Turning Tide

President Bush has set the same national security trap of the past two election cycles, the Democrats have blustered straight into it for the third straight election cycle, the issues of the mid-term election have been reframed, the war on Islamic Fundamentalism is once more paramount, and the GOP machine is roaring toward a victorious trifecta.

Here's my updated Senate scorecard of RCP-designated "competitive" races (based on most recent week's worth of averaged polling data, weighted toward surveys of "likely" voters; pickups italicized):

LEANS REPUBLICAN: (4-9 point margin): Kyl (AZ), Allen (VA)

TOSSUPS: (0-3 point margin): Cardin-Steele (MD), Talent-McCaskill (MO), Menendez-Kean (NJ), DeWine-Brown (OH), Corker-Ford (TN)

LEANS INDEPENDENT (4-9 point margin): Lieberman (CT)

LEANS DONK (4-9 point margin): Klobuchar (MN), Tester (MT), Casey (PA), Whitehouse (RI)

SAFE DONK (10+ point margin): Stabenow (MI), Cantwell (WA)

Working back through this list, I frankly don't care about Lincoln Chafee losing, as that's just a change of label on the same fetid product. Bob Casey has turned into a pumpkin and is in freefall. The numbers on the Burns-Tester race in Montana are a bit stale but were moving away from the GOP incumbent ten days ago; but with Burns' supposedly biggest liability being his ties to the Jack Abramoff scandal, and that scandal being another Dem propaganda fizzle outside the Beltway, I see no reason why Burns can't be lifted by the broader national GOP tide.

Amy Klobuchar, the hapless lib county prosecutor under whose lenient oversight a crime wave has overrun Hennepin County, has nevertheless maintained a healthy lead over GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy, a disappointment in a race that once looked like a prime candidate for a Republican pickup. But now the burgeoning trend of Donk dirty tricks has exposed AK as well with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar:

Democrat Amy Klobuchar's U.S. Senate campaign has fired its chief spokeswoman, revealing Wednesday that she viewed an unreleased TV ad for Republican candidate Mark Kennedy that may have been illegally obtained.

In a prepared statement, Klobuchar campaign manager Ben Goldfarb said that communications director Tara McGuinness was contacted last Saturday by a local blogger who sent her a link to the ad. Goldfarb said the campaign had turned the matter over to the Minneapolis office of the FBI.

"The blogger indicated to Ms. McGuinness that he had gained access to the advertisement by use of passwords," Goldfarb said in the statement. "Exercising poor judgment, Ms. McGuinness opened the link, watched the advertisement and asked others on our campaign to watch it."

Evidently Ms. McGuinness' judgment was not so poor as to prompt the Klobuchar campaign to report her misdeeds immediately, as they waited four full days to call the FBI. Which means four full days of gleaning everything they could from the purloined Kennedy ad.

The Klobucharoids are trying to insulate the candidate from this mess, but that is going to be a tall order. Aside from the applicable axiom that a captain is responsible for everything that happens on his/her ship, Brother Hinderaker broaches some toe-curling questions that AK is going to have to answer:

Was the conduct of Klobuchar's staff a federal crime, or was it only unethical?

Why did Amy Klobuchar - who now holds herself out as an exemplar of effective law enforcement - wait for four days to report to the FBI the possible commission of a federal crime by persons associated with her campaign?

Did Klobuchar deliberately withhold evidence of a crime committed by her staffers until after the [Minneapolis] Star-Tribune completed its polling?

Klobuchar says she has not seen the unreleased ad, although an unknown number of her staffers have. Has Klobuchar been briefed on the contents of the ad? Was the hacked ad used to prepare Klobuchar for her debate with Kennedy? At what point did Klobuchar find out that her campaign was using information obtained, apparently, in violation of federal law?

Did Klobuchar herself violate any federal criminal statute? Is she subject to criminal prosecution? Did she or someone on her staff put the unidentified blogger up to the task of hacking into her opponent's server?

My polling composite shows Klobuchar with an eight-point lead. I would expect that number to tighten considerably in the next week or two.

Of the five tossups, only the Tennessee contest to determine Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's successor has shown significant Dem-ward movement, and GOPer Bob Corker still holds a narrow lead over Donkressman Harold Ford, Jr. While the Talent-McCaskill battle for Missouri has been nip & tuck for months, the remaining three races evince either a GOP lead just inside the margin of error (Tom Kean, Jr. in New Jersey) or recent strong Republican surges (Mike DeWine within a point in Ohio, Michael Steele a point ahead in Maryland).

Based on the current numbers and trends, I wouldn't be surprised to wake up on November 8th to find the Republicans have not just held the Senate and House - certainly a triumph based on grandiose Dem expectations - but actually gained a seat in the upper chamber and a few in the lower. With gas prices plummeting, the economy booming, our country's declared enemies coming to our own soil to trash us to our faces with rhetoric that sounds barely distinguishable from Democrat talking points, Barack Obama wishfully calling the Bush Administration's success thus far in the GWOT "an illusion," Bill Clinton insisting that we "talk" with the Iranian mullahs "without conditions" - after years and years of Tehran's lies and double-dealing, to say nothing of Adolph Ahmadinejad's Nikita Khrushchev impression - and echoing the mendacious "torture" meme, the Democrats are once again hoisting themselves on the petard of their own solipsistic arrogance. The intractible mindset of 2002 and 2004 that convinced them the whole country agreed with them that Bush is Satan, and we should surrender Iraq to the terrorists and hunker down and cower inside Fortress America, and thus they didn't need any unifying national platform beyond "Bleep Bush and the party he rode in on!"

That's why I get such a kick out of the borderline autism of the Enemy Media's campaign coverage. They say and write and publish only what they want to see. That's why they are the only ones ultimately fooled by their propaganda, and why they'll never see this defeat coming either.