Bill Manzi.com

In a hotly contested rematch of a Senate race six years ago Republican incumbent John Sununu trails former Governor Jeanne Shaheen by six points in the latest Rasmussen survey. From Rasmussen:

Democrat Jeanne Shaheen continues to hold a steady lead over incumbent John Sununu in New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate race. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds the challenger leading 52% to 46%.

Earlier in the month, Shaheen held a five-point advantage and she has been on top in nine of ten polls conducted this year. This is just the second time that Sununu has received more than 45% support all year. Any incumbent who polls below 50% is considered vulnerable.

The Democratic march towards sixty Senate seats continues, and this is a key race for both parties. With Obama poised to win N.H. Sununu has been put in the unenviable position of having to carry both Bush and McCain on his back. He is begining to show that strain. My prediction: Shaheen by five.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/player/wpniplayer_viral.swf?thisObj=fo413434&vid=102408-16v_title

There is nothing that gets conservative juices flowing like a post on Al Franken. Despite trailing Senator Norm Coleman from the begining Franken has now edged ahead in a recent University of Wisconsin poll. From the Post:

Just weeks ago, Coleman appeared to be headed for victory, one of a handful of Republicans expected to win in a tough year for the GOP. But then a bad economy turned grim, the public’s faith in Congress cratered, and support for Franken started to grow. The latest poll, a University of Wisconsin survey that came out Thursday, showed Franken ahead of Coleman 40 percent to 34 percent, his biggest lead of the race. Independent Dean Barkley was favored by 15 percent of those surveyed.

With the race tightening and the Democrats now having a realistic chance of hitting sixty votes in the Senate the alarm bells are going off in G.O.P. land. The United States Chamber of Commerce has moved aggressively on this race, pouring in millions to stop Franken. From the Post:

Officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fearful of a union-friendly Democratic Senate, have dubbed the race “ground zero” in the effort to stop a 60-seat majority. The chamber and its affiliates have spent more than $3 million on ads designed to scare voters about Franken and Democrats, according to sources on both sides.

Norm Coleman’s lead has evaporated along with the Bush Presidency and the McCain candidacy, as he battles tailwinds that are destroying the Republicans nationwide.

But Coleman is struggling to get that message through the anti-Republican mood among Minnesota voters, particularly since the financial markets collapsed and he supported the $700 billion rescue plan. Franken was opposed to the bailout and rails against it on the stump.

In conservative Glencoe, the type of town where Republicans need to do well to offset Democratic strength in cities, Coleman faced heated questions about the bailout. “If I lose this race, it’s because of the American economy and voting for a rescue package,” he said afterward.

At several stops Monday, Coleman did not mention his party’s presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain. A poll this week showed McCain trailing Sen. Barack Obama by almost 20 points in Minnesota. And the only sign of President Bush was a Franken staffer wearing a Bush mask outside a Coleman event in Redwood Falls in southwestern Minnesota, an ever-present attempt by the Democrat’s campaign to remind voters of Coleman’s once-close ties to the White House.

Naturally the money invested here is buying ads, and they are getting tough. Here posted is the latest exchange between Coleman and Franken. Could the first decade in the new century actually be “the Al Franken decade”? For conservatives this thought may be even worse than the idea of eight years of the Obama Administration.

Senator John McCain, seeing his hopes fade away, has tried to move away from President Bush as quickly as he can, even issuing his own critique of the Bush Administration. From MSNBC and from John McCain:

In an interview Thursday with The Washington Times, McCain spoke of Bush in tones bordering on contempt, ticking off a litany of what he said were the president’s failures.

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government — larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America — owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” McCain told the newspaper.

“We just let things get completely out of hand,” he said of the past eight years of Republican rule.

Friday, McCain extended the theme in an address at a campaign rally in Denver.

“We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: hoping for our luck to change at home and abroad,” he said. “We have to act. We need a new direction, and we have to fight for it.”

McCain’s comments seem very close to some of the blog postings here on this site that criticized President Bush, and that had strong rebuttals from some who now strongly support, strangely enough, John McCain. And the Democratic ticket jumped on McCain for his attempt to get away from President Bush, with Joe Biden mocking the attempt.

“John McCain is now attacking the Bush budget and Bush fiscal policies, which he voted for, I might add,” Biden said at a rally in Charleston, W.Va. “Folks, this is as crazy as, you know, Butch Cassidy attacking the Sundance Kid. I mean, that’s a team.”

Yes McCain and Bush have morphed into McBush, and McCain knows what the result will be because of it. But I would like to hear from the conservatives out there. Is the McCain criticism of Bush valid?

Ron Howard reprises his roles as Opie Taylor and Ritchie Cunningham in this endorsement video for Barack Obama. If Barney Fife makes an endorsement of Obama this thing is over!

http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf