Just as the return of the swallows to Mission San Juan Capistrano is a sure sign of spring, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s recent decision to put money down in a formerly long-shot Senate contest is a sure sign that the race has become winnable.

Polls show that former Democratic state representative Jim Martin has caught up with GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss in Georgia.  Chambliss, you will recall, ran one of the ugliest campaigns in history six years ago to defeat wounded Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland.

Georgia is a state where Barack Obama originally devoted campaign resources, but then backed away when things started to appear hopeless.  Now the Obama campaign is considering reentering the battle for the Peach State because polls show that Obama is closing the gap with John McCain. A CNN/Time poll conducted Oct. 11-14 had McCain ahead by only 51% – 47%.

Current polls show Martin and Chambliss tied, with the incumbent having a 4 – 1 fundraising advantage.  According to an October 14 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, however, Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has now put about half a million dollars into Georgia television ads for Martin as well as given cash to the state Democratic party for more ads.

For more on Georgia and other current polling, check out Council for a Livable World’s constantly updated list of polls:

Full polling data is here.

There are a number of developments in the past few days which may indicate that strategists in the national Republican party believe that the 2008 elections will be a Democratic landslide of historic proportions.  Rather than attempting to win any Democratic seats, Republicans are desperately trying to stem their losses.

Granted, studying campaign expenditures to try to determine electoral strategies can be a little like reading tea leaves to determine the future.  However, looking at how national campaign strategists decide to spend their limited resources can be a good way of determining which races they believe can win and which they believe they will lose.  In the case of the national Republican party this year, which has extremely limited resources, financial decisions may be more telling than usual.

So, what are these telling developments?

•    Under the headline GOP may ditch recruits to rescue incumbents Politico reported Tuesday that House Republicans have ceased funding some of their “prized recruits” in order to focus on incumbents.  The list of incumbents they consider endangered was a stunner for those of us who follow House races, a number of them were not on anybody’s list of close races.

•    Senate Republicans followed suit the next day, canceling their advertising in the Louisiana Senate race, the one Democratic Senate seat that was considered vulnerable this year.

•    Even some of those incumbents are getting ditched: The Hill reported today that the national Republican party is pulling out of Michigan’s 9th Congressional District, leaving embattled incumbent Rep. Joe Knollenberg to fend for himself.

•    Republicans may not be considering just House and Senate races as hopeless, they may be giving up on John McCain as well.  Politico also reported that the Republican National Committee is in triage and “considering tapping into a $5 million line of credit this week to aid an increasing number of vulnerable incumbents.”  What is striking is that Republicans would put this last minute cash infusion into Congressional races instead of using it to try to put McCain over the top.  The implication is that they believe McCain will lose and the better use of their money is to try to stop Democrats from getting a filibuster proof 60 vote majority in the Senate.

•    Picking up on this meme, election guru Stu Rothenberg ran an article in today’s Roll Call (subscription only) with several anonymous Republican strategists debating whether to “throw McCain under the bus” and publicly tell donors the Presidential race is lost and their best hope is to contribute in Senate and House races to try to stop an overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress.

Taken separately, these developments could be explained as tactical decisions unique to each individual race.  Taken together, however, they begin to paint a picture of a party not just in disarray, but in blind, panicked retreat and burning its bridges behind it.

 

The national Republican party is following the the McCain campaign’s lead and pulling all of its advertising out of Michigan’s 9th Congressional District.  These ads would have supported embattled Rep. Joe Knollenberg.  It is likely that Repu…

Below is a commentary I had published yesterday in Foreign Policy in Focus about defense budgets and the financial crisis.

Goodbye to Defense’s Gilded Age?
By Travis Sharp
Published in Foreign Policy in Focus on October 15, 2008

The recently passed financial bailout package has drawn the ire of citizens throughout the United States. Both conservatives and liberals have condemned Congress and the White House for rescuing Wall Street titans, who caused the economic death spiral in the first place, by transferring an enormous fiscal burden to middle- and working-class taxpayers. At a time when people are losing their homes and struggling to make ends meet, many Americans find the bailout’s $700 billion price tag to be simply outrageous.

What many Americans may not realize is that the United States is likely to spend $711 billion on national defense in the fiscal year that began on October 1 (assuming fiscal year 2009 war costs are $170 billion, an estimate provided by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates). You read that correctly: the United States will spend more on defense over the next 365 days than on the $700 bailout package.

More after the jump.

This graph compares estimated U.S. defense spending in fiscal year (FY) 2009 to the bailout, previous U.S. conflicts, and other federal spending priorities.

Experts have claimed for the past few years that U.S. defense spending, now at its highest inflation-adjusted level since World War II, will start to decline soon. This anticipated downturn has yet to materialize. Presented with war funding requests still labeled “emergency” — even after seven years of war — and motivated by a desire to be seen as pro-defense, lawmakers have been ready and willing to give the Department of Defense (DOD) everything it asks for and more.

With the United States suffering through economic conditions not seen since the Great Depression, however, the era of $700 billion annual defense budgets may soon be coming to an end. “Any crisis of this nature is going to affect – must affect – other federal spending,” former chief Pentagon budget official Tina Jonas said about the struggling economy in September. “You cannot look at defense by itself. It is a subset of our macro financial picture.” Secretary Gates added that “I certainly would expect [defense budget] growth to level off, and my guess would be we’ll be fortunate in the years immediately ahead…if we were able to stay flat with inflation.”

Now, this is not the first time the Bush administration has claimed that defense spending is going down. Lowballing future costs is the oldest trick in the Pentagon’s book. But when high-level officials in an administration as defense-happy (and deficit-careless) as George W. Bush’s speak so openly about potential defense budget cuts, it suggests that spending contractions may indeed loom, particularly with military operations in Iraq ostensibly planned to start winding down in the next 6-12 months.

A troubled economy is not the only threat to $700 billion per year defense budgets. Declining tax revenues and growing mandatory spending are also clouding the fiscal skies. The Bush administration’s tax cuts helped increase the gross national debt over 70 percent (approximately $4 trillion) since FY2001, forcing the government to spend more on debt-interest payments despite generating less tax revenue. Federal spending on both mandatory programs (like Social Security) and debt interest payments, if current trends hold, will consume two-thirds of government revenues by 2015, crowding out other spending priorities like education and housing assistance.

With a new administration and Congress set to assume power in January 2009, today’s economic storm provides an opportunity to make the hard choices that have been put off for too many years. The key question for policymakers today is whether current levels of defense spending reflect the appropriate federal budgetary priorities. Money spent on defense is money not spent on deficit reduction, infrastructure, or developing alternative sources of energy. If certain parts of the defense budget were pruned, such as funding for unnecessary Cold War weapons systems, the savings could be redirected toward other critical needs.

Opportunity cost and budgetary tradeoffs are real. A lot could be done with the $700 billion appropriated for the financial bailout. Even more could be accomplished by trimming the $711 billion flowing into the Pentagon over the next 365 days.

Travis Sharp is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and the military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., where he works on issues related to Congress and national security.

Chris Cilizza is far from being the only expert to predict a larger-than-expected pick up of Democratic seats in November. Out of 21 shifts in the predictions of four expert resources – the Cook Political Report, Congressional Quarterly, Larry Sabato’…