Senator John McCain was kind enough to sit down with me for about twenty minutes in his office this morning - no small feat given the Chinese fire drill that's taking place in the Senate right now as Republicans race to finish a number of huge bills by the end of the week, and also because McCain was rushing off to attend the funeral of one of his dearest friends.

We touched on a variety of big issues like the NIE, Iraq, the military commission bill, immigration, and Republican prospects for the coming election. I'm hoping to have the full transcript of the interview available tomorrow.

That's the question we tried to tackle at the Pajamas Media event last night at the National Press Club. The gist of my remarks was that it is a very difficult, if not impossible question to answer. Indeed, I came to the conclusion that it's probably best to fall back on the answer people most often give when asked to define pornography: "you'll know it when you see it." Here are three observations I tried to make last night about partisanship.

In general, I think partisanship is a good thing. As the editor of a political web site whose mission is to seek out and publish the best political commentary, opinion, and analysis across a broad range of viewpoints, partisanship is often what gives force to an argument and makes it compelling.

That said, there is a difference between "smart partisanship" and a much less attractive alternative that relies on invective rather than argument and employs the widespread use of insults and obscenities. This is a problem the left continues to struggle with given that the new media revolution (to use a pretentious phrase) has taken place almost entirely in the last five years under the tenure of George W. Bush and given voice to a core of the most active liberal partisans who A) believe he wasn't legitimately elected in the first place - or legitimately reelected in 2004 - and who B) believe the President and his administration deliberately misled the country into the current war in Iraq.

One reason the question of "how partisan is too partisan" is almost impossible to answer is because the concept of partisanship is itself too subjective. The example I cited last night was the Swift Boat Veterans from the 2004 campaign. Basically half the country - meaning the 48% who voted for John Kerry - viewed the Swift Boat Veterans as an egregiously partisan attack. The other half of the country - or at least a good portion of the 51% who ended up voting for George W. Bush - thought it was perfectly legitimate, indeed newsworthy, that more than 100 of John Kerry's fellow Vietnam vets, including nearly all of his commanders, came forward and went on record to say that he was unfit to serve as Commander in Chief for a variety of reasons.

I think most would agree that if 100-plus members of the Texas Air National Guard had come forward in the same manner to denounce George W. Bush in either 2000 or 2004, liberals would have had a much different opinion on the matter - and the media would have covered it extensively.

Another example is to look at what's currently happening in the Virginia Senate race. Many of the same folks who moaned and screeched about the Swift Boat Vets attack on John Kerry two years ago as too partisan see nothing untoward about the attack being leveled against George Allen - which essentially boils down to a "he said-she said" affair between Allen and one person who went on the record (supported by anonymous sources) alleging he used the n-word thirty-five years ago.

The final point I tried to make last night is that naked partisanship, even of the most extreme kind, is preferable to partisanship masquerading as objectivity. I was thinking specifically about Dan Rather's Memogate episode and also the recent "fauxtography" incidents during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. The idea that evidence can be manufactured, images enhanced, and that "fake but accurate" is a new standard for professional journalists are all deeply disturbing and corrosive results of partisanship and bias in the media.

In a broader sense, the whole notion of objectivity in the media has fallen away on partisan lines. Conservatives look at FOX News and find the coverage exactly as advertised ("fair and balanced") while liberals see FOX as a shameless propaganda machine and mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Liberals read the New York Times and believe they're getting an objective take on the news, conservatives see a paper thoroughly riddled by liberal partisanship engaged in an agenda-journalism crusade against the Bush administration.

There aren't any profound conclusions to draw - not by me anyway - except that when it comes to discussing "how partisan is too partisan," the left and the right will have to agree to disagree. It was a great event last night and I was honored to be included among such a distinguished panel of guests.

The April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate - about which there has been much spin and too little factual analysis - was declassified in part Tuesday at the order of the president. It followed the Sunday NYT story which began, "A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks." A more objective reading indicates that the sixteen intelligence agencies agreed that:

* Though US-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged Al-Queda and disrupted its operations the number and geographic dispersion of terrorists is increasing;

* The global terrorist movement is becoming more diffuse, adapting to the methods we're employing to fight it; and

* Europe is judged an important target by the jihadists.

More importantly, at least to the politics of the week, is the one paragraph that deals with Iraq. It says: (1) that the Iraq conflict has become a "cause celebre" for the jihadists; (2) that resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world does cultivate supporters of the jihad movement; and (3) that if jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves and are perceived as having failed, this will reduce or eliminate Iraq as a recruiting tool.

The report also says that the recent condemnations of terrorist actions by Muslim clerics signal a trend that could grow into a religious counter to the jihadist ideology.

In short, the NIE confirms what the president has been saying for months. Iraq has become a central battle in the global war against terrorists because they believe it is one. If we are defeated there, the jihadists will be strengthened enormously and - conversely - if they lose, our strength is enhanced to at least as large an extent. Democrats, such as US congressional candidate Paul Hodes of New Hampshire, are reading the NIE through a politically clouded lens. Hodes is quoted in the Tuesday Washington Post as saying, "The report underscores that the longer Bush and his enablers...keep us in Iraq, the more we undermine our own security." Actually, it says no such thing.

Michael Barone recently penned an interesting piece that amplified a point that I made last week -- that the GOP seems peculiarly strong in some areas where Bush was weak in 2004, and peculiarly weak in some areas where Bush was strong.

Barone offers a tentative explanation that the political divisions that have defined America since roughly 1996 might be in motion. This might be true -- and I personally have thought that the "Red State/Blue State" dichotomy seems hewn into granite only because, in the chaos of the 24 hour news cycle, a month -- let alone eight years -- seems like an eternity. The problem is entirely on the side of the newsroom -- in America, it is very easy to have eight years of a phenomenon that does not amount to an indeliable element of American political existence. (We call that the Eisenhower Administration.) The news media and its pundits might not recognize that, but that's their problem.

I think that Barone's theory is interesting. I do not intend to dispute it here, for I think he might be on to something. My intention is to lay out a causal process that seems to exist in these districts that is independent of Barone's idea (of potential GOP trouble in rural America) or my idea discussed last week (of potential GOP trouble among Republican identifiers).

The set of races that are in conservative districts but are nevertheless on the table are all peculiar. We have IN 02, IN 08, IN 09, KY 04, NC 11, PA 10 and VA 02. Mr. Barone mentions CO 04, but Musgrave's vulnerability is really just due to the fact that she is a two-term representative** who only won with only 51% in 2004 and has drawn a (relatively) qualified and well funded challenger. She is in the lead in a bad year for her party -- which, for an incumbent like her, means that she is not really a peculiarity in need of explanation.

What of these 7 seats? Most of them seem to me to be explicable by the same causal process. On the one hand, partisanship is aiding the Republicans. On the other hand, the lack of a "personal vote" for the GOP incumbent (i.e. the type of vote that the House member enjoys because he/she is well-liked and widely regarded in the district) is aiding the Democrats. Ditto also is the national political environment, which I doubt is influencing vote choice directly in any appreciable manner -- but rather has brought forward top-tier challengers in 5 of these 7 races.

This dynamic seems to be playing out in two broad types of ways. So we'll take each type one at a time.

On the one hand -- in IN 09 and KY 04, former Democratic members of Congress are running to reacquire their seats. These two -- Baron Hill and Ken Lucas, respectively -- lost their seats in 2004. Hill lost outright to Mike Sodrel and Lucas chose to honor a term limits pledge and refrained from running. Both of the seats switched to the GOP because, I think it is fair to say, of the secular shift in rural areas from the "blue dog" Democrats to the Republicans. But they were two of the last seats to shift because of the quality of Democratic incumbents. The Democrats managed to win and/or hold these seats despite the secular trend in American politics. That says a lot about the two Democrats running -- they are of extremely high quality. Hill inherited the seat from Lee Hamilton -- and therefore won an open seat election in a conservative district. Lucas won the seat out from under the GOP when Jim Bunning ran for the Senate. The GOP only picked up the seat because he retired (temporarily, of course) and the Democrats nominated George Clooney's dad. So -- these are extremely high quality challengers.

Thus -- what we have in these two contests are two independent causal factors cutting sharply in two different directions. Sodrel and Davis both enjoy the advantage of district partisanship -- which is what yielded them the seats in the first place. However, they enjoy nothing of the "personal vote" that comes with incumbency because they are running against very strong challengers -- which is why the Democrats were able to keep the seats as long as they did. In the background here, of course, is the negative environment for the GOP -- which is undoubtedly what induced both Hill and Lucas to make another run for their old seats.

As for IN 08, NC 11, PA 10 -- all of these feature exceedingly weak incumbents who have run, in the past, relatively undisciplined campaigns and/or who have been generally undisciplined in their work to retain the steas. John Hostettler in IN 08 insists upon running the type of House campaign that went out of style when people started to buy a second television set. He raises no cash and eschews much of the professional advice upon which incumbents rely today. Charles Taylor in NC 11 has been haunted by ethics queries and is known to take controversial stands in Congress (like opposing a 9/11 memorial). Don Sherwood had an extramarital affair with a woman who eventually came to accuse him of abuse.

I think it no coincidence that the three weakest incumbents in the whole House are all in highly competitive races. There is a margin for error for incumbents in places like this that is greater than in swing or Democratic-leaning districts. You have some wiggle room to "be yourself" (for better or worse!). When your partisanship aligns with your district, there is relatively little pressure upon you. There is also the inclination to not run a full-time campaign and focus extensively upon reelection. This stands in sharp contrast to members like Bob Simmons, Jim Gerlach and Heather Wilson -- all of whom expect strong challengers and tight races, rain or shine. They are in full-time campaign mode and are highly disciplined members of Congress. Reelection stands at the forefront of their minds. Discipline is the name of the game.

But for many members, that is simply not the case. Reelection in a conservative district, after having served for a good long time, is less of a pressing concern for a Republican. I think that might explain the trouble of these 3. None of these men would do anything to intentionally diminish their chances of reelection -- my sense is that they just have not correctly assessed the risks that they could face in any given election, and have not ordered their campaign/governmental/personal existence as well as they should have. They never did the work to develop, or they put at risk, the personal vote that incumbents enjoy -- under the ostensible presumption that district partisanship would see them through.
In other words -- these 3 races, just as the prior 2, are explicable as being as close as they are because (a) the districts are very Republican, but (b) the Republican incumbents, for a variety of reasons, have failed to develop any kind of personal relationship with their constituents that is sufficiently large. The negative political environment forms the context that has given these members strong challenges.

That leaves IN 02, Chris Chocola, and VA 02, Thelma Drake. Both of them lack the kind of personal vote that the average incumbent enjoys, but they do not have the severe types of problems that characterize the members in these other districts. They should seem as safe as Musgrave seems, and right now they do not. Interestingly Moveon.org was in both districts early and seemed to have "softened" Chocola and Drake up. It seems that Drake is rebounding, and therefore we do not need to "explain" her (just as we do not need to explain Musgrave). However, Chocola seems to be faltering. I am not sure why. But, an explanation that captures the variation in 5 out of 6 races is not too bad.

My intuition is that this only offers a partial explanation. Weak incumbents who lack the personal vote should be in trouble - but 5 of these 7 seem to be in an obscene amount of trouble. Here is where Mr. Barone's theory about an emerging GOP problem in rural America might also be having an independent effect. It might also indicate a general softness for GOP candidates nationwide, which is what I hypothesized last week. My theory is still that the consensus estimate relies too heavily on these seats. Either the GOP will come home in sufficient numbers to bail out a few of these fellas, or Republicans in less conservative districts are in more trouble than we might apprehend.

**CORRECTION: The original version of this post incorrectly identified Congressman Musgrave as a freshman. She has been elected twice, in 2002 and 2004.

On the heels of last night's debate between Republican Rick O'Donnell and Democrat Ed Perlmutter in Colorado's 7th Congressional district, KUSA-TV is out with a new SurveyUSA poll showing Perlmutter with a commanding 17-point lead in the race, 54-37. That's a huge jump from the last SUSA poll in August showing the race a 45-45 tie. All caveats about putting too much stock in any given poll still apply, so be on the lookout for further polling to see if this race has really gotten away from O'Donnell.

I confess I don't have the attention span to sift through David Corn's response to Christopher Hitchens on Niger/yellowcake/Wilson/Plamegate and Hitchens' subsequent response to Corn. It sure looks interesting, though.

One noticeable difference this election versus the last cycle is the amount of spin both sides are generating. I'm on the mailing lists for Republican and Democratic Senatorial campaign committees and the Republican and Democratic House campaign committees. The amount of email these folks are sending out this year on a daily basis is staggering. Every possible event, detail, statement or gaffe is immediately pumped out via email under the most dramatic and accusatory headline imaginable.

As one might expect with both sides spinning so hard, every now and then one group will go a bridge too far. Today it happened to the DCCC, which just sent out an email leading off with the following:

"According to a new report by the National Association of Realtors, for the first time since April of 1995, around the time the GOP took over Congress, home prices have declined nationally, and are likely to continue to fall for the rest of the year. [emphasis added]

Presumably, the DCCC is trying to make the fatuous argument that Republicans are to blame for the current drop in housing prices, but instead they seem to have produced an advertisement crediting Republicans for the decade long housing boom.

Apparently, Josh Marshall doesn't think Larry Sabato needs to explain his n-word charge against George Allen, only that Allen needs to respond to it personally. This is NOT the way it's supposed to work, and I'm surprised Josh doesn't know better.

Josh and I graduated from Princeton University together in 1991. I didn't know Josh at all in school, but that hardly matters. Suppose I went on national television tomorrow and said that 15 years ago he had used the n-word in college. And when the interviewer of the show asked me how I knew Josh had used the word, or whether he'd ever used the word in front of me I responded, "I'm not going to get into that."

I'm sure Josh would agree that would be unacceptable. Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting Larry Sabato is lying. What I am suggesting is that Sabato should have to back up an accusation like the one he made, and Josh Marshall should be asking Larry Sabato to produce the goods before asking George Allen to respond to the charge directly.

UPDATE: The USA Today blog reports: USA TODAY political reporter Jill Lawrence spoke with Sabato this morning. She reports he told her that he never heard Allen use the n-word, but believes the future senator did because "people I know and trust" have told him it happened.

The Washington Times offered an article today about improving GOP prospects that, to me anyway, seemed long on conclusions and short on evidence. Their thesis:

There has been a palpable shift in the mood in Washington in recent weeks. No longer are insiders in both parties sharing predictions of a Democratic rout of Republicans.

Some on both sides had expected an election debacle for the Republicans, driven by the Iraq war, high gas prices and the perception that a Republican-led Washington can neither shoot nor spend straight.

Now those perceptions have changed.

First off, let me just note the strategic use of metaphor in this lead. This is metaphor-as-bet-hedging, which is typical of the press. No longer is there going to be a "rout" of Republicans. No longer are people expecting an "election debacle." This is interesting because -- what exactly is a "rout"? Is it 15 or 30 seats? Or 50 or 70? What is an "election debacle"? Is it that the GOP merely loses control? Or is it maybe that they lose control so badly that they cannot reacquire it in 2008? Who knows! What we do know is that nobody can point to anything specific in this article on November 8 and declare that the Times was wrong! Why? Because the Times has chosen to couch its thesis only in metaphor. One thing that has turned me sour about the press and its pundits is this kind of strategic use of the metaphor -- it subtly and quietly introduces ambiguity where clarity is possible and preferable. I think that this happens because no news outlet wants to put itself on the line, but they also do not want to appear as though they are not putting itself on the line. So -- they hedge their bets by way of metaphor.

Anyway, I will get off the literary high horse and get on with the argument. As I said, the evidence that the Times provides does not seem to me to justify the enthusiasm among DC Republicans.

For instance, here is something offered up by Ken Mehlman that the Times accepts without question:

Comparing the 2006 midterm elections to previous major shifts, Mr. Mehlman says he sees none of the signs that preceded those landslides. In 1974, following the Watergate scandal, there was a surge in the Democratic primary-voter turnout and a decline in Republican voter turnout. The reverse was true before the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.

So far this year, there has been no indication of a Democratic surge. In 36 of 39 primaries, the Democratic turnout has been lower than the average of the past 20 years. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Vermont had higher-than-average Democratic turnouts this year.

The Times goes on to imply, though not by way of more Mehlman quotations, that this indicates that Democrats are not activating their base voters as well as they did in 1974. There are two major problems with this. First, they do not need to. They Democrats "only" need 15 seats. Provided that base amplification has a linear relationship with final seat swings, they need to amp the base by a little less than 1/3 the amplification of 1974 or 1994, all else being equal. The Democrats netted 48 seats in 1974, the GOP netted 52 in 1994. The Democrats only need 15 this time around. So -- what the Times notes might actually be consistent with a Democratic takeover.

Second, the argument that low primary turnout is a sign of a relatively placid base does not square with what we know about primary elections. Primaries do not tend to have high turnout because voters are so excited for November that they just have to go out and vote in March. They are not like football preseason. They tend to have high turnout because there are competitive races that attract voter attention. And competitive races in the primary tend to occur when more than one strategic, high quality politician see a good chance at actually getting into Congress, and throw their hats into the ring.

So -- why were Democratic primary races relatively uncompetitive this year? There are at least two reasons, one that favors the GOP and one that favors the Democrats. To the GOP's advantage, there are not many open seats that they have to defend. Strategic, high quality politicians most frequently come out of the woodwork for open seats because they know how hard it is to take on incumbents. Fewer open seats means fewer potential pickup opportunities for the Democrats -- good news for the GOP. To the Democrats advantage, the party can and does play a role in encouraging/discouraging candidates to or from running, and it appears that the national Democrats have done a good job at this. They succeeded in (a) getting good people in about 25 races and (b) helping clear a path for these people through the primaries by discourating competitive, but inferior, candidates from offering a challenge to the recruited candidates. Now -- the Democrats have suffered some embarassments in the recruitment/derecruitment game, notably in CA 11, KY 03 and NH 02. However, this seems to me to be explicable by their unprecedented activity in pre-primary maneuvering. If your failure rate is 15% of the time, you are going to have a lot more failures when you try 50 times than when you try 10 times. If your successes are not mentioned -- and, in this case, they are not because a successful recruitment/derecruitment will have the appearance of the party not being involved -- it will look as though you are stumbling when you really are not.

Taking a step back, this Times article is very peculiar to me. The Times is certainly a right-leaning paper. But right-leaning news outlets, beyond talk radio at least, do not seem to me to be historically guilty of being pollyannaish about the Republicans (I think the left-leaning ones like The New York Times are typically pollannaish about Democratic prospects, which in turn actually damages Democratic prospects). So -- the Times is clearly picking up on a vibe that the GOP elites seem to feel, but do not really justify it well at all. This means one of either two things (or possibly a mixture of both): (a) there is no justification to the vibe, and modified GOP expectations will yield disappointment on November 8; (b) there is some justification to the vibe, but the data that is driving this expectation is not yet publicly available.

I am not sure which it is. This is one of the drawbacks of living in Wrigleyville. I am not in any kind of loop. Of course -- if you are like me and think that separation from the center of power enables one to analyze power more clearly, overall one is better off being a stone's throw from the Cubs home than the Nationals home.

I attended Senator Arlen Specter's address at the National Press Club yesterday (video at C-Span) . Specter discussed the extraordinary work left on the Senate's schedule: military commissions, NSA legislation, immigration, the federal shield law, and eleven appropriations bills. Specter remarked that never in all his years had he seen so much work of such high importance left to the final days of the session.

In addition to his fifteen minute long remarks, Specter spent close to an hour answering questions from the audience covering a wide range of subjects. Here are some of the more interesting pieces of Specters remarks and responses:

On Military Commissions: As he stated on CNN the day before, Specter reiterated that while he thought the compromise on classified evidence was "correct," he remained "strongly opposed" to the provision taking habeus corpus out of the hands of the federal judiciary. Specter said the great writ is explicitly authorized under the Constitution for cases of insurrection or invasion, neither of which we currently face. He'll be introducing an amendment to that effect this week.

On the NSA Program: Specter said there had been major changes in the bill over time but that it had been refined to the point where he thought the "chances are pretty good it will pass." In fact, responding to a question about his relationship with President Bush, Specter responded that he and the President had a great relationship and that he had negotiated directly with the President on aspects of the NSA legislation.

On Immigration: Specter was clearly peeved at being bullied by the House, saying it seemed clear that "the House of Representatives doesn't think much of the bicameral system." Specter said he thought enforcement was vital and that he supported a fence, but that immigration reform shouldn't be handled in such a "piecemeal" way. As Chair of the Conference committee on immigration Specter said he remained open to finding a comprehensive solution. "If somebody has a better idea," he said, "I'm open to listen."

On Judges: Specter defended his record as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying the 5.3% vacancy rate in the federal court system is the lowest it's been in 20 years. He rattled off a number of successful appointments, including Pryor, Brown, Owen and Kavanaugh, as well as Alito and Roberts. Specter said he put Boyle , Haynes and Meyers right back on the Committee list after President Bush sent them back up, and he stressed that he's been running a tight ship, getting folks through the committee in a timely fashion. Specter used John Bolton's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an example of why it's important to move expeditiously on nominations, saying, "if Bolton had testified or one day he would have been confirmed. Let them [nominees] hang out to dry and you can forget about it."

On Bolton: Specter said he supported Bolton and thought he was doing a good job. "He's smart, industrious, and cantankerous" Specter said, adding that he considered those to be "three good qualities."

On Signing Statements: Specter said President Bush's use of signing statements is "inappropriate under the Constitution." If the President likes a bill, Specter said, he should sign it. If not, he should veto it. But the President can't pick and choose which provisions of a bill he (and the rest of the executive branch) is going to follow.

On Torture: when asked about the Bush administration's use of torture, Specter challenged the premise of question. "I don't know that any officials have authorized torture," Specter said. "I don't think they have." He also referred to our current interrogation techniques as "rugged" but legal.

On the Election: when asked whether the GOP deserved 2 more years of Control, Specter said yes, for the following two reasons: 1) they've done a good job and 2) look at the alternative! Specter said his view was that the odds are "strongly in favor" of the GOP hanging onto the Senate and "somewhat in favor" of them hanging onto the House.

On Santorum: when asked what single piece of advice he'd give to Rick Santorum right now, Specter said Santorum should begin emphasizing the bill the two of them authored on stem cells. Specter was proud of the fact they had reached a compromise consistent with Santorum's religious, moral and ethical concerns and that also promoted life-saving science that would benefit millions of Americans. Specter thought that was an issue that would benefit Santorum in the election.