Monday Morning Quick Hits - New ABC Poll Shows Collapse Of Optimism On Iraq

by Steve

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, just released in the last hour and to be expanded later today, shows that public optimism on Iraq has crumbled in the last 30-60 days. Eighty percent of those polled, including more than 70% of Republicans, now feel that civil war is likely, and 52% now think that our forces should be withdrawn. 56% now think that the United States is not making sufficient progress towards restoring civil order in Iraq.

Want to see the next minefield that the Bush Administration will step into on the Dubai Ports World deal? Responding to building GOP criticism of this deal, the Administration has quietly approached DPW about restructuring this deal so that an American firm is brought aboard as a partner to lessen domestic criticism. Guess which firm is being positioned as DPW’s marriage partner? H-A-L-L-I-B-U-R-T-O-N. I kid you not. As we have said from Day One, the GOP never lets national security get in the way of a profit opportunity.

Thomas Edsall in the Post this morning writes about the failure of the GOP to meet its own rhetoric in realigning the Jewish vote away from the Democrats and over to their side. Edsall doesn’t even mention that Ari Fleischer’s Republican Jewish Congress was silent on the Dubai Ports World deal, even though Dubai participates in the Arab economic boycott of Israel, and was also silent on Pat Robertson’s lunatic blast at a comatose Ariel Sharon.

Adam Nagourney of the New York Times does another one of his hit-and-runs on Democrats today. Nagourney spends 37 paragraphs tagging the Democrats for not having a unified attack message against their GOP opponents contest-by-contest this year, something I myself have done. Nagourney points to the 1994 Contract with America as a comparison (as I myself have done) and he wonders aloud why the Democrats don’t have a similar manifesto. It isn’t until paragraph 33 of his 37-paragraph piece that Nagourney allows into the record what I now acknowledge myself: Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich didn’t roll out their contract until six week before the 1994 midterms. Adam, according to my calendar, it is March, still six months shy of when the GOP rolled out their prop that year. Yet you hold the Democrats to a standard that the GOP didn’t subscribe to in your own example. Of course, to actually acknowledge that up front in your piece would have undercut the reason for your hit piece, wouldn’t it Adam?

Bush, who has never vetoed a bill from his own GOP congress because of any concern over spending, today came out for the line-item veto. Yawn.

Edsall also runs a piece in today’s Post that reports on the findings of a recent study of online campaign fundraising and the 2004 election. The study shows that Democrats have done a better job of taking advantage of marshalling small donors to level the playing field against the GOP’s corporate base. In fact, the study showed that in 2004, more than half of all Democrats contributed to campaigns online, which was more than double the percentage of Republicans. Thank you Howard Dean and Joe Trippi.

I’m not sure how many of you caught the rosy scenario talk from Peter Pace yesterday on Timmeh’s show, which was countered by John Murtha’s appearance on Face the Nation, wherein Murtha repeated his assessment that we are the problem holding back Iraq.

Echoing what we were saying around here last year, Rahm Emanuel is focusing on this administration’s incompetence.

And the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein makes a point we made late last week: Bush doesn’t seem to know what is really going on inside Iraq.