Midday open thread

• Rasmussen: voters perceive Obama moving to the middle. The danger of Obama's recent calculating moves isn't even that he might be moving to the "middle". It's that he's now acting like every other politician. For those who thought he was something "new" and "different", fact is, he's behaving like every other politician before him.

  Beside that, now that Obama is seen as "less liberal", that should improve his poll numbers, right? Wrong.

  So, now that Obama is perceived as moving to the center, while McCain is still perceived as conservative, Obama's poll numbers should improve, right? Wrong. According to the daily tracking poll from the same polling firm, Rasmussen, the campaign has not changed at all as a result of Obama being perceived as less liberal:

  • Obama has been at 49% every single day since June 22nd
  • Obama has been at 48%, 49% or 50% every single day since June 8th
  • Obama has led by between 4-6% every day since June 23rd, and in all but three days since June 11th. In the other three days, he twice led by 3%, and once led by 7%.

  Poll movement of this small degree is not really movement at all, but rather "statistical noise." So, while there has been substantial movement in how liberal Obama is perceived as being, and even though McCain is viewed just as conservative as ever, there has been no movement whatsoever in the national matchup. This is very strong proof, even scientific, that Obama's move to the center has not won him any votes, and that the perceived change in the ideological gap between Obama and McCain did not impact their relative vote share.

  Or maybe not, as Josh Orton argues:

  As much as I'd like to believe that Obama's recent triangulation hasn't been effective, I'm just not sure these numbers prove it. As we've looked at before, the strategy for Obama is a multi-state/multi-path tour to the nomination. Exactly which blocs of voters are we talking about? In which states? [...]

  Point being, I guarantee that the Obama campaign doesn't gauge the success or failure of messaging by the rise and fall of top-line national tracking polls - this is a state-by-state, constituency-by-constituency race.

  Poblano also disagrees. Me, I think Obama was fine before his capitulation on FISA, and that his mainstream Democratic positions were mainstream American positions. I also think Obama is talented enough that he could've sold his mainstream politics to the American people.

  This debate is almost academic. If Obama improves, is it because Obama is "moving to the center", or because people are tuning in and preferring him to McCain? Is it because Jeremiah Wright is a distant memory almost forgotten by everyone? Is it because gas prices are going up and jobs keep getting lost?

  There's no way to quantify the reason Obama goes up and down, and I doubt the majority of people follow each policy pronouncement for where it sits in the "middle". Like I said, Obama was already in the middle. All his maneuverings at this point are merely political (avoiding attack ads), rather than ideological.

• Headline:

  Bush administration is protecting privacy and constitutional rights -- of tomatoes

• So McCain claims that he'll balance the budget in his first term, yet offers no numbers or evidence to back up his fantastical claim? Why isn't he being laughed off the stage?

  So what are the numbers behind that? We just asked the McCain campaign and the response we got was ...

  It's pretty straightforward, as we win, costs will go down with a smaller footprint over time, and those savings will go to deficit reduction. It's really the logical extension of Senator McCain's position as articulated in the 2013 speech. Achieving success in Iraq would obviously lead to reduced expenditures on the effort.

  This is what's behind McCain's promise. I'll do a lot of things that will get the deficit down. One of them is the the guarantee of victories in Iraq and Afghanistan and obviously that will save a lot of money.

• It's impossible to spoof this.
• Exactly like slavery.
• Yeah, there's not much to be happy about with this Congress.
• Incompetence at FEMA? Nope, Holy Joe doesn't care. It might make his BFF Bush look bad!
• A great start to the Tour de France this year. Catch the play by play over at Podium Cafe. My own bikes (road and mountain) have been getting extra work these last few weeks. Every year, I get a huge motivational boost around this time of year, for obvious reasons.