtained by the use of torture" are not permitted, but in most other instances evidence will be allowable if the judge deems it has "probative value." Sections 102-6 and 102-7 lay out the case for why this approach is preferable:

(6) The use of military commissions is particularly important because the conflict between the United States and international terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces generally makes other alternatives, such as the use of Federal courts or courts-martial, are impracticable. The terrorists with whom the United States is engaged in armed conflict have demonstrated a commitment to the destruction of the United States and its people, to violation of the laws of war, and to the abuse of American legal processes. In a time of ongoing armed conflict, it is neither practicable nor appropriate for alien enemy combatants like al Qaeda terrorists to be tried like American citizens in Federal courts or courts-martial.

(7) Many procedures for courts martial would not be practicable in trying alien enemy combatants for whom this Act provides for trial by military commission. For instance, court-martial proceedings would in certain circumstances-

(A) require the Government to share classified information with the accused, even though members of al Qaeda cannot be trusted with our Nation's secrets and it would not be consistent with the national security of the United States to provide them with access to classified information;

(B) exclude the use of hearsay evidence determined to be probative and reliable, even though the hearsay statements from, for example, fellow terrorists are often the only evidence available in this conflict, given that terrorists rarely fight and declare their intentions openly but instead pursue terrorist objectives in secret conspiracies the objectives of which can often be discerned only or primarily through hearsay statements from collaborators; and

(C) specify speedy trials and technical rules for sworn and authenticated statements when, due to the exigencies of wartime, the United States cannot safely require members of the armed forces to gather evidence on the battlefield as though they were police officers nor can the United States divert members from the front lines and their duty stations to attend military commission proceedings.

This last point strikes me as absolutely essential. Obviously, we want to facilitate some sort of process for adjudicating cases of suspected terrorists, but it would be absolute insanity to establish such a high threshold so as to further burden our soldiers in the field.

President Bush will be making a choice between the two approaches in the very near future - perhaps as early as next week. As I mentioned earlier, my military source suggested that leaking of the Bradbury memo may be a deliberate attempt to try and influence Bush's decision by ginning up a negative reaction to the military commission approach. We'll have to see what happens, and what The Decider decides.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 04:59 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Well, today I just need to post two videos of the day, because I wouldn't want anyone to miss the Clinton Loves Lieberman ad running in Connecticut.

It's powerful stuff, assuming Bill still has the love of the Democratic base. (And I can't imagine that he doesn't.)

We'll see if it's enough to bring back the Joementum.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 11:58 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Two notes on the current push to revamp the presidential public-financing system:

1) Via Bob Bauer, we get a sense of how significant this push is. By radically increasing how much money candidates would get under public financing, this bill is attempting to make it almost impossible not to accept the cash. If your opponent's taking it, you'd better do the same. (Also see Bauer for how this is all just a step on the path to public financing of congressional races, which incumbent congressmen would just love.)

2) Note that one half of McCain-Feingold is absent from the current push. McCain, who can raise tons of private money -- remarkably, one has to note, for a "reformer" -- presumably wants to skip public financing. Feingold, who can't and who's involved in the current push, would be a direct beneficiary of the new system (talk about an appearance of corruption).

And so the campaign-finance-reform lobby keeps chugging along. Final destination: no speech allowed during federal elections, except for that granted by Congress and the president.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 11:54 AM | Email Author | Permalink

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a new ad making it clear that they want 2006 to be all about Bush -- understandably enough.

Here's the ad: Now is the Time for a New Direction.

As always, send nominations to:

ryan-at-realclearpolitics.com

Posted by Ryan Sager at 11:13 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Here is a fascinating piece from the New Republic on the rivalry between Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton.

A clip:

Dean and Clinton--the Democratic Party's two power centers--find themselves locked in a struggle for intraparty supremacy. Each camp considers the other's political strategy fundamentally flawed. Dean loyalists dislike Clinton's stance on Iraq and her cautious approach to leadership, and they also fear she is too polarizing a figure to win a general election. Meanwhile, Clinton partisans doubt Dean's competence in managing the DNC and believe him to be just the sort of antiwar, elitist, left-wing Democrat who will scare off white middle- and working-class voters.

Most interesting is that the Clinton folks are basically building a parallel party structure to totally supplant the DNC during the 2008 campaign.

While I think there's a lot to be said for Dean's 50 state strategy -- as I've mentioned, I think the Dems need to be looking seriously at the interior West -- I'd bet on Clinton in this fight. She's going to be all-but-unstoppable in the primaries. The Democrats would be smart to stop her. But they won't be able to.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 11:02 AM | Email Author | Permalink

I know Republican Senate candidates Michael Steele and Mark Kennedy are worried about the scarlet R this campaign season. But this seems to be taking things a bit far.

Behold Steele's and Kennedy's blue yard signs:

(Thanks to reader Keith Miller)

Posted by Ryan Sager at 09:29 AM | Email Author | Permalink

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A new poll by InsiderAdvantage shows Johnson leading McKinney 46 percent to 21 percent, with one-third of voters undecided. The survey recorded the responses of 480 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

An analysis of primary election results showed McKinney's support eroding slightly in predominantly black south DeKalb County, her traditional base. Johnson won more votes than McKinney in predominantly white north DeKalb, Rockdale and Gwinnett, according to the analysis.

InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery said his poll detected some interest among Republicans in the race, which would also work against McKinney. In last week's primary, many Republicans stuck to their own races, headlined by the confrontation between Christian Coalition leader-turned-lobbyist Ralph Reed and state Sen. Casey Cagle in the GOP race for lieutenant governor. A poll released by InsiderAdvantage four days before that race showed Reed and Cagle in a dead heat, but Cagle got 56 percent of the vote.

McKinney's campaign spokesman, John Evans, dismissed Thursday's poll results.

"I'm sure that one is skewed," Evans said, adding that Towery is a Republican. "You don't know who they polled, and so what can you do?"

McKinney received the endorsement of former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young who said, if you can believe it, that he is supporting the cop-beating McKinney because, "Congress needs controversy." Now there's a catchy campaign slogan.......

Posted by Tom Bevan at 07:07 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Former British Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith has a long, must read post on Israel over at Conservativehome.com. It includes this rather choice bit, upbraiding certain world leaders for hypocrisy:

The 'world community' asks Israel to act proportionately but what will 'world community leaders' do in order to protect Israel if it does act in a way that Annan, Chirac and Putin think appropriate? Not, of course, that these leaders act proportionately in defence of their own interests. Putin almost bombed Grozny back to the stone age when Chechnya wanted independence. Chirac ignored world opinion when France tested nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Annan turned a blind eye to the corruption of the oil-for-food programme - corruption that contributed to the loss of thousands of lives every month in Saddam's Iraq. The best clue to understanding how the world will protect Israel in the next few years is to reflect on recent history. The best thing the world community does is talk. Disproportionate talking is in fact the only thing it does but jaw-jaw has not stopped the suicide bomb or missile attacks on Israel.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 06:52 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Michael Steele continues to dig himself a deeper political hole. As John Dickerson wrote yesterday in Slate, instead of hunkering down and taking his lumps, "Steele's slogan appears to be: 'More shovels!'"

Dana Milbank, no doubt perturbed at being called a liar by the Steele camp, is putting the boot in about as far as it will go - and Maryland Democrats are loving every minute of it.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 06:38 AM | Email Author | Permalink

When Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich took the oath of office in 2002 he was considered a "rising star" in the Democratic Party. Four years later you'd be hard pressed to find anyone still willing to describe Blagojevich that way, as even many Illinois Democrats have come to view his first term as a huge disappointment.

Blagojevich's tenure has been characterized by a rocky relationship with the Democrat-controlled state legislature (strained from the very beginning by his decision to remain in Chicago instead of moving to the Executive Mansion in Springfield). The tension has increased over the years, and his reputation for back-room wheeling and dealing has now gotten so bad it's been reported that members of his own party demand assurances from the Governor in writing, so little do they trust his word.

Blago's record on fiscal matters is also a problem. While most other states have been able to take advantage of a strong economy to erase budget deficits and even post surpluses in recent years, Illinois continues to languish. Earlier this week it was reported that Illinois ran a $3 billion deficit in 2005, and a recent balance sheet analysis showed the state with an overall negative net worth of $17.5 billion - both worst in the nation by far.

Finally, there is the issue of corruption. Blagojevich cast himself as a "reformer" the first time around, yet his administration has been dogged by multiple scandals and wide-ranging investigations. Earlier this month U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald notified the Illinois Attorney General he had identified "a number of credible witnesses" and was investigating "very serious allegations of endemic hiring fraud" in the Blagojevich administration.

Despite all of these issues, Blagojevich remains favored to win this November. He's been blessed by a weaker than expected challenge - thus far, anyway - from Republican Judy Baar Topinka, who appears to be having little success energizing a state Republican Party that remains divided and demoralized after a string of recent failures and embarrassments.

A wave of early attack ads has helped Blagojevich extend his lead over Topinka to double digits in the most recent poll by SurveyUSA. Though the race will likely tighten toward the end, unless Patrick Fitzgerald hands down a crippling set of indictments before Election Day, Blagojevich seems headed rather inauspiciously toward a second term.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 05:40 AM | Email Author | Permalink

CNN sticks the knife in at the end of a story about the Democrats' "Six in '06" agenda unveiling.

Here are the closing two paragraphs of their story:

At a meeting with reporters at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters, Democratic leaders unveiled a Web video with clips of the president saying "stay the course" interspersed with graphics such as "gas prices at an all time high."

They played the video on a small laptop in the front of the room full of reporters because, they said, they couldn't find a screen projector.

Ouch.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 10:34 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Will the Connecticut Republican Party endorse Lieberman if he loses the primary and runs as an independent? So asks the New York Post.

Answer: Probably not. But all the Republicans will vote for Joementum anyway.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 08:15 PM | Email Author | Permalink

What happens when a Berkeley linguist tries to save the Democratic Party through the power of language?

Find out in my review for the New York Sun of Geoffrey Nunberg's generously subtitled "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latté-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."

Posted by Ryan Sager at 08:03 PM | Email Author | Permalink

An embarrassing day for America: Maliki gets heckled by a war protestor.

As always, send nominations to:

ryan-at-realclearpolitics.com

Posted by Ryan Sager at 06:59 PM | Email Author | Permalink

The recent court decisions -- in New York on July 6 and in Washington State yesterday -- refusing to create gay marriage by judicial fiat have had a remarkable effect on the public discourse surrounding the issue: They've brought it into being.

Granted, there's been a lot of hollering about gay marriage, particularly from the Republican Party denouncing the activist judges who want to rewrite our marriage laws. But the Democratic Party has been largely silent. It's presumed many Democrats are in favor of gay marriage or civil unions, but most keep their mouths shut or even make noises about "defending marriage" to avoid the inevitable political fallout of speaking up.

But now, Democratic politicians are being forced to take a stand -- since judges aren't going to be able to do the heavy lifting for them.

When New York's decision came down, governor-in-waiting Eliot Spitzer immediately said he supported gay marriage and would introduce a bill to create it. Now, Washington's Gov. Chris Gregoire has come out for the first time in favor of (essentially) civil unions.

The logic here is simple. When the courts are taken out of the equation, people actually have to take sides and then defend their positions. In some states, it will be easy to defend the anti-gay marriage position. In others, however, like New York and Washington, high-profile Democrats are going to have to start going with their consciences -- or, at least, with public opinion.

It will be interesting to watch New York and Washington in the coming year. Those watching New York can check out the legislative wiki, put together by Ben Smith at the Daily News, set up to track state legislators' positions on the issue.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 04:47 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Let me steal the opening from Ruth Marcus' column on Alberto Gonzales yesterday and repackage it for my own purposes:

Howard Dean is achieving something remarkable, even miraculous, as DNC Chairman: He is making Terry McAuliffe look good.

Surveying the wreckage of Dean's latest imbecilic utterings, grotesquely overwraught analogies, and phony calls for unity, one really has to wonder: has there been a greater buffoon leading one of the two major parties in recent history?

Republicans remain thrilled by Dean's rise, of course, not only because he has an uncanny ability to make the Democratic party look bad with cringe-inducing headlines on a fairly regular basis, but also because he's created such a deep division within the party itself.

The bitter feud between Dean and DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel and over Dean's rapid cash burn rate and his insistence of pursuing a 50-state strategy at the expense of allocating all available resources toward this November is well known. And as Jay Cost wrote last week, with Democrats enjoying strong fundraising and a favorable national political climate, "the timing of this feud could not be worse."

Time will tell whether Dean's 50-state strategy turns out to be a smart, long-term investment or a collosal waste of resources. Much of the outcome will be determined by execution, and frankly Dean's track record in that department doesn't instill much confidence. As we learned shortly after his presidential bid imploded, not only was Dean fabulously undisciplined as a candidate, he was a terrible manager as well, and behind the scenes his campaign was an "utterly poisonous" mix of bickering and backbiting.

Luckily for Democrats, Dean is but one of three links in the party's '06 election chain, and the other two (Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel) are exceedingly disciplined, focused, and have put the party in the best possible position to make gains and perhaps recapture one or even both chambers of Congress this fall. But you know what they say: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If Democrats somehow manage to blow another opportunity this November, Schumer and Emanuel will get their share of criticism, to be sure, but expect most of it to flow to the trio's weak link, Howard Dean.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 04:23 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Voters don't like Republicans right now, but they don't much like Democrats either.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at public opinion coming into the midterms:

The Journal/NBC poll shows that Democrats have made little progress in improving their party's standing. The party's favorability rating, 32% positive and 39% negative, is as unflattering as the Journal/NBC survey has ever recorded. The Republicans' standing, now 33% positive and 46% negative, is near the party's record low.

The Journal's conclusion? 2006 may well hinge on local issues: "The 14% of voters who remain undecided in congressional races are especially interested in local issues. By 41% to 25%, those undecided voters say performance in the district will be most important to their vote."

(via The Note)

Posted by Ryan Sager at 01:37 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Over at GOP Bloggers, they're holding another straw poll. The question this time (as in this Gallup poll): Which candidates would you accept as the 2008 GOP nominee and which would you find unacceptable?

You can vote right here:

Posted by Ryan Sager at 12:34 PM | Email Author | Permalink

"If the Congressman is on the ballot, in my opinion, he will campaign and will be successful. I think now his chances are greater [than before] because the lawsuit has stirred up our base." - Jared Woodfill, Harris County Republican Party chairman, speaking about Tom DeLay's chances of holding onto his seat in the 22nd district if the courts force him to stay on the ballot.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 10:59 AM | Email Author | Permalink

Der Spiegel carries a rather frightening interview with IAEA boss Mohamed El Baradei.

Posted by Tom Bevan at 09:09 AM | Email Author | Permalink

"HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead."

Posted by Ryan Sager at 07:39 PM | Email Author | Permalink

Jim Geraghty at National Review reports that Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits -- and author of In Defense of the Religious Right -- has been blogging about John McCain, while also, undisclosed, working as a political consultant for him.

Geraghty's story has all the details and Hynes's response to the whole thing -- in which he accepts full responsibility and explains how the relationship came to be. Also, here's Hynes's post at his own blog (comments are open).

Two things strike me here:

First, Hynes is handling this correctly. There's basically no excuse for not disclosing the relationship earlier. And his past comments about similar scandals on the Left now look awfully hypocritical. But, unlike on the Left, it's not all deny, deny, deny. He handled something in the wrong way, and now he's saying so forthrightly.

Second, isn't McCain the one always hyperventilating about "circumvention" of campaign-finance laws. He and his pals even wanted to clamp down on the Internet recently to prevent bloggers from coordinating with campaigns. And now this is what his PAC is up to? Very odd.

Or, really, entirely predictable.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 06:56 PM | Email Author | Permalink

One more from Pew: Americans stand united behind Israel.

Posted by Ryan Sager at 06:32 PM | Email Author | Permalink

It seems Michael Steele isn't the only Republican Senate candidate this year trying to shake off the scarlet R -- for Republican.

Here's the first campaign commercial from Rep. Mark Kennedy, Republican candidate for Senate in Minnesota. You might notice it doesn't use a certain word. It starts with an R ...

Instead, the ad focuses entirely on Kennedy's family. For instance, here're his kids: "Dad likes to help people. He's principled, independent, just not much of a party guy. I meant he doesn't do whatever the party says to."

This is an open seat, being vacated by Sen. Mark Dayton of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, so it's a potential Republican pick up.

But this ad goes a long way toward showing that not many candidates out there think a Republican is such a great thing to be right now.

(Thanks to reader Cord Nuoffer for sending this in.)

As always, nominations can be sent to:

ryan-at-realclearpolitics.com

Posted by Ryan Sager at 05:39 PM | Email Author | Permalink

There's a fascinating little paper out from Pew today on whether ballot initiatives really work as turnout-boosters in close elections. The impetus for the study is the fact that the Democrats are looking to copy the GOP's "success" with gay-marriage initiatives by ramping up their own minimum-wage initiatives.

Currently, such initiatives are on the ballot in Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Nevada -- and may be on their way in Ohio and Wyoming -- but is there any real reason to expect them to be effective?

Pew looks at the impact of gay-marriage initiatives in 2004 and concludes: not really. Pew writes:

Yes it's true that in 2004, all 11 same sex marriage ban ballot initiatives were approved by voters -- and by sizable margins, ranging from a 57% majority in Oregon to an 86% majority in Mississippi.

Yes, it's true that Bush carried nine of the 11 states where the gay marriage bans were on the ballot in 2004. But it's also true that, unaided by gay marriage ban initiatives, Bush won those same nine states in 2000.

Yes, it's true that, in the aggregate, Bush increased his percentage of the vote in those 11 states by two percentage points between 2000 and 2004. But across all 50 states, he upped his percentage of the vote by three percentage points.

And yes, it's true that turnout spiked in those 11 states by 18.4% between 2000 and 2004. But nationwide, turnout was up by nearly as much -- 16%. And in Red America (the 31 states that Bush carried in 2004), turnout was up a bit more -- 18.9%.

In short, toting up all these numbers, it seems safe to say that the 11 gay marriage initiatives had no across-the-board impact on the 2004 presidential race.

Pew makes one exception: Ohio was so close (Bush won with 51 percent), that it's hard to say any one factor didn't tip the scale. And, of course, if Ohio had gone the other way, so would have the Electoral College -- no small matter.

But, overall, I think this Pew paper confirms what's been obvious since the smoke cleared after 2004. Despite the loud proclamations from "values voters" that they had won Bush his reelection, national security was far-and-away the decisive issue. And I don't particularly buy that the gay-marriage initiative tipped the scale even in Ohio. The Bush ground game there, particularly with black churches, was very aggressive. (But I'd be interested to hear from anyone with real, solid proof it was gay marriage.)

But back to those minimum-wage initiatives. Can they drive turn out? Well, 67 percent of Democrats consider the minimum wage "very important" as an issue; only 43 percent of Republicans consider gay marriage "very important." So, theoretically, it should have an even bigger impact (bigger than zero, that is, if you believe the first part of Pew's analysis).

Still, I don't really buy this. If an explosive, headline-grabbing issue like gay marriage made essentially zero difference, why would a wonkier, less emotional issue get