Democrats, and President Obama in particular, have two opportunities to show some leadership right now, which come conveniently right before an election. The first of these opportunities is on the growing foreclosure crisis. The second is on the recent federal judge's ruling that will end the military's ability to enforce the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy of excluding openly gay people from serving in the military. Democrats should use both of these opportunities as a chance to show some real leadership, and President Obama should be out in front leading this effort.

But I have to admit that the chances of this actually happening are questionable, at best. Which is a shame, really.

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The Nobel Prize committee does not hand out a prize for obstructionism in government. But if they did, Republican Senator Richard Shelby would certainly be the odds-on favorite to win it this year. Shelby is currently continuing to block Peter Diamond, President Obama's nominee to the Federal Reserve, from getting that "up or down vote" Republicans held so sacred not so long ago. According to Shelby, Diamond is not sufficiently qualified to serve on the Fed's board. Today, it was announced that Diamond had won this year's Nobel Prize for economics.

That's right -- according to Republicans, the winner of the Nobel in economics is somehow not qualified to hold a government job helping to run the economy. Maybe it's all tied to their hatred of "elitism," but at this point it's hard to tell what Republicans are thinking, I have to admit.

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We're going to start off with a warning this week: this preamble section is going to be mostly shameless self-promotion and one cheap inside joke. If that sort of egotism bores the pants off you, then you really shouldn't read it at work because walking around with no pants on is likely to get you fired (well, depending on where you work, of course). Ahem. In any case, you have been warned. Skip ahead to the awards sections if you'd like, I won't mind.

We'll start out with the cheap joke, to get it out of the way. I wrote on Wednesday about a question that is becoming more pronounced, if the current polling is to be believed: "If California Legalizes Marijuana, How Will Obama React?"  What I didn't include in the article, because I was trying for at least "semi-serious," was the totally-unrelated story which came out the same day. I even refrained from mentioning it when a commenter made a joke about what "joint" sessions of Congress would be like if Proposition 19 passes, I'll have you know. But it's Friday, so our seriousness bar is (as always) quite a bit lower. So here you go: in what has to be a completely unrelated item, the House announced that it has now passed a total of 420 bills that the Senate has failed to act upon. For those who just got the joke, you're welcome.

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President Obama, for only the second time in his presidency, is about to veto a bill. And since the first veto was more of a technicality than actually a checks-and-balances action between the federal government's branches, this can honestly be said to be Obama's first true veto. Which makes it interesting, and newsworthy. And the politics involved are just as interesting, because the White House may be signaling a number of things for the immediate future.

Obama is vetoing a fairly obscure change in the law, which sped through the Senate suspiciously fast at the last minute before they adjourned. Because Obama will use the "pocket veto," Congress is likely going to have to start all over again with the bill (and fix the problems), and will not even have the chance to override the president.

But it's the politics of it all which are so interesting. Salon points out some of these implications, after noting the conspicuous language in the White House press release:

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California will vote in a few weeks on Proposition 19, which would (if it passes) effectively legalize the recreational use of marijuana in the state. Chances of it passing seem to be growing, if you'll excuse the metaphor, like a weed. Right now, the poll numbers for Proposition 19 are better than the numbers for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown or Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer against their respective Republican opponents, for instance. Meaning California could become a "test case" state in challenging federal laws on the matter. But what would this mean, practically? Well, a lot of it hinges on how President Barack Obama reacts. Which is impossible to say right now, but at least we can examine the possibilities, now that California legalizing marijuana seems to have moved from the "pipe dream" category (sorry about that, I couldn't resist) to a very real political possibility, if the polling trend continues.

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The House Republicans' "Pledge To America" document, released last week with much ballyhoo, appears to not be quite the rallying cry they had hoped for. It seems that very few Republican candidates for office are embracing the Pledge as a ready-made campaign platform, or as some sort of blunt instrument to wield against Democrats. But none of this may matter, depending on how the media eventually decides to tell this story. Because the myth is always stronger than the reality, and the media simply loves simplistic storylines. Meaning the Pledge may indeed eventually be seen as the second coming of the "Contract With America." Which is, ultimately, even more ironic.

This is due to the fact that it is still highly debatable how much influence Newt Gingrich's Contract With America actually had on the 1994 midterm election. Conventional wisdom has largely settled on the storyline that the Contract was the main reason Republicans did so well in '94, but the evidence actually points to it being a very minor influence, at best. Most American voters in 1994, it turns out, had never heard of the Contract when they voted. 1994 was a Republican "wave" election, but it likely would have been just as big (or almost as big) a wave even if Newt had never come up with his gimmick. But it's easier and more comfortable for most political reporters to stick with the agreed-upon myth: the Contract was what swept Newt's crowd into Washington.

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Obama holds his ground

President Obama got a bit of a bounce in his monthly poll average in September, but the news is of a decidedly mixed variety. There is good news and bad in the numbers from last month for Obama, and it's looking like there won't be much of a pre-election change in his numbers which could help congressional Democrats out on the midterm campaign trail.

But we'll get to the good and the bad numbers in a bit, and then at the end take another look at which president's approval ratings are the closest match to Obama's, at this point in their presidencies. First, though, let's start off with this month's Obama chart:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

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I will begin today's column by drying a tear as we all wish Rahm Emanuel a fond farewell. Actually, I am lying. I am drying no tears for Rahm because I am crying no tears at his leaving. Chicago's loss is the White House's gain, as far as I'm concerned.

A quick review is in order here, and then we'll announce a contest winner from a long-ago-and-probably-forgotten contest in a previous Friday Talking Points article, where I opened the field of betting as to when, exactly, Rahm Emanuel would be leaving.

Way back in FTP [110], we were already more than ready to see Rahm make an exit. This was in response to the news breaking about Rahm comparing Lefties to "[sexual expletive deleted] [slur on developmentally-challenged people deleted]," as you'll all remember. Back then, I wrote (while awarding the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week to Rahm):

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Since I haven't done one of these in a while, let me explain that title for our more recent readers. Every so often (on Thursdays in particular, for some reason), I have to clear my metaphorical desk (my actual desk will remain just as messy as always, fear not) of a bunch of minor stories which have cropped up. While this often appears as nothing more than laziness on my part, these articles usually wind up being more time-consuming, due to the amount of links.

But all of that is neither here nor there. The style of journalism known as "three-dot" was pioneered and perfected by the late great Herb Caen of San Francisco newspaper fame, and consists of stringing together many disparate items conjoined with a liberal usage of ellipses, or those three little dots which indicate "sentence trails off here" or, in journalism, sometimes "there's a bunch of stuff I cut out from this excerpt here." Three-dot journalism relies on the first, and more common, usage... to trail off... into vagueness... or even innuendo....

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It is time once again to take a look at the state of the midterm election races in the Senate. It has been over a month since we last examined the state of these races, and there has been some movement in both directions. Of course, the most dramatic of these has been in Delaware, but other states have been moving around as well (although admittedly, not as drastically).

I should also mention that there appears to be a bit of movement over on the House side of things, at least from what you hear through the filter of politicians and the mainstream media. Republicans, once confident in their bragging about how they were definitely going to wrest control of the House from the evil clutches of Nancy Pelosi, are now not sounding quite as confident as they sounded a few weeks ago. The media is slowly picking up on the storyline "Have Republicans peaked too early?" or perhaps "Democrats see rise in fortunes." Whether all of this means anything is impossible to know (well, I should say: impossible without subjecting 435 House districts to a microscopic analysis, which is beyond our abilities given our resources and schedule).

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