Walter Shapiro, Salon.com's Washington Bureau Chief, has a rather insightful piece out today. The title of it is a question:  "Is 2008 a sui generis election?" (If Latin's not your strong suit, sui generis means, paraphrasing the definition,  "...unique to itself." ) Shapiro continues within his commentary to come to the conclusion that the answer--in relation to the 2008 election--is: "Not as much as one would think."

I would agree with Shapiro's assessment of this race now, as well. As we enter into the last six weeks of the election season, it's beginning to look a lot more like many tight races of the past, than something one would label: "sui generis."

There's more...

I've been reading through The Architect, and about halfway now, just getting into the Dowd part (which I find much more compelling for why Republicans win lately) then their genius (which is lacking) at the political-issue environments that Rove & Bush create, and come across Walter Shapiro's latest, Bush's brain found lacking:

For those who insist on finding the pivotal moment when Rove reshaped Bush into the president we all know and about 35 percent of the voters love, it probably dates back to January 2001, days before the Bush inaugural. As two more new books (significantly, neither of them is "The Architect") convincingly argue, the eureka moment came as Bush pollster Matt Dowd sat hunched over a computer screen in Austin, Texas, matching his survey data with the 2000 election returns.

According to "Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business, and Religious Leaders Connect With the New American Community," a collaboration among Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, former AP reporter Ron Fournier and Dowd himself, the Bush pollster discovered that the traditional swing voter was fast becoming an endangered species as only 7 percent of the electorate in 2004 had voted independently of party loyalties. The book describes the epiphany: "Dowd banged out an e-mail to the longtime Bush strategist Karl Rove, asking for a meeting in Washington: It's time for a different strategy." The next scene takes place in Rove's new office on the second floor of the White House as Dowd handed him the data: "Rove instantly recognized the significance of the numbers. 'Really,' he said, grabbing the sheet from Dowd's hands, his voice rising with excitement. 'Man, this is a fundamental change.'"

What is going on here beyond the weird notion that contemporary political drama is built around the electric excitement of two Republican statistics geeks (Rove and Dowd) analyzing the latest polling data?

In "Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power," veteran political reporter Tom Edsall explains the significance of this apparent shift in the tectonic plates. If Dowd's data was right and there no longer is a large floating block of unaligned moderate voters, then the way that the Republicans can consistently win elections is by mobilizing their conservative base. Edsall recalls that "while running for president in 1999-2000, Bush had explicitly reached out to the center-left, a strategy so antithetical to that of his 2004 campaign."

In all likelihood, Bush had always intended to shed his 2000 campaign camouflage and govern, in sharp contrast to his father, as an unswerving conservative. But Rove, whose origins in the direct-mail fundraising business had always given his politics a hard-sell ideological edge, certainly provided Bush with a strategic rationale to follow his red-state heart. What Rove's analysis predicted was that Bush would fare much better politically as a divider than a uniter.

There's more...