Two new polls out on the New Jersey gubernatorial race show two different results but with the same number: a candidate leading with just 40 percent of the vote. Such is the environment in the Garden State now with an independent candidate polling in the mid-teens.

SurveyUSA's latest survey has Chris Daggett (I) at 18 percent, his highest showing in any poll.

Survey USA
(611 LVs, 10/12-14, MoE +/- 4%)
Christie 40 (-3 from last poll, 10/5-7)
Corzine 39 (-1)
Daggett 18 (+4)
Undecided 3 (+1)

New York Times
(475 LVs, 10/9-14, MoE +/- 4-5%)
Corzine 40
Christie 37
Daggett 14
Undecided 9

Christie's lead in the RCP Average is now down to just 0.8 percent. And with just over two weeks to go, it's anybody's race.

The three candidates have a final televised debate tonight. Next week, Gov. Corzine could also see a boost from a full-court press of national Democratic surrogates, including President Obama.

Don't you have better things to do with your time than this?

Boehner Statement on the Inaugural Class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame

WASHINGTON, DC – House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today issued the following statement on the announcement of Bill France, Sr., Bill France, Jr., Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt as the first inductees to the new NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina:

“Today's induction of the inaugural class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame is a tribute not only to stock car racing fans but to the vision of the early pioneers of America's number one motorsport. For the last 61 years, NASCAR has come to exemplify the great American virtues of competition and merit. The new Hall of Fame is much-need addition for NASCAR fans and will soon take its place alongside Cooperstown and Canton.

“Congratulations to Richard Petty and Junior Johnson, and to the family of Dale Earnhardt. These three racers are American legends and their many championships a product of their persistence, talent, and tenacity. Congratulations as well to the France family as Bill Sr. and Bill Jr. are honored for devoting their lives to building a simple, family-owned business into an icon of success in the world of sport.”

A new poll from Daily Kos of the Delaware Senate landscape shows a tight race in the offing should Attorney General Beau Biden (D), as expected, face Rep. Mike Castle (R).

General Election Matchup
Castle 46
Biden 45
Undecided 9

This is the first poll taken since Castle announced his run. The nine-term Congressman and former Delaware governor leads among independents 48-40, and also has the support of one-in-five Democrats. Biden leads among voters 18-29 (48-42 percent) and 30-44 (47-44 percent), and has a 10-point edge among women.

Biden, son of the vice president, just returned from a year serving in Iraq, and has said he is focused on spending time with his family and resuming work as Attorney General. But this morning, he said he signaled that he was indeed looking to run.

"Am I considering it? Absolutely," he said on Good Morning America. "But I'll be making that decision in due course."

In the event Biden does not run, the poll tested matchups featuring Ted Kaufman, appointed to replace Joe Biden this January; former Lt. Gov. John Carney, who is now running for Castle's seat; and New Castle County Executive Chris Coons:

Castle 49 -- Carney 41 -- Und 10
Castle 51 -- Coons 39 -- Und 10
Castle 51 -- Kaufman 37 -- Und 12

Favorable Ratings
Castle 64 / 30
Biden 65 / 29
Kaufman 36 / 26
Carney 41 / 19
Coons 34 / 8

The survey of 600 likely voters was conducted by Research 2000 from October 12-14, and has a margin of error of +/- 4 percent.

Attorney General Bill McCollum (R) has the early lead in the race to replace Gov. Charlie Crist (R), who is running for Senate. McCollum leads state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink (D) by 7 points with more than a fifth of voters undecided, according to a poll released by the Florida Chamber of Commerce (605 LV, MoE +/- 4%). The poll was conducted by Cherry Communications, a GOP-affiliated firm.

McCollum 42
Sink 35
Und 21

Crist still enjoys a 62% job approval rating, though it's down 5 points since August. On health care, 52% said they disapprove of the "Obama supported health care plan" being debated in Congress; it must be noted, though, that 91% of respondents said they have health care, and the health care legislation before Congress is partially meant to insure the uninsured.

In fundraising, Sink doubled McCollum's take in the 3rd quarter, bringing in $1.6 million to McCollum's $853,000.

New Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll shows President Obama's job approval down slightly from last month and slipping under the 50% mark. Obama's current job approval in the Fox Poll is 49%, with 45% disapproving, compared to 50% approval last month with 42% disapproving.

Overall, Obama's job approval stands at 52.6% in the RCP Average.

Support for Obama's handling of individual issues is down across the board:

Health Care: 42 approve, 50 disapprove (vs 44/48 last month)
Economy: 48 approve, 49 disapprove (55/40)
Afghanistan: 41 approve, 43 disapprove (51/32)
Iran: 44 approve, 43 disapprove (n/a)

Congress' job approval is also down slightly, no small feat given its already dismal ratings. Current approval/disapproval is 24/66 versus a 27/64 rating last month.

Also of note: Republicans have surged into the lead in Fox's version of the generic ballot question. Last month 40% said they were likely to "vote for a Democrat to help Barack Obama pass his policies," while 35% said they would "vote for a Republican to provide a check on Obama's power." This month, support for Democrats on that question dipped down to 38% while Republican support bounced to 42%.

A new Rasmussen poll, the second in just over a week, shows that the major party candidates are losing ground to independent Chris Daggett as Election Day nears.

General Election Matchup
Christie 45 (-2 from last poll, 10/5)
Corzine 41 (-3)
Daggett 9 (+3)
Not Sure 5 (+2)

Christie leads by 1.2 percent in the RCP Average.

There are more to the numbers, however. When voters are asked their first choice, the race is tied -- Christie 38, Corzine 38, and Daggett 16. Rasmussen finds that 57 percent of Daggett's supporters say they could change their minds before election day, accounting for the final numbers.

Voters tend to favor Christie when asked who they trust more on taxes, government spending and corruption.

Interestingly, only a third of voters correctly identified Daggett as the recipient of the Newark Star-Ledger's endorsement this weekend. That reflects to some degree the lack of overall media coverage of the race beyond newspapers; New Jersey has no major television market of its own, and New York and Philadelphia stations tend to give scant coverage to Garden State politics.

Favorable Ratings
Christie 46 / 51
Corzine 43 / 55
Daggett 45 / 27

President Obama, who comes to New Jersey next Wednesday to rally voters for Corzine, has an approval rating of 57 percent. That's 17 points better than Corzine's; 59 percent disapprove of Corzine's job performance. There might be another reason for Obama's visit, Rasmussen surmises:

While Christie's voters are a bit more certain to actually show up and vote at this point, Democrats have traditionally displayed a stronger get-out-the-vote effort on Election Day. Among voters who are certain they will vote and certain of how they will vote, Christie has an eight-point edge, 49% to 41%. That's one reason President Obama and other leading Democrats will be visiting the state in hopes of driving up turnout among Democratic constituencies.

The automated telephone survey of 750 likely voters was conducted October 14, and has a margin of error of +/- 4 percent.

The debate over the fate of American power goes on. First consider a post this week by Ezra Klein. Klein essentially argues: if America is a declining power, no worries, someone else will handle the job. Klein writes:

Central to the nationalist's lament is that having a huge, rich, stable country like America has been very good for the world. It's led to technological progress and economic improvement and relative peace and all the rest of it. The reasons for that are no secret: America's riches allowed it to invest in innovation. Its wealth allowed it to trade. Its economic ties gave it a strong interest in global stability. All this was good for America, yes, but also good for other countries that benefited from our rise. All this, however, also applies to a strong, rich, stable China, or India, or integrated European union. …

This thinking betrays an apathy over the decline of U.S. power. But more importantly, it ignores history. Not all dominant powers have used their dominance similarly. Consider what I wrote in April, In Defense of Pax Americana:

… Expect no Beijing consensus. As James Fallows recently wrote, "No other nation that could build roads, airports, and industrial parks as modern as China's could impose so repressive a political regime."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed, "When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty."

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free are not traveling to China. Indeed, China seems to have a reckoning brewing with its impoverished masses. On the world stage, China sells arms to Sudan and just this past week, with Russia, stalled UN Security Council measures to press North Korea away from brinkmanship.

If this is to be the Chinese century, as some contend, the Middle Kingdom has not yet found its sense of outward mission. Only last year, the Chinese navy took part in its first operation beyond the Pacific and this was to protect Chinese vessels from pirates in the waters off Somalia. America's pledge of freedom has often been undercut by its effort to secure power. China is focused on power alone.

And the data, exhibiting this U.S. "force for good" argument, is in the article.

But what now to do? On the other side of the political spectrum, from Klein, is Charles Krauthammer.

Krauthammer recently wrote an essay arguing the decline of American power is now a “choice,” and Obama is making all the wrong choices. He writes:

…the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power--the old Clintonian view--but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.

… In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline--to make America essentially one nation among many.

Clearly, and most potently since the Vietnam War, there has been a strong voice in American liberalism that sees U.S. power for its worst face, rather than its best. And this vein of thinking has over-idealized soft power. They forgot the role of hard power that Kennedy-Truman-FDR understood.

Krauthammer, however, neglects to point out that we witnessed the opposite extreme on the right. In George W. Bush's time, there was an over reliance on hard power. Iraq is the most tragic of examples. If the future of the U.S. involves choice, as Krauthammer rightly suggests, some of Bush's key choices made us less powerful.

In my view, it's too early to tell where Obama's foreign policy will lead us. Obama sounded idealistic at first. He has since taken on a realism unseen since H.W. Bush (e.g.-- concessions on missile defense to Russia, not meeting with the Dali Lama, watching his words on the green revolution in Iran). Let's give our president time to prove these careful steps can take us somewhere.

Initially, Obama's tone was too apathetic about the decline of U.S. power. And I wrote so much in the Pax Americana article. But, by the time we came to his Cairo speech, Obama had learned a lesson. Here are a few lines:

The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words – within our borders, and around the world.

Obama should keep up these lines. He should seek the benefits of engagement. But he must not forget that engagement is not a value but a means to an end. And if engagement does not serve that end, then something else must-- if the end is important enough. And some ends are.

But give him time. Obama may prove a realist who wields idealism carefully, more loosely in word than action. That was the post Bay of Pigs Kennedy, after all.

All good presidents learn lessons. All good presidents use both hard and soft power. Both types of power can keep the United States very powerful. And yes, that would be a good thing. I agree with Krauthammer, on this front. The American super power need not be past tense. Choices matter. But Obama seems to get this too. That's why he's taking his time before making the next big choice on Afghanistan.

A plurality of the American public now disapproves of President Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan, according to a new Marist poll. At the beginning of June, 57% of registered voters surveyed by Marist approved of how the President was handling the situation in Aghanistan, while only 24% disapproved. Today, only 43% approve, while 45% disapprove. That represents a 35-point swing in public opinion in just four months.

According to Marist, the slide in Obama's standing cuts across ideological lines. Democratic support for Obama's handling of  Afghanistan has dropped 13 points (from 75% to 62%); support among Republicans has decreased 17 points (from 41 to 24); and support among Independents has slid 13 points (from 52 to 39).

The public remains split on whether more troops should be sent to Afghanistan, highlighting why the war is such a thorny issue for the President. Thirty-nine percent say more troops are needed, including 57% of Republicans and 47% of Independents. Thirty-three percent say fewer troops are necessary, including 41% of Democrats and 31% of Independents. And nearly one in five (19%) say current troop levels should be kept about the same. Nine percent are undecided.

With assistance from Conservative Party nomninee David Hoffman, Democrat Bill Owens has erased a 7-point deficit from two weeks ago and taken a 4-point lead with 19 days to go in the special election race for the vacant 23rd District of New York, according to a new survey from the Siena Research Institute (Oct. 11-13, 617 LV, MoE +/- 3.9%).

Just 40% of Republicans back the GOP nominee, Assembly Member Dede Scozzafava, as 27% back the more-conservative Hoffman. Hoffman also leads among independents with 31%, while Owens draws 28% of the independent vote and Scozzafava gets 24%.

Owens 33 (+5 vs. last poll, Oct. 1)
Scozzafava 29 (-6)
Hoffman 23 (+7)

"With just 10 points separating the three candidates, this is likely to be a very tight – and fiercely fought – campaign right through election day, now less than three weeks away," said Siena pollster Steven Greenberg. "With one in six voters still undecided, who these undecided voters choose to support – if they choose to vote at all – will likely determine the outcome of this race. And given how tight the race is, this election may very well be won by a candidate with less than 40 percent of all the votes cast."

The three candidates are running to replace former congressman John McHugh (R-N.Y.), who left for an appointment as Secretary of the Army. McHugh had regularly won the district easily, with his lowest winning percentage (61%) coming in his first election in 1992. However, Barack Obama won the district by 5 points with 52% of the vote in 2008, after George W. Bush won by 4 points with 51% in 2004.

Rasmusssen is out with results in the Demoratic primary for the Pennsylvania Senate race showing incumbent party-switcher Arlen Specter leading challenger Joe Sestak by a narrow four point margin, 46 to 42, with ten percent undecided.

The new numbers represent an eight point jump in support for Sestak and a one point decline for Specter since last month's survey.

It should also be noted that Rasmussen's poll of likely Democratic primary voters shows Sestak winning a much larger percentage of support (and thus has the race significantly closer) than any of the other most recent polls, all of which surveyed registered voters.