Romentum?

Interesting new Rasmussen poll out:

Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton now posts a 14-point lead over incumbent Democrat Michael Bennett, but her lead over Bennet’s intraparty challenger, Andrew Romanoff, is not as big in the race for the U.S. Senate in Colorado.

[...]

She runs just seven points ahead of Romanoff, a former state House Speaker who is challenging Bennet for the Democratic Senate nomination – 45% to 38%. In January, Norton had a 12-point lead, 47% to 35%.

Romanoff cut Norton's lead in half over the past month?  That's a lot of poll movement for a period in which essentially no campaigning occurred.  And it doesn't seem to be related to party -- Norton's lead over Bennet is virtually identical to last month's.

So why would the poll show so much movement for Romanoff?  Well, it's possible that we're talking about polling methodology issues.  The survey involved only 500 voters, so we might be seeing just a lot of random fluctuation here.  Also, Rasmussen is using a "likely voter" screen, and I imagine who is considered a likely voter for November 2010 has shifted around quite a bit recently.

But assuming the poll is capturing something real, it suggests, as Rasmussen notes, that Bennet is facing the worst of both worlds: As the incumbent, he gets blamed for being in power during tough times, but he doesn't have any of the built in advantages of incumbency (e.g.: massive name recognition).  Romanoff, while still trailing Norton, doesn't carry as much baggage as Bennet.

So I'd call this relatively good news for Romanoff.  But he should really stop having Ken Gordon write his press releases:

Bennet now trails Norton by 14% while Romanoff has closed to be within 7% - the momentum is all on Andrew's side. It is sort of a Massachusetts moment.

Ken, did you really just compare Romanoff to Scott Brown?  Really?

Prediction

Should Democrats incur substantial congressional losses in the midterm elections, Scott Lee Cohen will be to 2010 what Mark Foley was to 2006.

Doing better than Reagan seems like a realistic goal

I've been staring at this chart (via Yglesias) for the past few days with some degree of horror:

The red line shows unemployment starting in January 1982; the blue line starts in January 2009 and projects forward.  What the chart nicely shows is the parallel economic situations faced by Reagan and Obama -- a sharp rise in unemployment peaking at around 10%.  But unemployment under Reagan dropped pretty precipitously after that.  This was due, in part, to aggressive moves to loosen up lending by Fed chair Paul Volcker, who believed (correctly) that inflation would not be a significant concern.  Conversely, current Fed chair Ben Bernanke seems more concerned about inflation and is willing to tolerate much higher levels of unemployment as a result.

The horrifying part, to me, is that the Obama administration seems okay with this.  Indeed, they just pushed Bernanke's renomination through the Senate.  Remember, Democrats are supposed to be the party that generates jobs.  If Obama is someday asked why his administration wasn't as good at generating jobs as Reagan's was, "Reagan had a more liberal Fed chair" was always going to be a pretty lame excuse, but now it's a useless one since Obama decided to keep Bernanke in charge.

Hopefully, the economy will outperform these dour expectations. Today's news is encouraging.

Rare photos of famous people

These are mesmerizing.  (h/t Ezra)  And yeah, that's the cast of "Star Wars."

The futility of question time

Okay, I loved Obama's exchange with Republican members of Congress last week.  Yes, I thought he did very well there, but beyond that, it seemed like a very healthy activity for American democracy.  Our polarized system features a lot of choir-preaching and not very much debate or discussion across ideological lines.

So will we see more of this?  Not likely.  As Kevin Drum (via Bernstein) points out, it's tactically stupid for Republicans to invite Obama to do this again:

Right now Republicans have a built-in advantage when it comes to attack politics and they'd be fools to give it up. A format like this, which puts the president front and center, allows him to directly call out distortions and lies, and rewards conversation rather than machine-gun style talking points, is something Republicans should justifiably be very afraid of. Unless they're suicidal — or somehow figure out a way to take better advantage of the format — they'll never allow this to happen again. Without the noise machine, they're lost.

Beyond that, notes Ezra Klein, it's not in Republicans' electoral interests to have reasoned public discussions with Obama.  These members of Congress need to run for re-nomination among Republican primary electorates, substantial pluralities of which believe that Obama is a socialist and a foreigner and a racist and otherwise unfit to be president.  Not only do they despise Obama, but they're likely to regard anyone who collaborates with him as a traitor.  Unless you can figure out a way to be outwardly defying Obama in a venue in which he has the microphone, it's a risky venture.

Every news report ever

(Thanks to Cousin Liz.)

Seeing race everywhere

Paul Passavant noticed that the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union address looked weirdly like an alternate universe in which the president was a white guy.  He suggests that this is by design:

Finally, and most disturbingly, is the significance of the venue for the Republican response to the SOTU—the legislature in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond, of course, was the capitol of the confederacy. Although the significance of the locale was apparently missed by the networks and the Democrats, it likely would not be missed by the core Republican constituency—southern whites.

I don't know.  For some reason, everyone's making a big deal about the fact that Gov. McDonnell's speech was delivered in the well of a state legislature.  No one seems to remember Gov. Christie Todd Whitman's response to President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union address.  Like McDonnell, she spoke in front of her state legislative chamber.  Surely there was no racial component there.  And I'm guessing it wasn't the GOP's intention to conjure an alternative universe in which women ran the nation.

I think the visual was actually the key here.  The president has an enormous advantage when delivering a SOTU, including a built in audience, roughly half of which is likely to cheer wildly for him at the drop of a hat.  A governor speaking in front of a legislature has at least a fighting chance of looking good by comparison.