Hillary’s presidential poll numbers at Rasmussen are at a low:

…just 27% of Americans say they would definitely vote for the former first lady while 43% would definitely vote against. Still, 59% of Americans believe it is somewhat or very likely that she will be the Democrat’s nominee in 2008.

Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.

This is a microcosm of the Democrats’ problem. Their base won’t allow them to nominate anyone who can win a general election, whether Hillary (who is a powerhouse of the party but politically unappealing to much of the electorate) or someone who will have to tack too far left to win the nomination to find their way back to the center in the fall.

Even brobdingnagian. Lileks comments on the latest federal budget:

You can expect the news stories to fasten on that 5.5 percent cut, since the media seem to operate with three unspoken and largely unexamined assumptions: We don’t spend enough on education; conservatives don’t want to spend anything on education anyway since it leads to godless rational beliefs like “the Earth is round”; and a reduction in the overall rate of increase is tantamount to a reduction in funds.

Really? If you find two $5 bills and lose one, are you $5 ahead or $5 behind? The latter, if you work in Washington.

A reduction in the projected rate of growth is always a cut. Note the headlines about the `07 proposals: “Bush’s $2.77 Trillion Budget Plan Calls for Medicare Cuts,” said The New York Times. The Washington Post had the same idea, and graciously upped the budget total: “Bush’s $2.8T Budget Proposal Cuts Domestic Programs.”

To which Democrats say: But of course. To which Republicans say: If only.

Conservatives will still, for the most part, vote Republican, even if they weep and rend their garments before checking off “R.” Why? Because they see Democrats as the ones more likely to tax everything that isn’t nailed down, levy “gravity user fees” for things that are, take away private health care, strangle school choice and want SpecOps to get a warrant before sabotaging Iranian nuke factories.

There are a lot of dim bulbs in the Senate, and there’s a lot of competition for the dimmest (Patty Murray, Babs Boxer, Jim Jeffords, Susan Collins come immediately to mind, and I’m sure that there are others), but my impression from every interview with him that I’ve ever heard is that Lincoln Chafee is not qualified (in Jonah Goldberg’s famous quip) to be a spell checker in an M&M factory. The Conways have a roundup of his political prospects this fall, including some other oatmeal-brained commentary from him:

Laffey described Chafee’s views on the region as “two standard deviations outside of American and Rhode Island thought.” In an effort to make the point, he quoted Chafee’s own words questioning the legitimacy of what the senator termed American “gripes” with Iran’s nuclear program…Chafee, he said, “doesn’t get it at all” that “there are some really bad people in the world.”

They’re upset that the National Republican Senatorial Committee continues to support him against the much more conservative Laffey, presumably on the assumption that he’s the only Republican (to the infinitesimal degree that he is) that can win Rhode Island. But here’s where the dim bulbedness comes into play. According to them, if even with the support of the NRSC, he loses the nomination, he’ll run as an independent.

But that would seem to me to result in a Republican win, because an independent (and liberal) Chafee would split the liberal vote with the Democrat candidate, whereas the Republicans would coalesce around Laffey. So this really is a fight worth waging, and it not only doesn’t necessarily risk a Senate seat for Republicans, but it might be an opportunity to replace Chafee with a real Republican, and provide a lesson to the other RINOs.

He should be. John Bolton has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. By a Swede.