President Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and James Crowley share a beer on July 30. (White House photo)

Two weeks after President Obama said that Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” by arresting Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates for arguing with them inside his home, Republicans are still taking stock of their unexpected political gift.

A Pew Research poll released on July 30 found the president’s approval rating among white voters slipping seven points, from 53 percent to 46 percent, explicitly because of their disappointment in the Gates remarks. A CNN/Opinion Research poll released on August 4 found that six out of 10 white voters disagreed with the president’s remarks. A Quinnipiac poll released on August 6 found that white voters, by a 2-1 margin, believed that the president had “acted stupidly” in talking about Gates.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“He would have been a whole lot wiser to shut up,” said Roy Fletcher, a Republican strategist based in Baton Rouge, La. “He got really close to losing the image he has as a post-racial president. For a few days, the question for a lot of people became, ‘Wait a minute. Is he the president of the United States? Or is he just the president of minorities?’ And that was a really unfortunate thing.”

As the Gates saga finally fades from the news cycle–few pollsters or strategists reached by TWI thought it had lasting power, and one compared its short-lived nature to the frothy Gary Condit scandal of 2001–it’s left Republicans encouraged about their chances of whittling down the Democrats’ House and Senate majorities in 2010. The mini-controversy put into focus a fact about the 2009, 2010 and 2011 electorates that Democrats don’t enjoy talking about and Republicans don’t enjoy bragging about. They will be, as Fletcher put it, “older and whiter” than the electorate that put Obama and most Democrats on the Hill into office in 2008. As they try to regain statewide offices in this year’s New Jersey and Virginia elections, and as they look ahead to the 2010 midterms, GOP strategists are watching for opportunities to turn white swing voters against the Democrats, and to activate the conservative white voters who turned out sluggishly in Ohio and other 2008 swing states.

Doing that requires a gentle touch. Five days Obama made his remarks about Gates, and three days after he admitted that he “maligned” Sgt. James Crowley, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.)–a conservative member of the House GOP leadership who represents a district that voted for the president in 2008–introduced a resolution demanding an official presidential apology to the Cambridge police. McCotter got a burst of media attention for the resolution, but drew only mixed support from constituents and only three Republican co-sponsors in the House.

McCotter’s office declined to make the congressman available for an interview, suggesting that the issue had run its course and that the resolution had run aground. According to one House Republican staffer, it foundered because members worried that the situation was too racially charged. Only one of the GOP’s official party organizations, the National Republican Congressional Committee, nudged Democrats on the issue, with one press release directed at six Democratic members of the Massachusetts delegation in the House. The NRCC dropped the issue thereafter. By and large, the outrage took care of itself.

“Let’s face it,” said Michael Graham, a Boston radio host, in an interview with TWI. “During a national, televised press conference, the president had an Al Sharpton moment. In November 2008 he was not ‘our’ president for black voters and ‘their’ president for white voters. If he becomes, for middle-class white Americans, ‘their’ president, that’s devastating, that’s a killer.”

The problem for Democrats is that the white voters who might sour on the president because, in part, of the race issue are more likely to turn out to vote than the young and black voters who made up his margin of victory in 2008. On Tuesday, Public Policy Polling released a survey of Virginia’s 2009 statewide races which showed Democrats losing badly because of lagging enthusiasm from their base. Fifty-two percent of likely voters told the pollster that they had supported McCain in 2008 to only 41 percent who said that they’d supported Obama. In November, the state that gave Obama a solid 53-46 victory over McCain.

“Virginia has a racially polarized electorate,” explained Tom Jensen, a pollster at PPP. “In 2008, African-American voters made up 21 percent of the overall vote. If they fall back to 16 percent–that was the turnout level in 2004–that’s an overall 5.5 point drop for [Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Creigh Deeds right off the bat.” (African-American support for Democrats is so lopsided that it costs them more than 1 point of overall support for every point of the overall turnout decline.)

Republican and Democratic strategists alike are aware of numbers like those, and closely watching Virginia and New Jersey for some hint of how the electorate will behave without Barack Obama on the top on the ballot. Tellingly, the NRCC’s broad list of 70 possible House Democratic targets in 2010 includes, along with the expected bumper crop of “wave babies” elected in 2008, nine members of Congress elected before the Obama win who represent Southern districts with sizable numbers of black voters. A close look at the list, as well as other potential Republican targets, reveals dozens of seats where the historic African-American turnout of 2008 either pushed Democratic challengers over the finish line or gave extra job security for longtime incumbents.

Republicans and Democrats alike pointed to several seats in the South and the rust belt as ripe GOP targets in an electorate where, as Fletcher put it, “Obama nation doesn’t show up.” Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.), a conservative Democrat whose district is 44.5 percent African-American, sailed to a 2-1 re-election victory in 2008, but he’s on the NRCC target list for 2010. One Republican strategist suggested that Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), whose district is 47.5 percent African-American, could be taken down if white turnout stays strong but black turnout slumps. “People forget, that was a Bush district,” the strategist pointed out, suggesting that the easy re-election victory of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in a December 2008 runoff was a better screen for voter turnout than the November 2008 election, when Chambliss was held below 50 percent of the vote.

Strategists from both parties pointed out House districts from Connecticut to Alabama where the high African-American turnout of 2008 pulled Democrats over the top. African-American voters in Connecticut’s 4th district, who make up 10.9 percent of the vote, helped elect Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) In Maryland’s 1st district, the 11.2 percent African-American population helped Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.) to an upset victory. “[Tom] Perriello and [Glenn] Nye are gone,” mused one pessimistic Democratic strategist in Virginia, referring to Democrats elected last year in districts with African-American populations of 21.4 percent and 23.9 percent respectively.

The Republican opportunity extends to Senate races where troubled incumbents or conservative candidates in states that voted for Obama may contend with a more favorable electorate. “Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would be in a lot of trouble if Barack Obama was at the top of the ballot,” said PPP’s Jensen, referring to two states where African-Americans made up more than 29 percent and 23 percent of the vote in 2008.

Fletcher and other strategists were confident that an Obama backlash was brewing even if race was removed from the equation. The white senior citizens who are turning against the president are doing so because of worries about health care. Conservatives were not ready to bet on Obama further weakening white support for Democrats with another Gates-style gaffe. “The lock’s been jiggled, but the door hasn’t been broken down,” said Graham, who suggested that the Department of Justice’s decision to drop a case against the radical New Black Panther Party might be hurting white support for Obama if it got more coverage.

But some strategists were ready to declare the GOP’s demographic advantage. Fletcher pointed to a July 20 study of Census data that crunched numbers from 2008 and found that, while minority voter turnout surged, overall turnout declined. Many conservative voters white voters simply didn’t turn out. One example of the decline? Barack Obama beat John McCain in Ohio by 258,897 votes, but he only won 73,624 more votes than George W. Bush in his 2004 run against John Kerry.

“Three to four percent of the white vote didn’t come out last time,” said Fletcher. “They’re coming out this time.”

Gates went on the attack against Pentagon “business as usual” yesterday:

“If we can’t get this right, what on earth can we get right?” Mr. Gates said in an acerbic, sometimes withering speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. “It is time to draw the line on doing defense business as usual.” From his point of view, that means overbuying weapons for wars the nation is unlikely to fight.

Parts of the plane are built in more 40 states, so it’s no surprise that even progressive senators from Massachusetts like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry don’t want to close the production line during a massive recession. What’s noteworthy is that Lockheed Martin, the principal F-22 manufacturer, doesn’t appear to be fighting the cut so hard. Lockheed also has a huge piece of the Joint Strike Fighter, Gates’ preferred replacement (to oversimplify things a bit) for the F-22, so it makes money either way. More Gates:

[T]he F-22, designed for cold-war aerial combat, has become the poster plane for each side. Mr. Gates argued to the economic club that it was a “niche, silver-bullet solution” for only a few potential situations, specifically “the defeat of a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet,” and that the cheaper F-35, which is to start production in 2012, is a more versatile fighter. The F-22’s supporters say it not only provides jobs but also ensures American dominance of the skies.

Anyway: the vote on the F-22 is expected to come soon.

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Gates didn’t mind throwing his own elbows. The 187 number “was based on input from combatant commanders who are actually going to have” to use the planes in combat, and “discussion with the Air Force leadership.” His budget increases the buys for unmanned aerial vehicles so that neither the F-22 nor the F-35 will be “the only aircraft in the attack air arsenal,” as the “only defense surf-air-missiles is not something that has a pilot in it.” And right now, the United States has 1000 “fifth-generation aircraft” compared to China’s 300, a gap that “gets even bigger” when projecting out to 2025.  The idea that a 700-plane lead over China isn’t sufficient air dominance “seems to me to be unrealistic.” Also, the “first training squadron for the F-35 at Elgin Air Force Base” is on track for 2011. Aside from that, Gates thinks Chambliss’ criticisms have merit.

Chambliss is one thing, though, and Schwartz is another. The way Chambliss framed his interactions with the Air Force chief — they’ve been exchanging letters and having private meetings, and Schwartz will testify in the near future on the defense budget — made it sound like Schwartz is unimpressed with Gates’ instruction that “I don’t want to see any guerrilla warfare on these programs.” It’s a thin line between budget subterfuge on the Hill and an honest military assessment for a need for expanding the F-22. Also worth remembering is that Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said last month that the service chiefs and the combatant commanders  “uniformly endorsed the termination of the F-22 at the number we all agreed on, the 187 [planes] and the transition to the F-35.” If Chambliss is presenting Schwartz’s position correctly — and Schwartz grudgingly endorsed the cap in an op-ed recently — that doesn’t sound particularly true.

Here’s Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), back in full effect. He wants to know about prosecutions for interrogators, which CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta rejected yesterday.

“My view is whether you agree or disagree with the opinions issued by the Attorney General [in the Bush administration] with regard to interrogation methods, the CIA operated according to those views,” he reiterated. “You did your job pursuant to the law as provided by that administration … We’ve got to move forward to deal with the challenges for here on out.” So there’s that.

Now Chambliss asks about Clinton-era National Intelligence Estimates on terrorism, when Panetta was chief of staff. “Were you involved in discussions relative to the issues pointed out in those NIEs?… What preparations or actions” did he take if so relevant to those “significant warnings?”

Panetta says he was only there for one of those NIEs. “Terrorism was one of the major priorities that was identified within the administration. The bombings that took place [in 1993] and the rising threat … became a major focus … Tony Lake and Sandy Berger constantly reminded the president of that,” he said, and talked about Richard Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism czar, doing the same. “I can assure you within the administration there was a great deal of attention to the issue of terrorism.”

And with that Chambliss yields. Weird that he thought he’d trip Panetta up on that. After all, the Clinton administration never received an intelligence product as florid as “Bin Laden Determined To Attack In The U.S.”

Bond spent much of his time at the hearing yesterday trying to bait Panetta into walking back President Obama’s bans on torture and getting Panetta to say that the Clinton administration committed as many human rights abuses as the Bush administration. During his final series of questions, Bond succeeded in getting Panetta to admit he hadn’t seen with his own eyes people getting tortured as the result of extraordinary rendition, and had only read about how the process resulted in torture from the numerous studies, first-person accounts and books exploring it. Bond crowed that Panetta wasn’t, in fact, issuing a “blanket statement” declaring extraordinary rendition — the process by which the CIA kidnaps a terrorism suspect and gives them over to another security service, usually one skilled in the arts of torture — to result in 100 percent guaranteed USDA-certified torture.

Now check out the questions Bond asked Panetta to answer before the hearing. They’re hosted on the committee’s Web page devoted to yesterday’s hearing. All of them have to do with fees Panetta earned on the lecture circuit. (The source for the first question is an article in something called the “Huffington Riposte,” LOL.) Here’s a sample. All answers are for some reason written in the third person:

Has EduCap or the Academy of Achievement donated any funds to the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute in the previous 4 years, including 2008?

To the best of his recollection, the only donations by the Reynolds-affiliated entities were the ones previously disclosed to the Committee. He does not recall any donations from EduCap or Academy of Achievement. He does not recall any donations for less than $5,000 from these entities. There were not donations from any Reynolds-affiliated entities in 2008. (Note: He is relying on his recollection on these questions because the institute does not maintain an easily-assembled list of donations below the $5,000 level, per our previous discussions with Committee staff.)

If the hearing this morning continues down this road, it’s sure to get at the very heart of what it takes to lead the intelligence community at a time of war.

Keeping the production line of this model aerospace program open currently requires no additional taxpayer dollars, and is not a rescue or bailout. Rather, it will allow us to maintain a healthy program that delivers considerable economic benefit while providing our Air Force with appropriate numbers of the best fighter aircraft ever made. Production of this aircraft is in jeopardy—and with it more than 95,000 American jobs, over $12 billion in national economic activity, and the superiority of America’s Air Force.

I don’t know who’s paying for the website, but Lockheed Martin, the main manufacturer of the F-22, is a safe bet. Chambliss certainly knew to cite the “95,000 American jobs” talking point to Gates yesterday. I note as well that Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a former Lockheed Martin official, recently wrote along the same lines, specifically urging Congress and the Pentagon to “maintain F-22 production” as part of a “defense stimulus.” Watch this argument expand in the coming weeks.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) first asked whether there were “shovel ready” defense projects that should be included in the stimulus, “things we have to spend money on anyway.” Gates replied that he had submitted some thoughts to the White House after President Obama solicited them from him. These would be projects like constructing or renovating “military hospitals, clinics, barracks and childcare centers,” Gates said.

It wasn’t really enough for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). Chambliss brought up the Air Force’s notoriously wasteful F-22 Raptor fighter jet, “just as an example” — charitable of him! — and said that “if we shut down that line, we’re talking about a loss of 95,000 jobs.” (Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-22, has a facility in Marietta, Ga., that assembles the jet’s forward fusillage.) He argued that “if we truly want to stimulate the economy, there’s no better place to do that than defense spending.” So much for health care, green jobs, infrastructure, etc.

Gates was pretty noncommittal. The facilities-construction jobs were the ones he emphasized in terms of stimulus-related defense spending. But when the defense budget comes forward in April, this is definitely something to look out for.

Sen. John McCain visited the state a few weeks ago to stump for Chambliss, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined the effort today:

In the months and the years ahead in Washington and in every state capital, we must build our case for reform of government with actions and not just words. And thankfully, Saxby has built a record of real achievement in service to his state and to his country. And that’s exactly the kind of man we need in Washington.

Presumedly, Palin was referring to actions other than Chambliss equating a Vietnam War hero with Osama bin Laden, the multiple deferments that kept himself from that war, or his more recent defense of a sugar-company (which also happens to be a large campaign contributor) following a deadly refinery fire.

But of course there’s much more at stake here than just Chambliss’s career.

In the wake of November’s elections, Democrats control 58 Senate seats, including those held by the two independents who caucus with Democrats. If they could pull the Georgia seat from Chambliss, Democrats would be that much closer to a filibuster-proof 60-member majority. (Minnesota, which is in the middle of recounting votes after a tight Senate race, could be no. 60).

Indeed, Chambliss, Palin and other Republicans are framing the Georgia election as a kind-of last stand against a single-party dictatorship.

“We need Saxby because we need checks and balances in Washington,” Palin said. “And we will not have that if Saxby is not reelected, Georgia.”

Chambliss has a lead of 3-5 percent in the polls, according to The L.A. Times. Thirty hours from now we’ll know how accurate they were.

Facing a runoff election in a few weeks — and recently hit with a subpoena to testify about his ties to the sugar company whose refinery exploded in February, killing 14 — the Georgia Republican has turned his frustration on the media, giving a light shove to a cameraman yesterday who appears to get to close to the embattled senator.

The Democrats are hoping to make the subpoena (not to mention the shove) an issue in Chambliss’s Dec. 2 runoff against Democratic challenger Jim Martin — which, by the way, can’t come quickly enough.

Can someone please make this election season end?

You know the one: It used images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to suggest that his opponent at the time, Sen. Max Cleland (D), was soft on terrorism because he hadn’t rubber-stamped several of President George W. Bush’s homeland security wishes.

Nevermind that Cleland was a Vietnam vet who’d lost three limbs in the war, while Chambliss steered clear of the conflict via five school deferments — the challenger decided to make the contest one of patriotic duty.

From the ad:

As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead. He says he supports President Bush at every opportunity. But that’s not the truth. Since July, Max Cleland has voted against the president’s vital homeland security efforts 11 times. Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading.

In an interview with MS-NBC last week, Chambliss called the ad “truthful in every way.”

“Max Cleland was trying to join himself at the hip with George Bush at that point in time — ran ad after ad showing the two of them together, and saying that he was supporting George Bush,” Chambliss said. “He couldn’t dispute it because he knew that it was true.”

Aside from the well-discussed inanity of equating a war hero with the most notorious terrorists of the day, it’s sure strange to think that there was ever a time when ties to Bush could be beneficial.