Inside Politics

Cash advantage

“The president’s fund-raising sure helps,” U.S. News & World Report reports in its White House Week column.

“Republicans in key congressional districts have now accumulated a big cash advantage over their Democratic rivals. Sources says that House Republican incumbents on the party’s endangered list each have an average of $200,000 more on hand than their opponents,” the magazine said.

“In the past, that kind of cash advantage has meant victory for more than 90 percent of candidates. Another good sign for the GOP: some of the most endangered Republican incumbents appear to be gaining momentum in their campaigns, according to GOP surveys.”

Coming home

“If you have any doubts about the confusion of the Democrats, just look at the party’s midterm strategy,” Mark Halperin writes in the New York Times.

“On the one hand, Democrats are reluctant to push for liberal policies that would motivate their base. But the core of their enunciated message — both vowing to stop the president’s right-wing policies and blurring their differences with Republicans on highly charged issues — has in recent elections been a recipe for defeat. Such equivocation is the kind of themeless pudding that does not match up well with the conviction of the White House message and is uninspiring to both the Democrats’ base and the center,” said Mr. Halperin, who is the political director of ABC News and co-author of “The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.”

“For months, the president was in severe political peril, with approval ratings regularly hovering around 30 percent, in large measure because he was missing the support of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that is essential to his majority. Despite conservative disaffection with the White House over the past year on issues like spending (and even, in some cases, on Iraq), the latest polls show the GOP base is coming home — and just in time. Base support is headed toward 90 percent, just about where it was before the 2002 and 2004 elections.”

Ashcroft book

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is to publish a memoir of his time in office, lashing critics of the Bush administration’s strategy in the war on terror.

Advance copies of “Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice,” which is to be published this week, were not available, but one person close to Mr. Ashcroft told Shaun Waterman of United Press International that he “hits out hard at critics of the administration” and its war on terror.

He has particularly harsh words for some of the members of the September 11 commission, especially Democratic former Justice Department senior official Jamie Gorelick, the source says.

The publisher’s blurb says Mr. Ashcroft’s position as the administration’s most senior law-enforcement official gave him “a uniquely comprehensive — and uniquely chilling — view of the threats to American security,” adding that Mr. Ashcroft discusses “the enactment and defense of the Patriot Act, the Robert Hansen spy scandal … and the recently discovered domestic surveillance program authorized by President Bush.”

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