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- Harry Joe, a junior at Dartmouth, has put together a convincing argument that, based upon the generic congressional ballot, Democrats stand to lose an unprecedented number of seats in the midterm elections. Joe grants that national polls might not necessarily reflect the opinions of every individual congressional district, but when plugged into a particular regression model, the results offer an uncannily accurate projection of midterm results up to 300 days prior to Election Day. Clearly, assessing the validity of Joe's findings is that of assessing his methodology, which I will leave to others. But this is the first solid evidence I've seen of Republicans retaking the House in 2010, and it should be taken seriously.
- I have no interest in trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Jimmy Carter, but particularly in the area of foreign policy, his record speaks to a number of profound successes, which the former president and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski lay out here in response to a recent Walter Russell Mead article in Foreign Policy. What I am interested in is honesty about the facts of previous presidential administrations, and concerning Carter, the idea that his alleged "malaise" speech (in which the word malaise did not appear) sunk his presidency by being condescending to the American people. Actually, the "crisis of confidence," as it were, was when Carter fired his entire Cabinet, leading the public to question the president's competence. It is for this reason that Barack Obama would be wise to ignore calls to do the same with his Cabinet today.
- Fareed Zakaria is speaking my language on how to deal with Iran: "Can we live with a nuclear Iran? Well, we're living with a nuclear North Korea (boxed in and contained by its neighbors). And we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and Communist China. Iran, we're told, is different. The country cannot be deterred by America's vast arsenal of nukes because it is run by a bunch of mystic mullahs who aren't rational, embrace death and have millenarian fantasies. But this isn't and never was an accurate description of Iran's canny (and ruthlessly pragmatic) clerical elite." Yet the madman theory of statesmanship lives on and to an increasingly disturbing degree tends to accrue to Muslim leaders. Read the whole thing.
- I'm not here to speculate about the public-option revival's chances, which seem to change from hour to hour. Rather, my friends, I'm here to talk to you about the inclusion of Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the Republican delegation to the upcoming health-care summit. You may recall, in the fall of 2008, as the world's financial system collapsed, Sen. McCain bravely suspended his presidential campaign to return to Washington to work on the problem and encouraged his primary rival, then-Sen. Barack Obama, to do the same. These days McCain is suspending his support for all the bailouts he previously supported, claiming he was "misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke." I for one hope that Mr. McCain once again draws upon his seemingly endless reserve of selflessness and suspends something, anything, for the sake of passing bipartisan health-care reform. Thank you.
- Remainders: Your U.S. Senate in action, sitting on 290 bills that have already passed the lower house of Congress; Daniel Foster has an extremely loose definition of "Orwellian"; in case you needed a reason not to watch Jay Leno, the resuming host of The Tonight Show provides one; yes, taking "respondents' minds off several major lines of attack against the [health care] bill" does make them more favorably disposed toward it; Rep. Steve King is pretty despicable; given that public-sector jobs aren't real jobs, I wonder if public-sector workers are even fully human either; and Michael Steele, please don't ever change.
--Mori Dinauer
