The latest WSJ/ABC News poll has numbers for potential three-way contests with named independent candidates, Pat Buchanan and Michael Bloomberg.  Both of these are match-ups that are very, very, very unlikely, but the numbers are interesting for what they show about the decided lack of enthusiasm for Giuliani if there is a conservative candidate in the mix.  In a three-way contest between Clinton, Giuliani and Buchanan, the results are 44-35-12 respectively.  A Bloomberg candidacy seems to hurt Giuliani less and Clinton more, which makes sense, but it would only receive 10%.  Combined with generally lower levels of identification with the GOP and less intense support for a generic Republican as President, which are also reflected in earlier parts of the poll, this seems to confirm that there are a lot of people who would normally be Republican voters who will jump at just about any chance to vote for someone other than Giuliani.  This is probably not just Giuliani’s problem, but reflects the generally weak levels of support for the GOP overall.  However, until polls begin regularly testing three-way races with other Republican candidates that remains uncertain.

Reached at her home in Iowa, the waitress, Anita Esterday, said that neither she nor a colleague who helped serve Mrs. Clinton recalled seeing any tip.

She said a local staff member of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was in the restaurant on Thursday to tell them that the campaign had left a tip.

She said that when she and her colleague said they had not seen a tip, the staff member gave each of them $20.

Ms. Esterday said she did not understand what all the commotion was about.

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.” ~The New York Times

Via Jason Zengerle 

In addition to all the other reasons why Obama’s “hope and unity” theme doesn’t work is that he is framing his opposition to Clinton in these terms:

I believe that she is part of the fierce political battles that we had in the 90’s and that some of that carries over to today.

Now that he has actually started directly criticising Clinton and even using her name (audacious!), he is trying to use the “fierce political battles” of the ’90s as a way of saying that Clinton will have a hard time winning a general election.  Yet what I imagine many Democrats remember about the ’90s and those “fierce political battles” is that they won a lot of those battles and had the White House for eight years, and they probably also remember that they enjoyed the ’90s a lot more.  Also, they might prefer some “fierce political battles” to what many Democratic voters have seen as the repeated, craven capitulations of their side to the GOP.  To the ears of the average Democrat, more talk of cooperation and bringing the country together, while all very high-minded and pleasant in its way, is just another invitation to be dominated.  (Even though this had little or nothing to do with who was in the White House, it must be tempting for many Democrats to look back on that period as a relatively good one that they would like to repeat, much as some Republicans seem to want to live forever in the mid-’80s.)  Obviously, if you look too closely and remember who was involved in the biggest policy debacle of those eight years (that would be Hillary), memories of the ’90s don’t help Clinton as much as they might otherwise, but the power of nostalgia can have a significant effect. 

What is so remarkable about Clinton’s overwhelming lead thus far is that many progressives can’t stand her for policy and ideological reasons, but the hunger for victory is so great that many Democratic voters seem willing to back the establishment favourite with the most effective political machine.  Clinton has been compared to Nixon more than a few times, and this seems as badly wrong as you can go, but the dynamic today is very similar to the one we saw with Bush and conservatives in 1999-2000.  In both cases, there are core constituencies who distrust a candidate but swallow their objections for the sake of party unity and the desire to throw out the other side.  If Republicans and the Bush family in particular saw 2000 as a kind of payback for 1992, my guess is that a sufficiently large number of Democrats (and the Clintons themselves) see ’08 as their payback for 2000.  It seems that the mood of the Democratic Party is that of people who want some payback. 

Ironically, it is Obama who is effectively using the same kind of “I’m a uniter” rhetoric from Bush’s 2000 campaign that Bush used to make a claim that he was a different kind of Republican.  However, Obama is not the establishment’s favourite and also does not bring a political machine that has been involved in at least two successful presidential elections (which is what Bush ’00 and Clinton ’08 have in common), and so cannot combine the “change” rhetoric he likes so much with the reputation for specifically political competence in fighting elections.  Forget the arguments over “experience” in government for a moment, and consider simply the two candidates’ political experience, which is really something else all together.  Plenty of voters might be willing to accept his argument that experience in Washington is the problem, not the solution, but the Democratic voters who want to win don’t want to nominate someone who brings so little experience in drag-out electoral fights to the ticket.  Clinton doesn’t need to advertise her willingness to engage in political fights, since everyone knows she is very willing, and can delegate her attacks to all those people in her machine whom we know only too well.  Obama has no record of being able to engage in “fierce political battles” if that should become necessary, and so it is odd that he would make a point of drawing attention to what is, in fact, one of his most glaring weaknesses with the Democratic primary electorate.

They are inclined to see international problems as a result of America’s engagement with the world and are viscerally opposed to the use of force – the polar opposite to the self-confident and idealistic nationalism of the party I grew up in. ~Joe Lieberman

Take away some of the polemical edge, and what you have here is someone who seems to have missed out on the internal political evolution of his party for the last four decades, only discovering it recently thanks to Ned Lamont and the gang.  You’d think that he had been in a coma during the ’70s and ’80s.  If you qualify his statements a little so that they resemble a view that actual human beings in America hold, many people are viscerally opposed to unjustly using force and think that repeated unjust or unwise uses of force have contributed significantly to many problems.  Are there some people who simplistically attribute everything that’s going awry in the world to the U.S. government?  Maybe, but no one of consequence holds this view. 

Yglesias makes some good points, and I see what he means when he says that Bush and Lieberman aren’t internationalists.  If you defined internationalism by a very weak standard of whether someone supports projecting power overseas, they would be, but this is really what interventionism or hegemonism is.  Lieberman’s move is to collapse them all together into one.  Internationalism and hegemonism are, however, connected in that the former provided all of the tools and assumptions that the hegemonists have used to pursue their agenda, and there is a more or less straight line from Truman’s universalised containment doctrine to Kennedy’s hawkish anticommunist New Frontier to the Vietnam hawks who eventually became disillusioned with the Democratic Party over Vietnam and other matters and broke off to become neoconservatives.  More old-fashioned liberal internationalists, such as Michael Lind, recoil at what is being done and said in the name of liberal internationalism in the Democratic Party today (by plenty of people other than Joe Lieberman, I hasten to add), but the seeds of the current madness were always there within liberal internationalism.  They can be found in Wilson and Kennedy.  Where the modern jingoes have gotten even worse is in their embrace of the latter-day equivalent of rollback and their denigration of the idea of containment.

No one will confuse me with a fan of Kevin Drum, but I share his annoyance at this response to this post.  Responding to an observation about rising opposition to the war despite changing opinions about the fortunes in the war, the NYT Opinionator’s Tobin Harsaw said:

It’s a good point, but I suspect some will feel Mr. Drum shows a bit too much pleasure in making it.

Drum objects, rightly, to the roundabout, weaselly invocation of “some” as the move of someone who refuses to take ownership of his own words and claims, and rejects the claim that he was showing any pleasure in making the observation.  He was, in fact, making an observation about polling trends that he found interesting because they were, well, interesting and noteworthy.  It actually is interesting that opposition to the war is going up despite “improved” attitudes about progress in the war, because it seems to show that public opinion is not so easily swayed by a few months of positive trends after years of catastrophic mismanagement.  That’s a compliment to the American public, if you ask me. 

There is, of course, also the implication that war opponents must never derive satisfaction of any kind from the overwhelming support of the public for their position, but must always cower in the shadow of respectable elite opinion that says that war must go on indefinitely no matter what.  “Some” might call this view obnoxious, and I would be one of them.

Here is Ron Paul’s latest New Hampshire television ad.

Via Ambinder, Walter Shapiro reports:

A quick canvass of South Carolina political experts produced the tentative conclusion that Robertson’s blessing will register only at the margins, if at all. “The Christian right is always locally autonomous, and they don’t take direction from their presumed leaders. I don’t think this will signal a mass stampede by the evangelicals to Giuliani,” said Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University.

Even more skeptical was David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University, also a Republican political consultant. “Pat Robertson roared into the state in 1988 after he finished second in the Iowa caucuses, and everybody thought that the Christian Coalition would deliver for him,” Woodard recalled. “Instead George H.W. Bush thrashed him.”

If that’s true for South Carolina, how much more is it true for Iowa? 

Shapiro also reminds us of the limited power of endorsements:

It is embarrassing to recall how many otherwise sensible reporters proclaimed the 2004 Democratic nomination fight all but over as soon as Al Gore embraced Howard Dean.

What the Robertson-Giuliani and also the Weyrich-Romney stories tell us is that some of the social conservative leaders are opting for those candidates who, as the Values Voters forum showed us, do not win over the social conservative crowd.  Among those present at the forum, Huckabee was the overwhelming favourite, while his fiscal heresies have made him unacceptable to movement leaders.  This means that “values voters” seem less likely to follow the lead of their putative spokesmen, especially when the latter make truly puzzling (Weyrich) or downright bizarre (Robertson) selections.  It’s not as if these leaders are ward bosses who can turn out their people for a candidate en masse.  Indeed, the average social conservative has to be thinking long and hard about what exactly following the guidance and advice of many of these leaders has yielded and finally concluding: not much.

The recent online chatter about the “scandal” involving Regnery sounded pretty baseless to me, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it.  Dan McCarthy explains why there is nothing to this controversy.

Alex Massie notes Obama’s relatively more sane approach to Cuba policy and Steve Clemons’ enthusiasm for any candidate who gets Cuba policy right.  (Clemons reiterated his preference for Obama’s Cuba position over that of Clinton just this week.)  Any candidate, that is, except for the one who has been calling for a complete end to the embargo for years and years, and the same one who generally opposes counterproductive and ineffective sanction regimes.

Incidentally, Cuba policy stands out as one of the more obvious examples of where Ron Paul favours engagement and Washington has preferred futile isolation.