Atrios...revealed !!

Needless to say, I disagree with the President's call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages and civil unions. I have nothing to add to what has been so eloquently stated this morning by Andrew Sullivan, except to pray that Senators Kerry and Edwards do the right thing on this issue, even if it means four more years of W. In the end, it is not a political position, it is a point of decency.

For whatever reason, I don't think John Edwards' inability to answer a question on the foreign corporate tax credit and its relation to the European Union is going to be a big issue come Super Tuesday. Reporters seem to think that playing "Stump the Candidate" is an effective way to demonstrate how much more learned they are than the people running for office, so last time we had some smartass reporter questioning candidate Bush on who the President of Taiwan was, and now we have this story.

It is an article of faith that one of the more significant after-effects of 9-11 has been the creation of a substantial segment of former liberals whose backing of the President in the "War on Terror" will realign American politics into the foreseeable future. This group, disproportionately represented in the blogosphere, sees Bush as a modern-day combination Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, galvanizing the forces of freedom in a twilight struggle against Islamofascism, and they uncritically supported the decision to go to war with Iraq, no matter what the current rationale happened to be. The Democrats, with their support of such trivialities as "international law", were derided as unserious, doomed to a certain landslide defeat in November 2004.

Well, as it turns out, the more important segment of the voting public, albeit one that hasn't had the gumption to set up their own vanity sites with Blogger yet, are the voters who cast their lot with George Bush in 2000, and who have now gotten a case of buyer's remorse. Up to eleven percent of the people who voted for Bush last time now say they will pass on the G.O.P. this time, as opposed to only five percent who now regret their vote for Al Gore in the last election. The key issues: anger over the decision to go to war in Iraq, and concern over the President's economic priorities. In particular, independents now overwhelmingly disapprove of Bush's performance as President. [link via CalPundit]