The NBC/WSJ poll that came out earlier this week has some interesting results. The midterms are just over nine months away, so it seemed worth checking the questions related to the elections. The generic ballot shows a Democratic edge of 2 points, 44-42, but we should bear in mind that the RCP average for the generic ballot continues to show the GOP ahead by 3. More interesting, only 27% of respondents said that they would be casting their votes to send a signal of opposition to Obama. 37% said they will be signalling support for him, and 38% said they will not be sending any signal about Obama. That does not exactly fit the picture of a public recoiling in horror from Obama.

Contrast this with a comparable question about Bush in ’06. Throughout 2006, anti-Bush voters had the edge over pro-Bush voters by 15-18 points. Prior to the 2002 and 1998 midterms, when the presidential party gained seats in the House, pro-Bush and pro-Clinton voters edged out the opposition voters by 12 points in ’02 and 5 points in ’98. What distinguishes the ’02 and ’98 results from ’06 and this year is that in the earlier elections there were far more neutral voters for whom the President was not a direct factor. Nonetheless, as the ’02 and ’98 results suggest, when there are more pro-presidential voters than anti-presidential voters the presidential party tends to have better-than-average midterm elections. Interestingly, Obama’s numbers here are almost a reverse of Bush’s ’06 numbers: where 37% wanted to show opposition to Bush and just 22% wanted to express support, 37% want to show support for Obama and 27% want to express opposition. While this is just one result, it wouldn’t seem to herald the collapse of Democratic majorities caused by massive anti-Obama sentiment sweeping the land.

That doesn’t mean that Democrats aren’t going to lose many seats this fall. They will. However, it does suggest that most voters’ frustrations right now are not a product of their dissatisfaction with Obama. It is possible that these numbers could change and the anti-presidential vote could increase, but if we look at the ’06 numbers we see that the levels of support and opposition were locked in over a year earlier and barely changed at all between the end of ’05 and the election. After everything we have been hearing about Republican successes and the administration’s approaching doom, what is interesting here is that there are relatively so few respondents in this poll that want to express opposition to Obama in the midterms.

Part of this has to be a result of the public’s assignment of blame for current problems. 48% assign either a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of blame to Congressional Republicans, 41% to Democrats in Congress, and just 27% to Obama. One reason why Obama keeps coming back to the claim that he inherited most of the problems beforehim is probably that he and his advisors assume that the public continues to believe that others are far more responsible for our current predicament. Until these numbers change, we can expect to hear more from Obama along these lines for many more months to come.

Nestled in the list of small-business initiatives that President Barack Obama announced in the State of the Union address was a measure providing incentives to small firms that hire employees and raise wages.

The details of the initiative, which Mr. Obama is expected to highlight when he visits Baltimore today, include a $5,000 tax credit for every net new employee in 2010 [bold mine-DL]. This credit would be retroactive to the beginning of the calendar year and could be received on a quarterly basis, if the business so chooses. In addition, employers would receive a tax credit to cover Social Security payroll taxes on wage increases. ~The Wall Street Journal

Pence called a White House plan to offer tax credits to small businesses the “Jimmy Carter tax credit,” arguing that it could provide incentives for employers to lay off employees [bold mine-DL]. Although Republicans have criticized Democrats for doing too much too fast, Pence called the plan a continuation of the “small ball” economic policies from Democrats in Congress and the White House.

“I don’t think we should be looking to the economic policies of the Carter administration to get us out of the worst recession in 25 years,” Pence said. ~Politico

Yesterday I said that the GOP remains just as intellectually bankrupt and unimaginative as ever, but I need to amend that in light of Pence’s comments. If possible, the GOP has somehow managed to become even worse than it was in previous years. How else can you explain the desperate bid to reframe tax credits for small business as a job-killing measure? It is tax credits similar to these that the Republicans normally advocate as a matter of course, and it was this sort of thing that Republicans were demanding more of last year during the debate over the stimulus bill. Instead of recognizing this and trying to claim that the administration has adopted one of his party’s solutions, Pence is reduced to the absurdity of claiming that possible tax reduction on businesses that hire new employees is some revival of the dreaded Carter years.

Pence does not attack these credits for being insufficient, nor does he attack them for being unaffordable. He doesn’t even resort to the old favorite of complaining that the tax code is already too complicated and needs to be radically simplified. To make a coherent critique of the measure, Pence could have said any of those things. Instead, he started talking about someone who’s been out of office almost thirty years and who has nothing to do with the current proposal. Plus, he is arguing that tax reduction creates disincentives for growth.

Remarking on Obama’s upcoming meeting with House Republicans, Pence said:

There has been a perception greatly propagated by the majority in Congress and many in the administration to suggest that we are the party of no ideas.

Who could have given them that impression? It certainly couldn’t have been Mike Pence and his heroic resistance to Jimmy Carter tax credits!

Let’s remember that Pence is not some minor member of the minority. He is the House Republican conference chair, the third highest-ranking Republican in that chamber, and he recently decided not to pursue a Senate bid against Evan Bayh in order to re-build a Republican majority in the House. If this is what he has to offer in his current role, perhaps it would have been better for the GOP if he had tried his luck back home in Indiana.

For the last year, Republicans have worked, assiduously and effectively, to derail the Democrats’ legislative agenda. This, in fact, was a constant in Axelrod’s remarks. “They made a decision they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed.” It’s been an inarguable success for the Republican Party. Health-care reform is on life support. Republicans just won a Senate seat in Massachusetts. Election experts are beginning to talk about a potential Republican takeover in November. There is no case to be made that the GOP is in a worse position than a year ago. ~Ezra Klein

It occurs to me that the arguments for recent GOP successes are rather like Republican arguments concerning our wars abroad. Bear with me. What I mean is that Republicans have been treating temporary, tactical political victories as if they were far more significant, strategic victories, when, in fact, they have no political strategy worth mentioning. This is how many Republican hawks have approached problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially in Iraq, the strategy has always been unclear, unrealistic or even non-existent, so there is great emphasis on finding tactics that “work” to make a basically incoherent policy seem successful on the surface.

The Republican glorification of the “surge” is a case in point. A change in tactics was widely hailed on the right not only as a “new strategy,” which showed that the people saying this did not understand what strategy was, but most Republicans took it to be a vindication of the entire war. Tactical success later matters more to them than the strategic folly they committed earlier. It is almost as if resisting Obama tooth and nail counts for more to them than the utter failure of their time in government, and they fully expect to be rewarded with a new chance at governing on account of their blocking maneuvers. As time goes on, however, the limits of this approach become clear. Having no understanding of strategy and no definition of the long-term goals to be achieved, they are ultimately not going to succeed in any remotely enduring way. Tactical victories simply delay the final reckoning and prevent the recognition that the policy or agenda is bankrupt and useless.

So Klein is right that as far as short-term, tactical success is concerned the last few months have been very good for the GOP. However, nothing could be worse for the GOP than the illusion of success under present circumstances. Worse than learning nothing from the last two elections, the GOP has learned the wrong things. Republicans made up a self-serving story that the public turned against them because of excessive spending. This permitted them to ignore the real reasons for their defeats. Aggressive foreign policy and loose monetary policy, among other things, remain as sacrosanct and beyond reproach in the GOP as they were in the early Bush years. Not recognizing their past errors, the GOP will make them again and again in the future, and they will attempt to cover these mistakes with temporary, tactical solutions that simply put off the consequences of their terrible decisions until someone else is in office. They will then exploit the situation as much as they possibly can, pinning the blame for their errors on their hapless inheritors and hoping that the latter are so pitiful that they retreat into yet another defensive crouch.

Is the GOP in a worse position than a year ago? On the surface, no, it isn’t. Once we get past the surface, however, the same stagnant, intellectually bankrupt, unimaginative party that brought our country to its current predicament is still there and has not changed in any meaningful way in the last three years. Why would it? The party’s leaders have no clue, its pundits are reveling in the luxury of opposition, and its rank-and-file has been whipped into such a state of agitation over their own impotence that they cannot see that they are led by people who will ignore and abuse them the moment they are no longer needed to win elections. It may seem that the GOP has derailed the majority’s agenda, but in reality it is the GOP that went off the rails long ago and has yet to begin to recover.

Last week, Michael Barone compared the GOP win in Massachusetts to the 1974 special election to fill Gerald Ford’s House seat in Michigan, which was at least an interesting comparison, but now he has concluded that this is another 1974. In January 1974, Nixon’s approval rating had fallen to 23%. By the time of the midterms, Ford’s approval was still 47% even after the pardon, but the damage to the party had been done. Lawbreaking, scandal, cover-up and disgrace dragged the GOP down. That is what the bottom falling out looks like. It should be pretty easy to remember what it looks like, because this is also what happened to Republicans in Congress for the last two elections.

This analysis of the relationship between presidential approval and midterm House losses is useful, but it can also be misleading. It includes the ’74 loss among those elections when presidential approval is under 50% when determining the average number of House seats lost. Technically, this is correct, because Ford was President by then, but the reason for the ’74 blowout was obviously the unpopularity of Nixon and the association of the party with Nixon. 1974 was also the sixth-year midterm election in the second term of a deeply unpopular President, which would seem to make it nothing like this upcoming midterms.

Even the GOP under a very unpopular Bush during the worst stage of a very unpopular war did not lose more than 30 seats in one cycle. Thanks to more precise methods of drawing up gerrymandered districts, incumbents have become harder to defeat over the last few decades. This is why the GOP didn’t lose more than 30 seats in either of the last two elections despite continuing to embrace one of the three most unpopular Presidents of the last century. 2006 wasn’t another 1974, either, and there were many more reasons to think that it would have been that bad for Republicans. So Barone’s comparison with 1974 seems wrong in several ways.

According to the RCP average, Obama’s rating is currently 48.7/46.8, which is higher than Reagan’s was at a comparable point. So how can Barone conclude that Obama’s party is about to experience a 1974-style repudiation? Judging from his earlier article, he has concluded that the Massachusetts election has great meaning:

The Republican victory in the current Democratic heartland of Massachusetts sends the message that Americans are repelled by Barack Obama’s big-government programs, backroom deals and oversolicitude for those who want to destroy us.

This is simply speculation. Not only does Barone present no evidence that this is why Massachusetts voters backed Brown, but there is good reason to think that the average Obama/Brown voter is not repelled by what Obama is doing. Of course, McCain/Brown voters are repelled, which is why they didn’t vote for Obama in the first place. Indeed, Obama voters who supported Brown may have cast their ballots without intending to send any message to Obama. According to that Post poll, he was not a factor in the decisions of half of Brown’s voters. To the extent that Obama/Brown voters were repelled, it seems to have been “dealmaking” and a lack of transparency that offended many of them. While the comparison with Ford’s House seat thirty-six years ago catches our attention, the reasons for the two losses are very different.

The GOP was voted out of power a little over three years ago, and it was battered again during a presidential election in which the opposing candidate won more than 50% of the vote. Is there any precedent for a party that has gone through two terrible elections, lost its majorities in both houses in one of them and then rallies to win back control of one or both houses in the third? There is one that I can find, and that was 1954, but the GOP majority going into those midterms was eight seats, not seventy-eight as the Democratic majority is today. Eisenhower managed to bring the GOP into the majority very briefly and by a narrow margin, so it only took a modest, normal midterm correction for the Democrats to win back the majority. For the same thing to happen this year, we would have to see an unprecedented swing in public sentiment towards the GOP after the public had barely finished punishing them.

Has a presidential party lost its majority two years after their President won with more than 50% of the vote? Again, the only example I can find is Eisenhower, who won a landslide victory that was just enough to create a slim Republican majority that vanished two years later. I cannot find any precedent for the immediate repudiation of a presidential party with such large majorities in the first term of a President who won the majority of the popular vote. It simply doesn’t happen. If the majorities were considerably smaller, Democratic loss of control might be conceivable, but they have too much of a cushion that they have built up over the last two cycles.

Update: Checking more closely, I see that there is another example of a President winning over 50% of the vote and then losing the House in the next election. The last time that happened was in 1910 when the Democrats took control of the House after Taft’s 1908 victory over Bryan. An important difference between now and then is that the Democrats were coming off of a number of electoral defeats dating back to 1900, and Republicans had held an uninterrupted majority in the House since 1894.

Ross:

But what was already an unprecedentedly dreadful climate for the Democrats is looking darker by the day. If unemployment is still around 10 percent this November, it’s difficult to see how they hold the House; if unemployment stays at 9 percent into 2012, it’s very difficult to see how Barack Obama wins re-election. I stand by my contention that ideology as well as the woeful economy is dragging the Democrats down, but there does come a point where only the economy matters: Obama could spend the next three years channeling Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Silent Cal, and he still isn’t going to get re-elected if 9 percent of the country is out of work.

Was it an “unprecedentedly dreadful climate”? Is it growing darker? 1982 provides a precedent of a similarly dreadful political climate for the presidential party, so the current climate is not unprecedented. The ’81-’82 recession was actually more severe and damaging to the administration than this recession has been, but Reagan survived it. During the tail end of the recession, Reagan’s approval slumped well below where Obama’s approval stands today. Indeed, if Obama’s approval ever dipped as low as Reagan’s 1982 numbers, there would be a great deal of caterwauling that his political career was over. Reagan’s political opposition in Congress was much greater, and he lacked the majorities in Congress that Obama enjoys. It is true that the last Democratic President to have similar majorities was Carter, but Carter came into office with majorities that were built on top of pre-existing Democratic majorities. Obama has come into office very soon after Democrats regained power in Congress after over a decade in the minority. That has to make some difference in how the public judges the two parties and their fitness for running branches of government.

Obviously much depends on whether or not unemployment remains as high as it is, but not only did Reagan recover from the setbacks in the ’82 midterms amid similarly high unemployment, but he went on to win one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history two years later. Regardless of economic conditions, I would be very wary of assuming that the public will act in a certain way over two years from now. Much will depend on the quality of the candidate the GOP nominates, and just as much will depend on the perceived economic improvement between now and then that the incumbent will claim as his own.

Unemployment is at 10% right now, and it is quite easy to see how Democrats hold the House. As satisfying as a protest vote against the majority party will be, it is very doubtful that the public is ready to trust the GOP with any sort of responsibility in the federal government after the hash they made of things during their time in power. So long as there is measurable improvement in economic indicators, the GOP ought to be worried that it has reached its peak ten months too early.

Right now, lockstep GOP opposition to the stimulus bill appears to be on the side of public opinion, but if there is anything that we have seen over the last few months it is that public opinion is easily changeable depending on circumstances. If the delayed 2010 spending reduces unemployment, even temporarily, the opponents of the bill will be left scrambling for cover. Suddenly most of the people who have already declared the bill to be a waste of money could turn on a dime and a decide that the money was well-spent after all. If the public is ultimately results-oriented, as we keep hearing, any positive change in economic conditions is going to work against the opposition strategy of rejecting everything.

Having considered the prospects of Republicans’ winning the majority of House seats, I noticed that there is some discussion of whether the GOP can win a Senate majority. Marc Ambinder writes:

Democrats might lose the seats formerly occupied by Biden (DE), Obama (IL), Reid (NV), and they’ve lost the Kennedy seat. Beyond these nifty talking points, though, there’s not much of a case to me made just yet that Republicans can win eight seats.

This sounds about right, though I think this gives Mark Kirk more of a chance in Illinois than he actually has. Giannoulias will probably win the Democratic nomination, and he stands a very good chance of holding that seat for the Democrats. For the GOP to win an outright majority, they need nine more seats and Lieberman or ten more seats. Ambinder is right that an eight-seat pick-up is implausible, and anything more than that is simply fantasy. To add nine, that would require not only picking up North Dakota, Delaware, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, which is at least conceivable, but also picking up Connecticut and Indiana (or California). Barring some unforeseen catastrophe for which the administration is responsible, it is no great risk to say that this is never going to happen.

There are three midterm elections in the last sixty years in which the party not in control of the White House picked up 8+ Senate seats: 1958 (16), 1986 (8) and 1994 (8). Two of these are sixth-year midterm results, and so are not necessarily comparable to the middle of Obama’s first term. I have covered why this year is not like 1994 for the House, but even if the Senate elections somehow produced the same result as in ’94 the GOP could not regain control of the Senate. To argue that the GOP can win a Senate majority, one would have to argue that the ’10 midterms are going to be even worse for the presidential party than 1994 was.

Rich Lowry is dreaming of another 1994. No doubt the announcement of another Democratic retirement in AR-01 is encouraging this kind of thinking, but the number of House Democratic retirements (now at 12) is not yet even remotely close to the number of 1994 retirements. There were 28 House Democratic retirements before those midterms, and these open seats accounted for more than half of the GOP’s gains that year. To be generous, let’s assume that the GOP can once again gain twice as many seats as there are Democratic retirements. That would mean Democratic losses of 24 seats, which would be a significant GOP gain and comparable to the ’82 losses for Republicans, but it would fall far short of winning the majority. The ’82 comparison seems reasonable, but it may be a stretch when we consider that Reagan’s average approval rating throughout 1982 was noticeably lower than Obama’s rating is today.

Even Obama’s overall approval rating is misleading in a way. As Alex Massie observed a few days ago, Obama’s approval is actually very positive in every region of the country except the South:

According to one recent poll the President is popular in most of the country. In the north-east, more than 80% of voters approve of his performance. In the midwest 62% of voters have a favourable view of Obama and so do 59% of voters in the west. Only the south bucks this trend. There, 67% of the electorate has an unfavourable view of the President.

Obviously, the South is a large region and makes up a significant part of the national population, so poor ratings in the South are far from irrelevant, but the number of vulnerable Democratic seats put in jeopardy by high disapproval ratings there is actually not very great. There are 12 vulnerable Southern seats currently held by Democrats, and only five of these are open seats. If we add in Southern Democratic seats rated as “likely Democratic” to this list, that adds just nine more.

Lowry:

The ’94 GOP sweep was possible because so many Democrats held naturally Republican ground, particularly in the South.

What Lowry does not take into account is that the current Republican House membership is built around the gains made in 1994. Much of the “naturally Republican ground” that the GOP gained in 1994 has remained solidly Republican ground ever since with few exceptions. There are simply far fewer Democratic seats in the South to be taken away, and many of those that remain are not going to fall as easily. 1994 saw Southern voters casting their Congressional ballots for the party they had been backing at the presidential level for decades. This is what solidified the so-called “Southern captivity” of the GOP. It is reasonable to expect that the GOP will pick off some of the few remaining Democratic seats in the region, but they have already consolidated control over so many of the South’s districts that there is not much more room to improve. What distinguishes this from Democratic success in 2006 picking off Republicans in New York, Pennsylvania and New England is that Democrats were positioned to expand their majority in every region of the country. If that poll is accurate, Obama is not unpopular in the rest of the country, which distinctly limits the GOP’s chances of adding to their numbers in the House.

Lowry also discusses 1994 without paying any attention to the presidential election that preceded it. After all, 1994 was not exactly a repeat of 1966. The GOP was not rebounding from a devastating blowout, but was benefiting from a number of factors that we have not seen since then. Clinton had won just a plurality of the popular vote two years earlier, an odd independent candidate had wrapped up a fifth of the vote that was disgusted with both parties, and the election was overwhelmingly driven by the public’s disaffection with the incumbent Bush. Southern voters swung to the GOP, where they have remained since then, and evangelical turnout increased to the level where it has stayed for 16 years. Added to this, depressed Democratic turnout and organization created by dissatisfaction with the failure of health care and the passage of NAFTA compounded these difficult conditions to create a once-in-a-generation result.

Another key, obvious difference with 1994 is that the Democrats have just won the last two cycles, which were repudiations of Bush and the Republican Party. Parties that have been roundly rejected by the public in two straight elections do not come roaring back to huge gains in both houses in the third cycle. Of course the opposition party will make gains in the midterms this year, because opposition parties almost always do, but talk of regaining the majority is ridiculous. Before 1994, Republicans had not made gains of 20+ seats in midterm House elections since 1966, and Democrats had become the seemingly permanent majority party in the House. Few could remember the last time the Republicans had been in the majority, and they had been there so briefly that there wasn’t much to remember anyway. Today, the memory is all too fresh, it is very negative, and it hasn’t faded nearly as much as party leaders need for a quick turnaround. The last time the GOP was in opposition to a Democratic President elected with more than 50% of the vote, they gained 15 House seats in 1978.

A lot of ink has been spilled since 9/11 trying to argue that bin Laden doesn’t really care about Palestine. But that’s always been silly — nobody knows what he “really” cares about, and it doesn’t especially matter since he talks about it a lot and presents it as a major part of his case against the United States. An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement surely would not convince bin Laden or al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements to give up their jihad — but it would take away one of their most potent arguments, and one of the few that actually resonates with mass publics. ~Marc Lynch

Via Andrew

One of the reasons there has been a consistent effort to deny that Bin Laden has any “real” interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that such an interest, sincere or not, suggests jihadist groups are fueled by U.S. and allied policies, or at least that they successfully exploit U.S. and allied policies for propaganda purposes. Washington would then be faced with at least one of two unpalatable truths. Either our policies are correct and necessary, but strategically disastrous in their effects on Arab and Muslim public opinion and jihadist recruiting, or they are and incorrect and unnecessary while also being strategically disastrous. Washington would then have to decide if it wants to live with perpetual, low-level conflict occasionally exploding into major military campaigns every decade, or if it wants to make enough policy changes (and push our allies to make similar changes) to reduce that conflict to a bare minimum.

For most of the last decade, our preference in and out of government has been to deny that U.S. and allied policies had anything to do with jihadist attacks and their ability to recruit and win sympathizers. This acknowledgement would be to “blame the victim,” so that even if it were the correct analysis it was politically incorrect to say it out loud. Instead we have been treated to a whole host of explanations for why jihadist violence exists and why it tends to be directed at the U.S. and our allies. The lamest of these has been rather popular, namely the claim that “they hate us for our freedom,” or modernity or secularism or whatever it is that the person making the argument finds worthwhile about the West and sees lacking in Muslim countries. Then, of course, there is the trusty appeal to the enemy’s insanity. Unlike us, they are not really rational, and so their actions cannot be explained by referring to anything so mundane and normal as political grievances.

Finally, there is the religious essentialist argument that jihadism is what Islam requires at its core, and therefore there is no way to weaken it without some dramatic transformation of the entire religion. This last argument has won more sympathizers because the people trying to challenge it inevitably go to the opposite extreme and simply ignore or dismiss past Islamic conquests as having nothing to do with Islam. If the essentialist argument really held up, however, Algerians would still be attacking France, Central Asian Muslims would still be warring against the Russians, and Saudis would have been attacking American targets long before the 1990s. We do see cases where separatist movements involving Muslim populations’ breaking away from non-Muslim states become intertwined with and dependent on jihadist groups, because these are the groups providing assistance and because they lend an extra religious and ideological veneer to the conflict that wins the separatists more sympathy abroad. As a general rule, when the cause of the political grievances has disappeared, violent resistance also disappears.

Anti-jihadists like to invoke one or more of these arguments. I am reminded again of a quote from George Kennan in which he described the flaws of the popular anticommunism of his day. His words apply to popular anti-jihadism almost perfectly:

They distort and exaggerate the dimensions of the problem with which they profess to deal. They confuse internal and external aspects of the communist threat. They insist on portraying as contemporary things that had their actuality years ago [bold mine-DL]….And having thus incorrectly stated the problem, it is no wonder that these people consistently find the wrong answers.

Even when anti-jihadists are willing to acknowledge that Al Qaeda uses the grievances of Muslim populations in Iraq or Palestine for propaganda purposes, they will usually hold that changing policy or addressing those grievances to minimize the effectiveness of the propaganda is a form of capitulation. We are supposed to be engaged in “global counterinsurgency,” but we must take little or no account of the stated motivations of jihadists and the reasons why many millions more sympathize with their immediate goals while often deploring the means they use.

The Palestinian cause generates remarkable reactions in Western anti-jihadists. For most of them, it is an article of faith that Palestinians, or at least the organized factions that speak for them, are just about as bad and hostile to “the West” as Al Qaeda itself, and so there is no point in attempting to make any deal with them. As far as they are concerned, the correct response is to back Israeli policies to the hilt, and to throw up as many obstacles to anyone here at home who would attempt to use U.S. influence to change those policies. The Bush-era habit of lumping together every Islamic revolutionary, militant and terrorist group under some catch-all term of “Islamofascism” made it easier to lump all these causes together, which is oddly enough exactly what jihadists would like, and once they were lumped together they could be that much more easily demonized together.

On the whole, it seems that the more sympathetic to or at least understanding of Palestinian grievances a Western observer is, the less willing he is to endorse standard anti-jihadist arguments. Likewise, the more one agrees with anti-jihadist arguments, the more reflexively hostile to Palestinian grievances one tends to be. When most Western anti-jihadists hear that Bin Laden has tied the Christmas bomber attack to the cause of Palestine and specifically to the treatment of Gaza, or when they learn that the bomber who killed the seven CIA operatives claimed that the Gaza operation early last year had driven him to jihadism, the conclusion they draw is not that there was and is something wrong with U.S. and Israeli policies with respect to Palestinians. There is no sudden revelation that the inexcusable blockade of Gaza is politically unwise as well as morally wrong.

On the contrary, the support Bin Laden expresses for the Palestinian cause makes that cause seem to most Western anti-jihadists to be that much more indistinguishable from Al Qaeda’s goals and therefore that much more antithetical to Western interests. This might very well be another purpose in Bin Laden’s exploitation of Palestinian grievances: to harden Western audiences against Palestinian claims even more by linking his cause to Palestine, which will make Americans in particular less interested in supporting an administration that tries to exert pressure in support of a peace settlement. Bin Laden would like to appropriate the Palestinian cause, which Palestinians definitely do not want, and most Western anti-jihadists would like nothing more than to let him have it. So while Lynch is right that resolving this conflict would deprive jihadists of one of their great sources of effective propaganda, our own anti-jihadists will do their utmost to thwart all efforts to that end.

Eric Cantor, the Republican leader, told me yesterday that he assumed they would assume the majority in November. ~Mark Shields

If there is one thing from the last week that should deeply discourage Republicans, it is the realization that for all of the real successes in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, their party in Congress is still led by the same people who presided over two very large consecutive electoral defeats, most of those leaders were complicit in the bailouts their constituents hate, and these leaders continue to have no correct understanding of why they were voted out of the majority. That doesn’t mean that voters know or care about Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and Kyl themselves. Voters never knew or cared about Pelosi and Reid, either, and campaigns that tried to drag down effective Democratic candidates by attaching them to their leadership never worked. That said, party leaders in Congress are not irrelevant when the party is in the minority.

These are the people who are the functioning political leadership of the GOP, and they have been unusually unsuccessful in repairing the image of their party, crafting anything resembling a coherent opposition agenda and providing the public with any reason to believe that they would handle another turn in the majority with any competence. On top of it, if Cantor is any indication, they seem to be no better at analyzing the national political landscape. If Cantor actually assumes that the GOP will win back the House in November, he is engaged in wishful thinking or has simply spent too much time listening to flattering, unrealistic claims made by other Republicans.

Republicans would need to gain 40 seats to win the majority again, and that will give them the bare minimum of 218. At most, they might realistically net 13-16, and that is assuming that things continue to go their way. Even if every seat listed as “lean Democratic” by CQPolitics today fell to a Republican candidate, and the GOP won all other vulnerable Democratic seats, that would be only a net of 37. That would be a significant and remarkable gain and larger than the Democratic pick-up in 2006, but that is as high as the GOP wave can possibly crest. In the last 36 34 years, Presidents with approval ratings above 40% do not normally lose 30+ seats in the House. 1994 is the one exception, and that result was greatly aided by the huge number of retirements of members of the majority in that year. At the moment, Republican House retirements still outnumber Democratic retirements.

If Cantor automatically assumes that the GOP will do better than this in one cycle, he is dreaming and complacent. That tells me that the GOP simply expects victory to happen, which makes it more likely that they are going to be unprepared to fight the election effectively and they will end up being badly disappointed.