It is safe to say that Governor Jim Gibbons has been a disaster for Nevada Republicans; he's been involved in all manner of scandals and he is only slightly more popular than intestinal flu. According to Mason Dixon, he fails to clear the 35% mark against any of the three prominent Democrats exploring a bid against him, including Clark County Commission (and Senator's Son) Rory Reid, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman (who is considering a run as an independent), and State Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley. Goodman in particular clobbers Gibbons 56%-29%.

Fortunately for Republicans, federal judge and former Attorney General Brian Sandoval has resigned his post, and likely plans to run for Governor. Sandoval leads Gibbons 33%-17% in primary polling, and leads Goodman 45%-38%, leads Buckley 44%-36%, and leads Reid 49%-32%.

I just about fell out of my chair yesterday when I read this in the Washington Post.

President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority.

This confirms a suspicion I have had for some time, and made clear a few weeks ago: Democratic leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill have only recently begun to take seriously the internal divisions within their own party.

Frankly, I am stunned that they would be caught off guard by this. How could they not have anticipated this? How could they possibly have been surprised that the left and right flanks of the party would not see eye to eye?

To explain my utter, complete astonishment at this bone-headed mistake, I need a visual aid. The following is courtesy of Google Maps. It marks the district offices of four types of congressmen:

(1) Democratic House committee chairmen are marked with blue pinpoints.
(2) House leaders and chairmen closely involved with health care are marked with red crosses.
(3) The top 40 Democratic House members in McCain-voting districts are marked with yellow bubbles.
(4) Committee chairmen from the McCain-voting districts are marked with yellow pinpoints.

Here's the map:

As you can see, coastal liberals dominate the leadership positions. California has six of the 24 leadership positions I have delineated. Another seven are located roughly within the megapolis that stretches from Washington, D.C. to Boston. Meanwhile, those marginal members are clustered in the South and the Border States, with a few sprinkled across the Great Plains and then into Arizona.

This is a stark visual representation of the divide within the Democratic Party. We can clearly see the source of the problem. Liberal leaders from the coasts were given wide latitude by the White House to write these bills - and, unsurprisingly, they delivered products their fellow liberals love (or at least like). But the moderate and conservative Democrats - whose votes are needed for passage yet who run the risk of defeat next fall should the broad middle of the country sour on the reform efforts - weren't fully consulted, and don't like the bills. Hence, the internal friction - which corresponds pretty well with age-old sectional divisions in the party (more on that in a moment).

It was always going to be a challenge to find something that the moderates could stomach yet the liberals don't think is too watered down. That, more than anything else, was destined to be the highest hurdle for health care reform to jump. Amazingly, the White House waited until after the liberal House bills were published - and all the attending fallout - to take this challenge seriously, or even notice it! Because of this error, it is now in a substantially weaker position to find that middle ground. The liberals already have their bills on the table, so they are at least somewhat committed to them (as the Progressive Caucus has been saying for weeks, and as the WaPo article suggests). The moderates and conservatives are at home getting yelled at by angry constituents, rather than in D.C. searching for that common ground. The acrimony has forced Obama out onto the campaign trail, where he is making mistakes (e.g. the Post Office comment, the Cambridge police comment, and the AARP comment - all a consequence of the White House's desire to get back in front of the health care story). All of this has driven his poll numbers downward, leaving him less able to persuade the marginal members in the caucus, who must get getting nervous about November, 2010.

I can think of five very good reasons why the White House's lack of foresight on the potential for the intraparty squabble is absolutely inexcusable:

(1) For the months between November and January, we were treated to endless comparisons of Obama to the great presidents of the days of yore. One of them was Franklin Roosevelt. Question: who stopped the New Deal dead in its tracks after 1938? It wasn't the Republicans alone. It was Southern Democrats working in alliance with the Republicans. Who are the marginal members standing between Obama and a health care bill...Southern Democrats! Generally speaking, the internal cleavage within the Democratic Party (North v. South; left v. right) is really one of the most significant features of the political landscape since at least the Great Depression. After eighty some years and dozens of failed attempts at liberal reforms, there is no excuse for a President not to anticipate it rearing its head again.

(2) Much of last year was dominated by that famous primary brawl between Obama and Hillary - and all through these states (Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, etc.) the former First Lady made mincemeat of the junior Senator from Illinois. Then, when the general election rolled around, these states voted against him again. Historically speaking, these states usually vote for a winning Democrat. Obama should be very familiar with his struggles in this region, and not terribly surprised that the large number of Democratic members from it could create such problems for bills drafted by coastal liberals.

(3) How many of these members did Rahm Emanuel recruit? Fourteen of these seats changed hands in either 2006 or 2008 when Emanuel was in a leadership position in the House. Is this not a sufficiently representative sample to know that there could be trouble?

(4) Congress usually fails to find compromises on big solutions to big problems - exactly like what is being debated now - regardless of whether the legislature is under control of a single party or if it is split. This means that internal cleavages can do just as much damage to reform efforts as the partisan divide. This should be especially evident for an item like health care reform: Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton failed to deliver anything approaching the scope Obama is envisioning, even though the Democratic Party had complete control of Congress for at least parts of their terms.

(5) As stark as this map looks, the landscape in the Senate is even starker. Thirteen Democratic senators come from McCain states.

It's almost as if the President has absolutely no experience in dealing with the United States Congress whatsoever.

That's so puzzling, considering how Democrats turned down the fresh-faced newcomer who could turn a good phrase on the campaign trail for the old-hand who had been in Washington for 15 years by the time of the nomination battle. Oh wait...

Scotland's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill could be heard hugging himself when he let Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi go free on humanitarian grounds. He announced:

Compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs that we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as  a people. No matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the repulsive decision. Al-Megrahi helped take  270 lives in in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.  Terminally ill with prostate cancer, al Megrahi was flown home to die among his kin.

I do not belong to the hang-em-high crowd.  I  have long opposed the death penalty, and MacAskill has just made the job of recruiting others to that view harder to do.

My argument has been this:  The state does not have to kill people it holds in custody.  Instead, it can put those who commit monstrous crimes behind bars for the rest of the their days.

Al-Megrahi was not a 19-year-old who killed someone in a bar fight over a girl. He was a mass murderer who coolly plotted the incineration of hundreds of innocents.

Mercy for al-Megrahi was not putting him alone in a room with the families of the Lockerbie victims.  Mercy was giving him a fair trial, then sentencing him to life without parole.

We who fight on the front lines against the death penalty  -- who argue that justice can be served without it -- have been delivered a setback.  MacAskill's self-loving "act of compassion" makes me sick.

www.fromaharrop.com

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds President Obama's job approval down 12 points since April, as less than half of Americans are now confident in his leadership and ability to significantly improve the health care system.

The survey was conducted of 1,001 adults from Aug. 13-17 with a margin of error of +/- 3%.

Just 49% are now confident that Obama will make the right decisions for the country's future, down 11 points since April. Sixty percent of the 18 to 29-year-old voting bloc he dominated in the 2008 election still back him, while those 30 to 64 and 65 and older are below 50%.

On health care, more people now disapprove (50%) of the way he's handling the issue, compared to 46% who approve. While 58% say reforming the nation's health care system is necessary to control costs and expand coverage, just 45% support the changes being developed in Congress and by Obama. At the same time, 52% support the development of a government health care plan to compete with private insurance; 46% oppose it.

Obama's 57% job approval, higher than other recent polling, bumps his RCP Average back up to 52.0%.

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D), who shot into office in 2006 with 17-point margin of victory, is vulnerable as he gears up for a run at re-election. A new Public Policy Polling survey found the governor with an upside-down approval rating and trailing a potential Republican opponent.

Ritter trails with 38 percent to 46 percent for former Rep. Scott McInnis (R), who served six terms in Congress from 1992 to 2004. The other Republican tested is Josh Penry, a 33-year-old state Senate minority leader and former congressional aide to McInnis. Ritter and Penry are tied at 40 percent apiece.

"The good news for Bill Ritter is that despite a tough budget cycle and Democrats polling worse nationally he's not in any worse shape than four months ago," said PPP president Dean Debnam. "The bad news of course is that he already had a negative approval rating and an outside the margin of error gap against one of his possible GOP opponents back then."

Ok, so 2012 polls are basically meaningless - but that doesn't make them any less fun to talk about. PPP is out with a new 2012 survey showing Barack Obama leading all four potential GOP contenders (sorry TPaw and Jindal), though he's only over 50% against one of them and another runs surprisingly close:

Obama 47%, Huckabee 44%
Obama 47%, Romney 40%
Obama 49%, Gingrich 41%
Obama 52%, Palin 38%

Ed Kilgore writes in The New Republic that:

As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic--much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere.

Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.

Yes, dear reader, I am suggesting that this August's sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August's. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie. The candidates were fresh from a joint appearance at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, which was widely viewed by progressives as a strategic error by Obama. More generally, Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging. "Liberals have been in a dither for several weeks now over Barack Obama's supposedly listless campaign performance following his return from Europe," influential blogger Kevin Drum summed up sentiments at that time, "and as near as I can tell this turned into something close to panic."

These doldrums dissipated by the time of the Democratic convention later in the month, but reemerged in September, when McCain actually moved ahead in some polls. And the diagnosis of the problem was typically that Obama was too passive, and wasn't articulating a clear enough message. This should sound familiar to connoisseurs of contemporary progressive concerns about Obama.

Progressives are to take comfort in this resurgence.  Obama turned things around, you see, by sticking to his plan, which largely consisted of "his legendary calm ("No Drama Obama"); his confidence in his own long-range strategy; his ability to choose competent lieutenants and delegate to them abundantly; and his grasp of the fundamentals of public opinion and persuasion. There was zero sense of panic in the Obama campaign itself late last summer, because they stuck with their strategy and organization and didn't let the polls or news cycles force them off the path they had chosen."  By deploying these same traits in 2009, Team Obama can turn things around today.

Um, yeah. No doubt these were important factors (plus lots and lots and lots and lots of money). But let me suggest the most important factor in Obama's 2008 resurgence:

I hope he has a different plan for 2009.

(Troll/hate e-mail preempt: No, I don't think Obama caused, wanted or planned on the stock market crash; the point is he didn't reclaim his lead in the polls as a part of some grand plan that progressives/liberals can take comfort in today. Had the stock market not collapsed in September Obama probably still would have won, but we would have been looking at a very different race).

UPDATE: Better chart.

"I think you're going to continue to see a president that's going to push the envelope. I'll tell you right now, he is not interested in moving the dial just a smidge. He's interested in transformational change." - Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, speaking to the Des Moines Register editorial board.

President Obama's approval rating in Florida has dropped to 47% -- the lowest mark he's received in any state or nationwide polling by Quinnipiac (Aug 12–17, 1136 RV, MoE +/- 2.9%). This includes a drop among Democrats, from 91% to 83%.

Part of the president's problem in the Sunshine State -- which he won last year -- are voters' feelings about health care. Nearly 60% oppose enacting reform if it "significantly" increases the federal budget deficit, and more than 70% doubt Obama can reform health care without doing so. Just 38% think Obama's plan will improve health care nationallly; 45% say it will hurt it.

However, 58% do support creating a government health insurance plan.

"Although he still gets a 51 – 44 percent favorability rating, that's down from 62 – 32 percent in June and the President's 47 – 48 percent thumbs down verdict on his job performance makes Florida the first state in which a Quinnipiac University survey shows his job approval is underwater, even if his nose is right at the surface," said Quinnipiac assistant director Peter Brown. “This is also the first time that President Obama's approval rating has fallen below the 51 percent of the popular vote that he won in Florida."

Yesterday Tom commented on a Q poll showing Governor Charlie Crist leading Marco Rubio 55% to 26%.  Today, Rasmussen shows a similar result, with Crist leading 53% to 31%.  This is certainly a solid lead for Crist, but it should be a bit disconcerting that he's hovering around 50%, especially in a GOP primary where many of the conservative voters are probably not particularly inclined to vote for him.