At least according to a Newsweek poll:

A new poll from Newsweek has some interesting data on Hillary Clinton’s electability. According to the poll, Hillary beats John McCain 50 to 43 percent, squeaks by Rudy Giuliani 48 to 47 percent and trounces Mitt Romney, 58 to 32 percent. Her presumptive rival, Barack Obama, narrowly loses to McCain and Giuliani but thumps Romney as well, 55 to 25 percent.

That said, Hillary’s lead over McCain is interesting because of what it says about him. In previous polls the Senator from Arizona has handily defeated his Democratic opponents. But in recent months his numbers have begun to fall. Among independent voters, he’s slipped 15 points since March.

Could the McCain-Bush Iraq plan be dragging him down?

I know that polls this far out don’t mean much. However, as the article notes, the most important thing about this poll is when candidates lose support. For someone as well know as John McCain, losing 15 points in less than a year in public opinion means they aren’t agreeing with you on something.

This could also be the American people waking up to McCain’s rightward turn to lick the heels of the radical Christian right. The old Maverick McCain would have never given the commencement speech at liberty University, and Americans hate phony pandering. A man willing to sell his soul to get elected is a truly unseemly sight.

The Hotline has the list of John McCain’s leaders for his New York, Connecticut and New Jersey finance teams.:

Ken Abramowitz	Russ Gerson	Andrew Malik
Randy Altschuler	Howard Gittis	Georgette Mosbacher
Michael Ashner	Michael Glassner	John Myers
Kendrick Ashton	Steve Goldberg	Joseph J. Plumeri
Mark Broxmeyer	Sid Goodfriend	Scott Rechler
Bob Caruso	Dan Hebert	Ted Roosevelt, IV
Ben Chouake	Gary Holloway	Richard Rosenbaum
Harry Clark	Woody Johnson	Joe Schmuckler
Mayree Clark	Munr Kazmir	Barbara Sobel
Peter Cohen	Dean Kehler	Evan Stewart
Edward Cox	David Knott	Linda Tavlarios
Ray Dalio	Richard Kogan	Wayne Tuan
Patrick Durkin	Henry Kravis	Thomas E. Tuft
Anne Estabrook	Jerry Leamon	Barry West
Laurance Gay	Alain Lebec	Gordon Whiting
Peter Georgiopoulos	Leah Lebec	Laurence Zuriff
Andy Gershon	John Lehman

As the Hotline notes, the likely motivation behind releasing this list is to scare away Giuliani’s donor base. Will it work? We’ll know in a few months.

McCain mentioned his plan for throwing an additional 30,000 troops into the Iraq quagmire might be unpopoluar with the American people. Yep:

Nearly three-quarters said Bush administration policy needs a complete overhaul or major changes. But only 11 percent of those polled backed calls to send more American troops to Iraq, as President Bush is said to be considering.

Who ever said running for President of the United States was a popularity contest anyway?

Courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

POWELL: Let’s be clear about something else, Bob, that gets a little confusing. There are really no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you about that because… do we have the troops? You seem to be suggesting that we don’t.

POWELL: I’m suggesting that what general Shoemaker said the other day before a committee looking at the reserve and national guard, That the active army is about broken. General Shoemaker is absolutely right. All of my contacts within the army suggest that the army has a serious problem in the active force.

Check out the video.

Nothing raises morale like extending soldier’s tours of duty…

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson this morning ripped into the “McCain-Bush Way Forward in Iraq” saying:

“The leading advocate for escalating the war is Senator John McCain. I have served with John in Congress and I respect him. But John McCain is wrong, dead wrong to think that we can solve Iraq’s political crisis through military escalation.”

“There are no quick or easy answers to the crisis in Iraq. Our choices are between bad options and worse ones. Some prefer military escalation. Some choose staying the course. These options are illusions. The only realistic choice we have is to stand down militarily and let the Iraqis stand up and face the political crisis which only they can resolve.”

“The leading advocate for escalating the war is Senator John McCain.” It is hard to make it clearer. If / when Bush increases troop strength in Iraq, McCain’s chances for being President will go down the drain along with the country of Iraq.

The first in a series profiling the McCain 2008 Finance Committee, today’s money man is Donald Bren, chairman of the board of directors of The Irvine Company.

• As you would expect, the man is extremely wealthy. According to Forbes Magazine, Bren is the 104th richest person in the world with a net worth of 5.7 billion dollars.
• A Marine Corps veteran, Bren started building houses and worked his way up to a real estate empire.
• Over the last three election cycles (2002, 2004, 2006) Bren has donated $327,450 to Federal candidates and committees. Mostly republican causes, with a little more than $300,000 of that going to the RNC.
• Bren is known as a California Money Man, his rolodex is obviously wide ranging and he can command hundred of thousands of dollars in contributions quite easily.

Anyone else know anything about Donald Bren that I should know about?

Update: The Orange County Business Journal reports that Donald Bren cast his lot with McCain after being approached by both Giuliani and Romney.

It seems Senator John McCain only knows how to apply the American Military force. Now he is calling for more troops in Afghanistan, albeit less forcefully than his demand for more troops in Iraq:

Washington will send more troops to Afghanistan “if it’s necessary,” U.S. Senator John McCain said Saturday using measured words, as he urged increased training for Afghan security forces and the movement of European troops to the country’s insurgency-plagued south.

Asked if the U.S. would send more troops to Afghanistan, McCain responded, “The British have said that they will be sending additional troops, taking troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan.

“If it’s necessary, we will, and I’m sure we would be agreeable, but the focus here is more on training the Afghan National Army and the police, as opposed to the increased U.S. troop presence.”

Where are the additional troops for the McCain-Bush Iraq and Afghanistan Plan going to come from? More guard and reserve troops kept longer from their families and jobs? Longer deployments?

Angry, unstable St. John McCain needs to re-assess what the American people want. Support for the war is in the dumps and families are being torn apart by constant redeployments.

But if he really wants to hitch his presidential horse to Bush’s Iraq debacle, it can only benefit the Democratic candidate in 2008.

Trouble for McCain is brewing, and as usual Digby is remarkably prescient. He wrote last Tuesday:

[McCain’s] rationale for winning in 2008 hinges on his calling for more troops and the Bush administration not listening. (Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 08 must run against both Bush and the Democrats.)

McCain made a tactical error when he asked for a specific number recently. If they give him what he wants and it fails, which it will, his rabid support for the war becomes a huge liability.

Now comes the Saturday edition of the New York Times:

Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major “surge” in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said Friday.

Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.

McCain must be sweating bullets. If Bush decides to add troops, the strategy going forward in Iraq will be known as the McCain Doctrine. The Senator never thought Bush would actually go through with it.

For Bush, this presents an excellent opportunity to work on his legacy. Go with war hero John McCain’s plan for Iraq and it suddenly becomes his problem. Bush gets good press for trying something new, and John McCain watches his presidential hopes go down the drain.

What can McCain do now? One option would be to escalate the number of troops and add other stipulations that he could later claim were the reasons for failure. Look for him to do that on Sunday with the morning talk shows. To avoid having Iraq hung around his neck like a rotten albatross, he needs to move quickly.

The real question that is left unanswered in the NYT piece is the rationale the Bush administration has for throwing another 20,000 - 30,000 troops into the quagmire. The generals have come out against it, in fact the article even mentions Abizaid’s belief that a troop surge could easily make the situation worse. So why do it?

What do you think?

McCain news from around the web:

• McCain continues to insist the United States send 30,000 more troops to Iraq. Besides the obvious question about where the troops are going to come from, just think about how much more the Iraqi’s would love and respect us with an additional 30,000 troops in their backyard.
• McCain annouces list of big money fund-raisers. Businesses represented include: New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Univsion. The Straight Talk Express seems to be parked on Wall Street.
• Think Progress chimes in with their denunciation of McCain’s plan to regulate the internet and stifle small blogs and websites.

Media Matters has a nice roundup of Terry (racist crook) Nelson. Not much that wasn’t mentioned here in the earlier post, but they do have this nice tidbit about Nelson and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth:

Nelson’s consulting firm, Crosslink Strategy Group, counts Chris LaCivita among its employees. While working for a separate Republican strategy firm in 2004, LaCivita was a paid consultant and media adviser to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who launched a smear campaign against Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) based on lies, factual distortions, and baseless attacks on Kerry’s Vietnam War record and personal life.

At the time, McCain called the Swift Boat Veterans’ campaign “dishonest and dishonorable.”

Terry Nelson could be a huge headache for the McCain campaign down the road. His resume literally reads like a list of recent GOP dirty tricks and sleazy ideas. By hiring Nelson, McCain clearly states he cares more about winning than his integrity.