John Fund makes the case. Imagine the political significance and symbolism if the Majority Leader of the United States Senate is forced to give up his bid for reelection in the face of a humiliating defeat.

Greg Sargent got his grubby mitts on an internal memo from the Coakley campaign that is most interesting: Internal Memo To Top Dem Donors Warns Mass Senate Race Is “Very Tight,” “Urgent”. I'm not sure what Brown's odds are of winning next Tuesday, but if he does it will be the shot heard round the political world.

The AP reports Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, will run for Governor of Colorado.

As you can tell from the deluge of pieces on Harry Reid's remarks about Obama's "Negro dialect," this story just begs for comment. So here is mine: Harry Reid isn't a racist. But he is a dope.

Any publicly elected official with half a brain in their head should know never to say anything like that to reporters in this day and age.  His colleagues may brag about what a great tactician he is, but when it comes to common sense Reid is clearly a couple of marbles short of a full sack.

And, fair or not, there is a double standard. Even though what Reid said wasn't racist, as sure as the sun rises in the east Democrats would decry the same comments as racist if they were uttered by a Republican.

So goes the tired kabuki theatre in Washington, where hypocrisy on race is one of the coins of the realm and Al Sharpton steps in to play the role of moral arbiter.  The whole episode makes me want a stiff drink - and a shower.

Last week you may recall that Richard Wolffe went on Keith Olbermann's show and reported that his sources within the White House were telling him that some in the Obama administration believed that members of the intelligence community had within held vital information about the Christmas Day bomb plot in a deliberate effort to sabotage President Obama. (Video here.)

This revelation was so inflammatory that Wolffe went back on MSNBC just a short time later to effectively recant the claim when asked about it by Rachel Maddow, saying such a charge was "ten steps ahead of where the White House is right now."

Regardless, Wolffe didn't pull the idea out of thin air. Clearly, Wolffe's sources within the White House were either paranoid enough to believe such a thing or willing to slander the intelligence community to try and shield their boss from political fallout.

The reason I'm rehashing this is because we saw a similar story in the New York Times on Saturday regarding Afghanistan:

WASHINGTON — Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon's slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday. [snip]

One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said.

Ask yourself this: what possible motive would President Obama's hand-picked general have for misleading the President about the pace of deployment to Afghanistan? There is none.

Now ask yourself what possible motive would the Obama administration would have for selling the public on a pace of military deployments that was unrealistic?

Yet we find administration sources accusing members of the United States military of lying to them in the pages of the New York Times. It's more than tacky. More than dishnorable. It's downright scary.

New poll from CNN/Opinion Research shows President Obama starting his second year in office with a 51% approval rating, down three points from last month.  Those disapproving of the job Obama is doing as President jumped four points this month to 48%. Overall, Obama's job approval stands at 48.0% in the RCP National Average.

Looking a bit closer, CNN shows that those who "strongly approve" of President Obama stand at 26%, down from 40% in February, 2009. Those who "strongly disapprove" of Obama have nearly doubled over the same period, reaching 36% in the current survey.

Only 40% approve of the way President Obama is handling the issue of health care, and just 44% approve of the way he's handling the economy - both are his lowest ratings to date. Obama also receives an anemic 36% rating on his handling of the federal deficit, 44% on taxes, and 45% on unemployment.

According to the CNN poll, Obama still maintains majority support on his handling of foreign affairs (51%), Iraq (53%), Afghanistan (51%), and terrorism (50%).

Nearly half the country (46%) say President Obama's policies are "too liberal."

Even more ominously, 48% say they consider President Obama's first year in office to be a  "failure," while 47% consider it a "success."

Republican Senate hopeful Scott Brown is just shy of raising $1 million in a grassroots fundraising effort today, which the campaign has called a "money bomb," or "Red Invades Blue." The campaign had set a goal of raising $500,000 today with the effort, but revised that target twice based on the reaction from voters.

Brown said the campaign needed the infusion to guard against any last-minute attack ads. And sure enough, just after tonight's televised debate Martha Coakley's (D) campaign launched this ad aiming to tie Brown to the national GOP.

The Democratic National Committee has also stepped up its effort on Coakley's behalf, sending a top spokesman to Boston to monitor the race. President Obama also sent an e-mail to Massachusetts supporters urging them to back Coakley next Tuesday.

There's been a lot of analysis lately of the various polls in the Massachusetts Senate race that are floating around the Internet. The polls are all over the place, but I think Scott Rasmussen hit the nail on the head with his analysis.

The bottom line is that almost all of these polls agree on one thing: Democrat Martha Coakley is hovering right around 50%.

Consider: PPP (D) has her at 47%. The Globe/UNH poll has her at 53%. Rasmussen has her at 50%. Even internal Democratic polling -- which usually represents the Democrat's best-case scenario -- has her leading state Senator Scott Brown 50%-36%. In other words, most of the variance comes from Brown's numbers -- which vary between 36% and 48% support -- not Coakley's. As I've noted before, when you see one candidate very stable and one candidate with a high degree of variance in their numbers, it means that the undecideds are trending toward the candidate with the higher variance. In other words, that candidate will tend to be toward the high end of their polling range.

This is where the "undecided rule" starts to come into play. It's a political science rule that predicts that undecided voters will break heavily for the challenger. It's come into a bit of disrepute of late, especially given Bush's strong showing among undecideds in the 2004 election. There were also some good examples in 2006 and 2008 of the rule failing to perform as expected, and a quick google of "undecided rule" links to various criticisms of it.

My take on it this that this is simply an example of people taking a political science "rule" and losing track of the reasons the rule existed in the first place, what might have changed to make it weaker, and what might still survive of it. The reasoning behind the undecided rule is that if voters haven't fallen in love with the incumbent by election day, they aren't going to vote for him (or her). The undecideds, therefore, can be expected to take a flier on the challenger.

But the undecided rule was formulated in the 1980s, in pre-internet America, when information moved much slower, and where expenses on television advertising were not nearly as high as they are today. And the dataset trickles down to state Attorneys General races, mayor races, and countywide contests. It even covered primaries. (If you want to read the original article giving the intellectual backdrop for the rule, click here). In other words, its dataset included an awful lot of races where people probably never heard a peep from the challenger. In those situations, it makes sense that voters who didn't like an incumbent would cast a default vote for the challenger.

Contrast that to POTUS, Senate, and even Congressional races today. Everyone knew everything about Bush and Kerry, and began focusing intently on the race early on. It was one of the longest, most intense races of my lifetime (at least until 2008). Similarly, Senate races, Governor's races, and even Congressional races receive a lot more scrutiny than they used to. In other words, the challenger today is probably much less likely to be a "default" option by the time election day rolls around, especially in high profile races that people tend to follow closely.

Indeed, take a look at the examples given in the original "undecided rule" article of cases where the undecideds broke against the challenger:

Last year in Minnesota, where Hubert Humphrey III challenged Sen. David Durenberger; and in Nebraska, where Bob Kerrey, the former governor, challenged David Karnes, who had been appointed to his Senate seat. In 1986 in Florida, when incumbent Sen. Paula Hawkins faced ex-Gov. Bob Graham. And in Chicago in 1979, where two-year incumbent Mayor Michael Bilandic split undecided voters with challenger Jane Byrne.

All of these examples included situations where a well-known challenger was involved, or where an incumbent without a full term under his belt was involved. You probably can't get a more well-known name in Minnesota than Hubert Humphrey, and Kerrey and Graham were popular Governors. It makes intuitive sense that these races would tend to break more evenly -- in the case of the well-known challenger, the people could potentially have equally negative feelings about the challenger, while in the case of the short-term incumbent, voters might be more willing to give the incumbent a chance. For a more recent example, look no further than Lisa Murkowski, who beat two-term Governor Tony Knowles despite trailing in almost every poll that cycle (this is the rare combination of short-term incumbent and well-known challenger).

So if we look for a principle that survives this new age of saturation advertising and internet-driven intensity, we might say that when you have two well-known candidates, the undecided rule is probably inapplicable as a predictive device. But if there's a disparity between the candidates, the undecideds will still tend to break toward the lesser-known candidate. There's probably caveats and exceptions here, but I think that's probably about right.

So what does that tell us about the Massachusetts Senate race? We have a sitting Attorney General who came out of a contested primary, going up against a more-or-less completely unknown state Senator. She's struggling to get above 50%. All of this points toward a very close final race -- potentially much closer than a week ago when I guessed at a 54-46 spread. Again, this is also consistent with what we're seeing in the variance in the Coakley/Brown numbers. Coakley should be worried.

In the not-so-surprising news department, the New York Times is reporting that Sarah Palin is joining FOX News Channel as a regular contributor to its programs. Palin signed a multi-year contract, though the Times did not have details.

More from the Times:

Ms. Palin will not have her own regular program, one person with knowledge of the deal said, though she will host a series that will run on the network from time to time.

Facing a closer-than-expected special election race that could affect the outcome of health care reform, Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley (D) likely won't receive last-minute help from President Obama.

"The president doesn't have any travel plans to campaign in Massachusetts," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at this afternoon's press briefing.

Asked further about it, Gibbs maintained that it simply "is not on the schedule," and said the Coakley campaign had not requested the president's presence -- nor asked him to stay away.

This bit of news comes as one poll over the weekend found Coakley's GOP opponent Scott Brown leading by 1 point -- a surprising result in a race to replace the late Ted Kennedy in a state that has no Republicans among its 12-member congressional delegation.

That Public Policy Polling survey, though, was contrasted by a Boston Globe/University of New Hampshire poll that found Coakley leading by 15 points. That is closer to what many expected the race to look like, but the conflicting results are no doubt causing some unanticipated Democratic sweating.

However, the decision to not intervene could be in reaction to an internal poll, first reported by Politico, that found Coakley leading by a margin similar to the Globe poll.