What a Difference a Year Makes
Bush continues to tank

There are a couple of interesting nuggets in WP's Terry Neal's column Are Democrats Riding a National Wave? today. The first makes the point the Jon Stewart made with more humor on Wednesday. On the Daily Show, Stewart showed a negative ad in the New Jersey governors race in which Forrester was said to support Bush in an accusatory tone, followed by the same ad read as positive ad. Stewart remarked how much change an unpopular war, etc., could make in inflection.

In New Jersey, a Democratic-leaning state where Republicans have been competitive in statewide races, gubernatorial candidate Jon Corzine ran ads linking Republican opponent Doug Forrester to Bush. The fact that those were seen as attack ads says something about how the political landscape has changed since last November.

Neal's next paragraph talked about how few states were left in which the ad could still be read in a positive manner.

If Bush's poll numbers remain low, Democrats won't have to fear him coming to their states to campaign for their opponents next year. That's important, because a popular president can make a point or two difference by actively campaigning for a candidate. As of last month, Bush's approval rating was above 50 percent in only six states.

I checked out which six states still supported Bush and discovered that their combined population comprised 715,228 less people than my home state of North Carolina. Indeed, if you subtract Oklahoma, in which Bush had only a 51% approval rating, the state population totals became 4,302,440 less than NC's. If things don't change, Democratic candidates are going to be begging Bush to campaign for their rivals.

The impact on the Republican party is now being seen as moderates have finally found their voices, no longer easily run over by the Bush juggernaut. See Milbank also in the WP The Moderates Go to Extremes :

After five years of relative quiescence, centrist Republicans in both chambers chose yesterday to make a stand. At the Senate Finance Committee, Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) forced Republican leaders to cancel a committee vote on a $60 billion tax cut. In the House, a rebellion by a few GOP moderates shut down the chamber for nearly six hours and led leaders to abandon a vote on budget cuts.