Don Surber points out that July poll advantages often melt away by November.

At this point in 2004, Democratic Sen. John Kerry had a 7-point lead in the Gallup while Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has a 2-point lead.

Oops.

The Gallup Poll looked at the last few elections and found that the leader in July won only 3 of the 9 contested races since 1948.

Presidents Dewey, Humphrey, Dukakis and Kerry had leads of 11, 5, 6 and 7, respectively, at this point in their races.

In fact, in July 2004, Kerry had a majority over the incumbent, 51-44. …

Obama now leads Republican Sen. John McCain 46-44 in the Gallup.

Curiously, in 10 of the last 12 races, the Republican fared better in November than he polled in July. The two exceptions are President Clinton in 1992 and Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

Polls in July are nice to chat about around the pool while sipping iced tea (if you are a Democrat) or popping open a beer around the grill (if you are a Republican) or ignoring (if you are an independent).

Or fighting the malaria with a gin-and-tonic if you are a drunk.

Jesse Jackson’s whispered desired to “cut off (Barack Obama’s) n*ts” for “talking down to black people” about (something) “faith-based,” recorded and broadcast by Fox News,

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would seem to be a response to Obama’s July 1st Zanesville, Ohio speech, in which he proposed creating a “Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” But how is that “talking down to black people?”

The Reverend Jackson’s anger seems more likely to have been in response to Obama’s June 15th Father’s Day speech, in which he referred to half of all black children living in single parent homes, and urged black fathers to set an example of excellence and not “just sit in the house and watch SportsCenter.”

Obama proposed more ambitious educational goals.

You know, sometimes I’ll go to an eighth-grade graduation and there’s all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it’s just eighth grade. To really compete, they need to graduate high school, and then they need to graduate college, and they probably need a graduate degree too. An eighth-grade education doesn’t cut it today. Let’s give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

Obama also advocated placing greater emphasis on empathy and kindness and less upon machismo.

The second thing we need to do as fathers is pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in “us,” that we forget about our obligations to one another. There’s a culture in our society that says remembering these obligations is somehow soft – that we can’t show weakness, and so therefore we can’t show kindness.

But our young boys and girls see that. They see when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself. And so it’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets. That’s why we pass on the values of empathy and kindness to our children by living them. We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s our responsibility as fathers.

Jesse Jackson would be living in a state of spectacular denial if he thinks the problems Obama is referring to don’t exist, and his response seems to manifest a hypersensitive racial chauvinism surprising even for him… unless this whole affair was merely a calculated ploy intended to give Barack Obama a “Sister Soldjah moment.”

Headline:Enlightened New Multi-racial Leader Offering Change Denounced by Bitter Old-School Race-Baiter.

Matt Drudge quotes Bill O’Reilly boasting that he held back even more rich material.

We held back some of this conversation… we didn’t feel it had any relevance to the conversation this evening. We are not out to get Jesse Jackson. We are not out to embarrass him and we are not out to make him look bad. If we were, we would have used what we had, which is more damaging than what you have heard…

Oh yes, that Bill O’Reilly is a principled idealist. He’d never do anything unethical, like surreptitiously tape and then broadcast Fox News guests’ private statements. Except, whoops! he just did.

O’Reilly’s not an Obama supporter, so he wouldn’t be intentionally collaborating in “staging Sister Soldjah,” but he is dumber than a bootjack, and even Jesse Jackson is sufficiently smarter to be able to dupe him.

Perhaps Jesse Jackson’s stage whisper was intentional, and the clueless Mr. O’Reilly unfortunately got cold feet about exposing the best parts, featuring even more colorful terms and touching upon sensitive racial animosities, and all we got was an abridged, tepid, and bowdlerized version of what could have been a fine and memorable dramatic performance.

That political genius Barack Obama tells a Georgia crowd that they should be teaching their kids to speak Spanish, instead of worrying about immigrants learning English. And he then explains how embarrassing it is to people like himself to live among all those dumbass Americans who don’t speak lots of languages like the sophisticated Europeans do.

B. Hussein says:

Understand this: instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English –they’ll learn English!– you need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. Yo! It’s embarrassing… it’s embarrassing when… when… uh, Europeans come over here. they all speak English. They speak French. They speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and… and all we’s can say is “Merci beaucoup.”

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Oh yes, this one will win lots of support from those bitter gun-owners and church-goers in the Heartland, alright.

I bet they’re pulling out their hair at Obama campaign headquarters.

Unless he’s completely rested and prepared and working off a script on a teleprompter, Barack Obama is every bit as much of a disaster as Michelle.

Yes, learning languages is a good thing, but we have plenty of language education available in America right now. People like B Hussein Obama, who attended exclusive preparatory schools and Harvard, and who jet off regularly to Barcelona, Paris, and Gstaad, do almost invariably speak some other languages.

Ordinary, working class Americans (surprise, surprise!) actually commonly cannot afford European vacations, and have a whole lot less use than Europeans, who live next door to countries speaking them, do for foreign languages. If France was right across the Missouri River from Iowa, I expect most people in Sioux City would know how to read a menu in French. Spanish biligualism is actually pretty common right now in the US of A around the Mexican border.

The issue that bugs people is the way the system bends over backwards to accomodate foreign languages like Spanish, discouraging assimilation and inconveniencing ordinary Americans. When I use the ATM machine at the local supermarket, I have to choose a language before I can transact my business. The burden ought to go the other way. The immigrant ought to have to figure out how to deal with English language ATM machines. The inconvenience is minor, it’s true, but the symbolism is annoying. One feels that the normal American’s English language has been demoted from its formerly established position to the status of just another of the tongues of Babel.

Obama has yet again given a very effective demonstration of his elite perspective and his contempt for, and inability to understand or sympathize with, the lives of ordinary Americans.

Rich Lowry identifies the fraud which is Barack Obama.

In the past few weeks, Obama has broken two pledges (to take public financing in the general election and to filibuster legal immunity for telecoms that cooperated with the government in terrorist surveillance); has belittled his own rhetoric during the primary campaign (saying it could get “overheated and amplified” on the issue of trade); redefined his promise to meet without preconditions with the leaders of hostile states until it’s basically meaningless; endorsed a Supreme Court decision striking down a Washington, D.C., gun ban his campaign had previously said he supported; and made muddy, centrist-sounding statements about his positions on Iraq and abortion that he had to go back and try to clarify.

Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both? We now know that Barack Obama is not naive, but his ardent supporters are. Obama exhorted them to “believe” — one of his favorite words — in him and his virtue above all, and as soon as they gave him the nomination he wanted, he showed how foolishly credulous they had been. When it comes to triangulating, he’s Hillary Clinton without the baggage.

Forget the debate about whether Obama is “American enough.” He’s that great American archetype, the audacious salesman with an eye on the main chance. Nothing in his utterly orthodox left-wing record ever suggested he was a transformationally unifying figure, but he sold himself as that to the audience he needed in the Democratic primaries. Nothing in his record suggests he’s a sensible centrist, but he’s going to sell himself as one to the audience he needs in the general election, whatever contortions it takes. In his current TV ad, he touts his support for welfare reform when he actually opposed it.

Obama is calculating shrewdly now — just as shrewdly as back when he was attacking calculation. His left-wing base won’t abandon him, and all the dewy-eyed new voters attracted by him will stay that way, so long as he continues to look and sound good. His task is to win over general-election voters in a center-right country who value hardheadedness and practicality in their presidents.

Barack Obama doesn’t need to be a messiah figure. He needn’t even be particularly admirable. In a poisonous year for Republicans, he just needs to be a minimally acceptable Democrat, and so minimally acceptable he aims to be.

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Hat tip to the News Junkie (who likes a lot of the same stories I do this morning, I see).

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And Rich Lowry is not the only one who notices.

Tony Blankley sees a gifted demagogue at work fleecing the bumpkins.

Way back in June, Sen. Barack “middle name not permitted to be mentioned” Obama campaigned on the theme of “Change We Can Believe In.” Now, several days later, his theme should be “Change We Can’t Keep Up With.” Apparently, the change he was calling for was not for Washington politics, but for his primary campaign positions. …

Which brings us, as it always does in such circumstances, to America’s greatest fraud sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” It is not surprising that the youth is particularly enchanted by the senator from Illinois. Being young, they are inexperienced in the ways of the world.

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Iowahawk paraphrases the great man.

Let me be crystal clear: if elected president, my first act will be to call for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq. I have always been consistent and forthright in this position, and I want to reassure my supporters that my recent statement backtracking from it was just some bullshit my staff came up with to tack to the center for the general election. To win this election, it will be critical to appeal to the dwindling but stubborn group of idiots who cling to fantasies of American “victory” in this tragic disaster. It’s an unfortunate part of the complicated game of presidential politics, but let’s face it: I can’t stop this war if I’m not in the White House. However, you should know by now that whatever I may say from now until November, once elected I will immediately pull the rug from these gullible pro-war rubes.

Or will I? As is obvious to all but the most deluded HuffPo retard, the surge in Iraq has produced dramatic improvements in security throughout Iraq, and the roots of a stable pro-American democracy. We have the terrorists on the run, and it would obviously be crazy for us to pull our troops from the region just as we are on the verge of victory. And it is equally obvious that everything I said in the previous paragraph was designed to placate the naive hipster moonbats I brilliantly exploited to destroy the Clintons. (You’re welcome.) Now that the nomination is in the bag, I am finally free to stake out my genuine pro-victory Iraq position, and have a good laugh while the dKos morons screech like a bunch of apoplectic howler monkeys. Let’s face it: at the rate I’m heading right on national security, I’ll be raining nukes on Tehran by February. …

Just look at all of the comsymps and pinkos I’ve thrown under the bus in the last 6 weeks – Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Samantha Power, Jim Johnson, the list goes on. And you know what? I enjoyed it. Ask yourself this: when was the last time John McCain stabbed a lefty asshole in the back? Then ask yourself: who’s the real conservative in this race?

In conclusion, this should make it clear to the broad moderate middle mainstream of independent American voters that I am willing to reach out to both sides of the contentious war debate, and forge a new national consensus based on unity. Together, we can build a new era of hope, and bring an end to politics of cynicism.

Rasmussen reports:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

t’s just a shame that there is no Republican leadership whatsoever out there to offer a meaningful alternative.

Marc Ambinder says that Jim Webb will not be forwarding his tax returns to Obama campaign headquarters.

Last week, members of the team gave Sen. James Webb of VA a list of what they needed to begin their investigation of his background and career. Webb refused, telling them that he did not want to be considered for the position.

In a statement today, Webb disclosed that he had “communicated to Senator Obama and his presidential campaign my firm intention to remain in the United States Senate, where I believe I am best equipped to serve the people of Virginia and this country. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President.”

A Democrat close to Webb confirms that a request for documents preceded his declaration to the Obama campaign. The Democrat said that Webb did not want to relive the vigors of a campaign so soon after his election to the Senate.

Webb’s statement suggests that Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, the two leaders of the team, had received instructions from Sen. Obama to vet a number of finalists, including Webb.

In general, candidates who are asked to provide information ranging from references to tax returns have been promoted to the next round by the nominee himself. Because the vetting takes lots of time, nominees tend to ask for vets of only those under serious consideration.

This kind of report always leaves more uncertainty than it dispels.

Perhaps Webb is simply being coy, and may yet be persuaded. Or maybe Obama just isn’t inclined to try balancing his ticket with someone so different from the democrat party mainstream as Webb, and Webb is explaining to the press just how sour those grapes really are.

If Jim Webb is so determined not to run for VP, how come he published this May the second personal political manifesto he’s produced in under three years, titled: A Time to Fight?

Personally, I think Webb could help Obama a lot in regions and with constituencies otherwise completely out of reach, but I’m not sure that I believe that they could work together. It would be entertaining though to see the democrat nutroots go ballistic over the choice of Webb, so I’ll be sorry if it doesn’t happen.

Says the New York Times.

On the other hand, some other people seem completely lost without one.

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Uncle Cthulhu Wants You!

On Supreme Court Appointments:

Great Cthulhu is well accustomed to the adoration of priests wearing black robes and he is willing to accept the due homage of the Nine and raise them to his priesthood. Since there will no doubt be many vacancies on the court as their minds break one after another in the mad ecstacy of his fearful presence, Great Cthulhu pledges to appoint only strict Constitutional constructionists to the bench under the assumption that the basic sanity of their approach should allow them to serve at least a term year or two before they are reduced to gloriously gibbering cannibals. Because Great Cthulhu spent many years himself neither living nor breathing, he sees no reason that the Constitution must either.

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Hat tip to Will Wilson.

Obama gets to rail about the bad economy for which the probability of his election is responsible. Sometimes there’s no justice.

Glenn Reynolds.

Ann Althouse, responds to James Risen’s New York Times story on the left blogosphere’s recent conniption fit over Obama’s flipflop on FISA Telecom immunity:

You can’t please everybody, and if you want to be President, you really can’t please Greenwald, Hamsher, and Kos. Obama is taking the right position now, and he should defend it frankly.

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Andy Borowitz, at Huffington Post, was also impatient with the left.

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

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The Wall Street Journal notices Obama’s speedy march toward the Center with slightly less congratulation.

We’re beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so vigorously against the prospect of “George Bush’s third term.” Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate who’s running for it.

Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their party nomination, but Mr. Obama isn’t merely “running to the center.” He’s fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so rapidly that he’s embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush’s policy. Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?

Take the surveillance of foreign terrorists. Last October, while running with the Democratic pack, the Illinois Senator vowed to “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies” that assisted in such eavesdropping after 9/11. As recently as February, still running as the liberal favorite against Hillary Clinton, he was one of 29 Democrats who voted against allowing a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reform of surveillance rules even to come to the floor.

Two weeks ago, however, the House passed a bill that is essentially the same as that Senate version, and Mr. Obama now says he supports it. Apparently legal immunity for the telcos is vital for U.S. national security, just as Mr. Bush has claimed. Apparently, too, the legislation isn’t an attempt by Dick Cheney to gut the Constitution. Perhaps it is dawning on Mr. Obama that, if he does become President, he’ll be responsible for preventing any new terrorist attack. So now he’s happy to throw the New York Times under the bus.

Next up for Mr. Obama’s political blessing will be Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy. Only weeks ago, the Democrat was calling for an immediate and rapid U.S. withdrawal. When General David Petraeus first testified about the surge in September 2007, Mr. Obama was dismissive and skeptical. But with the surge having worked wonders in Iraq, this week Mr. Obama went out of his way to defend General Petraeus against MoveOn.org’s attacks in 2007 that he was “General Betray Us.” Perhaps he had a late epiphany.

Look for Mr. Obama to use his forthcoming visit to Iraq as an excuse to drop those withdrawal plans faster than he can say Jeremiah Wright “was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” The Senator will learn – as John McCain has been saying – that withdrawal would squander the gains from the surge, set back Iraqi political progress, and weaken America’s strategic position against Iran. Our guess is that he’ll spin this switcheroo as some kind of conditional commitment, saying he’ll stay in Iraq as long as Iraqis are making progress on political reconciliation, and so on. As things improve in Iraq, this would be Mr. Bush’s policy too.

Mr. Obama has also made ostentatious leaps toward Mr. Bush on domestic issues. While he once bid for labor support by pledging a unilateral rewrite of Nafta, the Democrat now says he favors free trade as long as it works for “everybody.” His economic aide, Austan Goolsbee, has been liberated from the five-month purdah he endured for telling Canadians that Mr. Obama’s protectionism was merely campaign rhetoric. Now that Mr. Obama is in a general election, he can’t scare the business community too much.

Back in the day, the first-term Senator also voted against the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But last week he agreed with their majority opinion in the Heller gun rights case, and with their dissent against the liberal majority’s ruling to ban the death penalty for rape. Mr. Obama seems to appreciate that getting pegged as a cultural lefty is deadly for national Democrats – at least until November.

Victor Davis Hanson wonders why so many Obama supporters come from California’s most affluent residents, the very people who have benefited most from globalization and free trade and an economy energized by Bush’s tax cuts.

After talking to and observing lots of Bay Area affluent and staunch Obama supporters, I think the key to reconciling the apparent paradoxes is done in the following ways.

Many enjoying the good life worry that their own privilege in some sort of way comes at the expense of someone else, or they fret that their present lifestyle in ecological terms is hardly sustainable. That concern does not translate into much concrete action. SUVs (Mercedes rather than Yukons) are no rarer in Palo Alto than in Fresno, while such progressives are just as likely, or more so, to abandon the public schools, to keep their children out of East Palo Alto or away from the Redwood City ho polloi, and sent off to and on their way at elite prep and public schools. To sum up, Obama offers a reassuring sense of self-image: one can still maintain all the current mechanisms one is accustomed to in ensuring privilege, but visible support for Obama offers a sense of atonement and alleviation of guilt at rather modest cost. (We shall see whether a President Obama really ups the top rates, takes off FICA caps, raises capital gains, and so in fact takes a $50-70,000 greater annual cut from top yuppie joint incomes.)

Somehow an Obama sticker, sign on the lawn, or a lapel button has become the equivalent of a crucifix around the neck of a prosperous 16th-century burgher: easy fides of inner good and a valuable totem in reconciling the apparent irreconcilable.

Obama supporters exploited a Google policy (reporting them as spam sources) to get anti-Obama Hillary supporters’ blogs shut down.

Blogasm

Larry Johnson lists victims and their new locations.