The Rehabilitation of Al Gore

I was checking out the polls for the 2008 presidential election the
other day and couple interesting things struck me.  The one I'll
mention here is how dramatically Al Gore's standing has improved in the
past year.  Here's the data from pollingreport.com:

A year ago, both McCain and Giulani trounced Al Gore, but had much smaller leads over Hillary Clinton.  Now, at least in trial heats, Al Gore seems to be equally as strong a candidate as Hillary.  A pretty dramatic change.  I think it is safe to say that “An Inconvenient Truth” (in addition to being a really good movie) has done wonders for his image.  It really is too early to speculate much about 2008, but Republicans should feel good about these polls.  On the other hand, there is no way, the pro-choice Giulani wins the Republican primaries. 

Separate realities

Interesting new poll from the LA Times today.  What I think is most striking is the amazing divergence between Democrats and Republicans related to issues on Iraq.  A scant 12% of Democrats think it was worth going to war in Iraq, compared to 73% of Republicans who thought it was worth it.  Given the almost mirror opposite, why is Iraq such a good Democratic issue?  64% of Independents also think going to Iraq was not worth it.  The other question with the largest partisan disparity: 23% of Democrats see Iraq as part of the war on terrorism as opposed to 74% of Republicans.  On this issue, like virtually every other security issue in the poll, Independents line up substantially closer to Democrats.  So, there's two different realities for voters, I think you know which one I think is more accurate. More on that later….