The Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire" by John Harwood drills down on the latest NBC/WSJ poll numbers and includes one headline that will make DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel smile almost as much as a UTA and Endeavor merger: "Democrats enjoy favorable issue terrain for midterm elections" LINK
Speaking of Emanuel, the DCCC Chair has taken a lot of heat for having said "at the right time we will have a position" on the war.
At yesterday's pen-and-pad briefing, NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds (R-NY) approached Rahmian levels of evasiveness when asked about permanent bases in Iraq.
After Chairman Reynolds invoked Jack Kemp's name while answering one reporter's question, the NRCC chairman was asked by ABC News if he agreed or disagreed with his friend and former colleague who has said in recent television interviews that he thinks the United States should announce "unambiguously" that it has no intention to keep permanent military bases in the Iraqi nation.
Kemp has also said during his recent round of television interviews to promote work that he and John Edwards have done for the Council on Foreign Relations that he thinks the U.S. should address concerns that it is in Iraq for oil by agreeing not to stay in Iraq beyond a "date certain" which Kemp has suggested should come at the end of 2008 or the beginning of 2009.
Rep. Reynolds said Kemp was "a great football player" and an "elder statesman" in the Republican Party who is "entitled to his opinion."
When pressed to answer whether he disagrees with the Republican Party's 1996 vice presidential nominee, Rep. Reynolds let his reference to Kemp's gridiron talents stand.
In his National Journal column, Charlie Cook looks at the midterm election through his macro lens and does the 1994 vs. 2006 data comparison. "By almost every relevant measurement, national polls indicate that Republicans are at least as bad off as Democrats were at this point in 1994, before suffering devastating midterm losses," writes Cook.