I hate to say it, but Charlie Crist is running a brilliant populist ad campaign. He’s running as “Charlie Crist, The People’s Governor”. I mentioned several weeks ago that he was doing a great job in the GOP primary of rebranding himself. He used to be the darling of the christian right. In the primaries, with an eye to the general, he was branding himself as a pragmatic problem solver and touting his achievements as attorney general. He’s now using those achievements as the basis of a campaign where he talks about going after the insurance companies and some other seriously unpopular corporate bugaboos. It’s fucking brilliant. If Jim Davis doesn’t do something to heat up his own campaign, he’s gonna get his butt kicked. Crist is very astute at getting the pulse of Florida voters this year. If he ran the kind of campaign that GOP gubernatorial candidates have run (largely successfully) in the last 20 years in this state, he’d lose big this year.

If you had difficulty with the link in this morning’s post, it’s fixed now. I’ve found a little bugginess with links since my last wordpress upgrade. I haven’t had the time to dig into whether there’s a fix for it and upgrade further. Sorry!

I’m reprinting this in its entirety since it is relatively short.

    Facing Facts on Iraq
The New York Times

    Sunday 24 September 2006

    While Iraq is a central issue in this year’s election campaigns, there is very little clear talk about what to do, beyond vague recommendations for staying the course or long-term timetables for withdrawal. That is because politicians running for election want to deliver good news, and there is nothing about Iraq - including withdrawal scenarios - that is anything but ominous.

    In the real Iraq, armed Shiite and Kurdish parties have divided up the eastern two-thirds of the country, leaving Sunni insurgents and American marines to fight over the rest. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his “national unity cabinet” stretch out their arms to like-thinking allies like Iran and Hezbollah, but barely lift a finger to rein in the sectarian militias and death squads spreading terror across Baghdad and the Shiite south.

    The civilian death toll is now running at roughly 100 a day, with many of the victims gruesomely tortured with power tools or acid. Over the summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month than the number of Americans lost to terrorism on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the electricity remains off, oil production depressed, unemployment pervasive and basic services hard to find.

    Iraq is today a broken, war-torn country. Outside the relatively stable Kurdish northeast, virtually every family - Sunni or Shiite, rich or poor, powerful or powerless - must cope with fear and physical insecurity on an almost daily basis. The courts, when they function at all, are subject to political interference; street-corner justice is filling the vacuum. Religious courts are asserting their power over family life. Women’s rights are in retreat.

    Growing violence, not growing democracy, is the dominant feature of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi knows this. Americans need to know it too.

    Beyond the futility of simply staying the course lies the impossibility of keeping the bulk of American ground forces stationed in Iraq indefinitely. They have already been there for 42 months, longer than it took the United States to defeat Hitler. The strain is undermining the long-term strength of the Army and Marines, threatening to divert the National Guard from homeland security and emboldening Iran and North Korea. Yet with the military situation deteriorating, the Pentagon has had to give up any idea of significant withdrawals this year, or for that matter anytime in the foreseeable future.

    If there is still a constructive way out of this disaster, it has to begin with some truth-telling. Politicians are not going to press for serious solutions when their constituents have not been prepared to understand what the real options are. Republicans will not talk about genuine alternatives as long as their supporters have been primed to believe victory is possible. Few Democrats will advocate anything that might wind up transferring responsibility for this awful mess to them.

    Acknowledging the hard facts of today’s Iraq must be more than a political talking point for the president’s opponents. It is the only possible beginning to a serious national discussion about what kind of American policy has the best chance of retrieving whatever can still be retrieved in Iraq and minimizing the damage to wider American interests.

The intelligence community has weighed in with an authoritative report on the effect of the war in Iraq on our “war on terror”. They’re confirming what everyone who hasn’t consumed the Bush administration’s kool-aid already knows: going to war in Iraq has worsened the terrorist thread and made us less safe.

I’ve said for the last year that I don’t believe that Al Gore will run for President in 2008. I still believed that after the marketing push he did for “An Inconvenient Truth”. I’m not so sure now. After reading this speech, he’s either laying the groundwork to run for President in 2008 or he’s seeking to become a non-political leader, a movement leader, of the type that this country hasn’t seen since Martin Luther King and has only seen a handful of times in its history. I can clearly see a political platform embedded in this speech. But I can even more easily see the case the case that the kind of change he’s going for can’t be lead from above, can’t be the platform of one leader or one party.

There’s a good article in the Monitor about why the Democrats might take the majority of governorships this year for the first time since 1994 and what the implications of that could be.

The GOP has found and launched its strategy to try to keep control of the House and Senate this fall: smear, smear, smear. In an effort to keep this election from being nationalized on unpopular issues like the war in Iraq and the poor performance of the GOP controlled congress, they are going for smear, distortion, and attack on Democratic challengers, hoping to make them look like risky choices compared with the local incumbent.

Well, it’s definitely going to be Charlie Crist on the Republican side for governor. From the earliest returns at 3 or 4 percent of total voters until now (at about 25%), Crist has pretty consistently held a two to one lead.

One the Democratic side, it’s still looking like Jim Davis is going to win it, but his lead narrowed in the polls this week and has been narrowing all night as the returns come in. He started off in the same nearly 2 to 1 position that Crist has held, but the gap has narrowed to about 10 points now.