Inside the Beltway

Crowns are out

These days, you never know a crown prince when you see one.

A White House pool reporter who accompanied President Bush to Denmark’s Fredensborg Palace, a French baroque structure built by King Frederick IVin the 1720s, saw fit to observe:

“Among the onlookers outside the palace was a young man wearing black jeans cut off at mid-calf, a striped green polo shirt and suede moccasins. He snapped photos as the president’s motorcade left the estate. Our bus driver, a Dane, identified him as Crown Prince Frederik.”

Poll crazy

On the heels of President Bush declaring yesterday that too much emphasis is put on political polling, Democratic strategists James Carville and Stan Greenberg released a poll they say supports the belief that “the Republican revolution, deeply entrenched in Washington, has lost its hold on the American people, who are looking for change.”

“All the moorings have been loosened: Iraq, Bush’s frontline in the war on terrorism, is deeply unpopular; Bush’s economy, led by tax cuts, is seen to leave most Americans stuck with limited opportunities; his supporters’ partisanship and religious zealotry, most think, have gone miles too far; and his efforts to ‘reform’ the New Deal welfare state, Social Security privatization, are supported by only a third of the country,” the pair of strategists writes.

They cite three Democracy Corps surveys taken in three months, showing only 41 percent of the country wants to continue on Mr. Bush’s course.

While in Denmark yesterday, Mr. Bush commented that too many people “chase opinion polls.”

“I don’t know if you poll this much in Denmark,” Mr. Bush mentioned to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. “We poll way too much in America, seems like to me.”

Hired help

The Legal Affairs Council is calling on conservative groups to stay home and not spend their money if President Bush appoints “a moderate or judge of questionable commitment” to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the Supreme Court.

The right-wing group goes so far as to state that “conservatives are treated like the hired help by most Republican presidential candidates, on the theory that conservatives have nowhere else to go and would not want to see a Democrat like Al Gore elected instead of a Republican president.

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