He continued: “But we will stay the course. We will do what is right. We will make sure that a free Iraq emerges, not only for our own security, but for the sake of free peoples everywhere. A free Iraq will change the Middle East. A free Iraq will make the world more peaceful. A free Iraq will make America more secure. We will not be shaken by thugs and terrorists.”

The president’s Iraq-for-dummies version of the story does not reflect the complexity nor the volatility of the situation. Two U.S. Senators, a Republican and Democrat, warned Sunday that Iraq could be headed to a civil war if the Bush administration sticks with its plan to hand over sovereignty on June 30. (Speaking to reporters after his North Carolina speech today, Bush said he’s sticking with the June 30 deadline.)

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden told the New York Times he thinks the administration faces its own civil war as it debates how to handle the unraveling situation in Iraq: “I predict to you — I hope I’m wrong — that your colleagues writing about this 10 years from now are going to look at 9/11 and they’re going to look at 6/30. This administration, as far as I can tell, is at odds with itself, being pulled apart — one portion saying we’re going to keep it under our tent and the other half saying, ‘Let’s give it to the U.N.’ ”

To get an idea of just what we’re dealing with in Muqtada al-Sadr, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole posted this on his blog today, quoting the radical cleric before he retreated into a mosque, surrounded by U.S. troops sent to arrest him. Muqtada said: “Make your enemy afraid, for it is impossible to remain quiet about their moral offenses; otherwise we have arrived at consequences that will not be praiseworthy. I am with you, and shall not forsake you to face hardships alone. I fear for you, for no benefit will come from demonstrations. Your enemy loves terrorism, and despises peoples, and all Arabs, and muzzles opinions. I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper. It is necessary to resort to other measures, which you take in your own provinces. As for me, I am with you, and I hope I will be able to join you and then we shall ascend into exalted heavens. I will go into an inviolable retreat in Kufa. Help me by whatever you are pleased to do in your provinces.”

Cole writes: “The bit about going into a retreat and hoping to join his followers later so that they could ascend to the heavens shows an apocalyptic imagination at work. The US is facing another Waco, and what we know is that military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Davidians and the Sadrists. That approach only confirms their conviction that the forces of this world are attempting to prevent them from attaining paradise.”

Muqtada al-Sadr is not the most influential Shiite cleric, of course, and he is estranged from the more powerful and moderate Shiite cleric Ayatollah Sistani. But al-Sadr has tens of thousands of disciples. As Josh Marshall points out on Talking Points Memo, the long-term impact of the weekend uprising he led is so far unclear. “It will be critical to see, in the coming days, whether this is one spasm of violence (organized by the young firebrand Muqtada Al-Sadr in response to being shut out of the political process by the Americans) which can be brought under control or whether this is the first day of a new phase of violence or even uprising.”

“The reality is that the U.S. doesn’t have anywhere enough soldiers in the country to control the place if there’s this sort of widespread violence on an on-going basis. That could quickly lead to a vicious cycle which will put a virtual end to reconstruction and prevent the coming into being of any entity for us to hand the place off to. In Jefferson’s ugly phrase, we may end up holding the wolf by the ears.”

“If you want Wisconsin once again to be seen by all of America as a place of diversity, of difference of opinion, of vigorous debate, where in the end people’s objectives are to come to an agreement that will take us all forward together, you have to show up for Tom Barrett on Tuesday!” he declared.

The final debate between Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett was last night, so Clinton’s visit was probably the last high-profile card that Wisconsin Democrats have left to play. Walker has enjoyed a clear mid-single-digit edge in polling, leaving Democrats to talk up their turnout operation and suggest that Tuesday’s voting universe will look much different than pollsters are assuming. But what they really need is a late shift in public opinion, something to push a small but critical chunk of the electorate in favor of the recall. On this front, the attention generated by Clinton’s swing is their best bet.

The second leg of the former president’s Friday travels will land him in North Jersey, where redistricting has pitted two right-term Democratic incumbents against each other in a primary.

Clinton has cast his lot with 75-year-old Bill Pascrell, a street-wise former Paterson mayor and self-described political “late-bloomer.” Clinton’s fondness for Pascrell dates back to 1996, when Pascrell waged what seemed like a quixotic bid against a freshman Republican only to ride the president’s reelection coattails to one of the year’s biggest House upsets.

But what really explains Clinton’s interest is Pascrell’s early and loyal support of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. Well, that and the fact that Pascrell’s opponent was the sole New Jersey House Democrat to line up with Barack Obama in the run-up to the ’08 primaries.

That would be Steve Rothman, a 59-year-old Democrat whose Bergen County hometown of Fair Lawn was actually shipped to the district of Republican Rep. Scott Garrett during redistricting. The race against Garrett would have been a winnable, though very iffy, proposition for Rothman. State and national Democrats urged him to give it a shot, telling him that it would earn him a chit for a future bid for statewide office. But Rothman didn’t take the bait, figuring that even if he managed to beat Garrett this year, he’d be facing perilous reelection fights every two years going forward. So he moved to Englewood, where he once served as mayor, a town that – like the majority of his old district – had been merged with Pascrell’s.

With his Bergen base likely to account for about 60 percent of the ballots cast on Tuesday, Rothman entered the race as the clear favorite. But Pascrell has clearly won the campaign, recruiting Clinton for an endorsement and today’s visit, netting endorsements from the district’s two main papers (the Star-Ledger and The Record), and stirring a backlash against an unfair Rothman attack ad.

Rothman is countering the Clinton visit by playing up his ties to Obama. But there’s only so much he can do here. The White House won’t endorse in a Democratic primary between incumbents, and Rothman’s clout with the Obama team is a bit suspect anyway; when the ’08 primary race ended, Rothman lost a power struggle for control of the New Jersey Obama operation. David Axelrod made an appearance on his behalf a few weeks ago, and today Rothman was given an Oval Office meeting with the president – with a Rose Garden colonnade stroll for the cameras.

In the battle for media coverage, Clinton’s in-person visit will probably trump the Obama/Rothman photo op. The question is whether it will be enough to push the old man from Paterson over the top on Tuesday.

Elected to his second stint in the House in 2004, Inglis irked some on the right by casting a symbolic vote against the 2007 Iraq troop surge and signing off on George W. Bush’s TARP plan. But if there was one single act that marked him as a traitor, it was his suggestion to attendees at a rowdy 2009 town hall meeting to “turn Glenn Beck off.” Boos filled the air, the video went viral, and Inglis spent the next year on the defensive. He finished 12 points behind challenger Trey Gowdy in the preliminary GOP vote, 39 to 27 percent, then gained almost no ground in the runoff, which he lost 71-29 percent.

Inglis remembers campaigning door-to-door and encountering hostility for the first time.

“I’m wondering, ‘Why is this happening?’” he said. “And what I came around to is that what happens is the tribe selects you to go to Washington. You believe with the tribe, you agree with them, and you go to Washington as their representative.

“Then you get there and you mingle with these other tribes, and you come to understand their point of view – not agree with it, but understand it. So when that view is presented, you don’t have the same sort of shocked reaction that some of the tribe members at home have to hearing that view.”

He recalled getting to know John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Democratic congressman from Georgia.

“He is an incredible American,” Inglis said. “I just disagree with him on this budget thing. But back at the tribe, at the tribal meeting, it’s like, ‘He’s some kind of Communist, that John Lewis. He’s not an American.’ No! He’s an incredible American. He’s one of our heroes.

“But the tribe doesn’t see that. The tribe sees you as sort of getting too cozy with John. And then they start to doubt you, because of this betrayal response. We are hard-wired to respond very violently – as I understand it, the brain really responds to betrayal. It’s one of the strongest human emotions.”

The spirit of 2010 is still very much alive in the Republican Party, as the landslide defeat of Richard Lugar in Indiana and several other recent primaries attest. The effect is to make every Republican lawmaker that much more weary of breaking with the party on a single vote and of reaching across the aisle to compromise with a Democrat or even saying anything pleasant about a member of the other party.

“The strategy is to have an object lesson, to make Dick Lugar an object lesson,” Inglis said. “And all you have to do is take down one Dick Lugar and you whip 20 into line, because they don’t want to be the next Dick Lugar.”

But Inglis thinks the end of the right’s purity crusade may be in sight. For one thing, he says, the GOP base’s restiveness will ebb if and when the economy improves. Plus, “folks that felt outside of the power structure and that were part of the insurgency against the establishment in the Republican Party are now becoming the establishment. They are moving into positions of responsibility within the party — and the view changes once you’re there.”

The way Inglis sees it, today’s Republican freshmen will eventually come to see Democrats like John Lewis just as he does.

“Anybody that goes there necessarily has this happen to them. Whoever it is, you’ve got to aggressively fight it in order to keep that kind of edge on you. Because you’re naturally going to move toward being Dick Lugar.”

But what will really tame the GOP revolt, he says, is a Mitt Romney victory this fall – an outcome that Inglis, who remains a conservative Republican, is very much hoping for. With control of the White House, and maybe Congress too, Republicans will have to present ideas – “and you’ve got to be ready to implement those ideas. It can’t just be, ‘We’re opposed to Obamacare.’”

If Obama is reelected, though, Inglis isn’t quite as optimistic.

“The intensity of the rejection of Romney from the left will be less than the intensity of the rejection of Obama from the right, because the left genuinely believes that government is a helpful force,” he said.

“Obama rejectionism is to the second – we don’t like him, plus we don’t like government generally. So it really amps up the rejectionist sentiment that says basically, ‘Anything he’s for, I’m against.’ Whereas if Romney is elected, people on the left are more likely to say, ‘We’re not generally opposed to government.’ So therefore they’re able to oppose Romney’s policies, maybe, but not have quite the degree of rejectionism.”

The shift to Obama as the new sworn nemesis created a new role for Clinton in conservative folklore. No longer was he a lying, scandalized, illegitimate president whose incompetence led directly to 9/11; now he became a model for moderate, responsible and pragmatic presidential leadership – a legacy to be invoked as a means of portraying the current Democratic president as dangerously to the left of his own party’s tradition.

This is the effect that Mitt Romney was going for a few weeks ago when he lamented that Obama had “tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas.” It’s what Artur Davis, the one-time rising Democratic star who flamed out in Alabama and his now reinventing himself as a Virginia Republican, was going for when he wrote this week that “this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party (and he knows that even if he can’t say it).” And, as Ed Kilgore notes, it seems to be what the Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost is going for when he backs up Davis’ claim by arguing that the Democratic Party “was never really Bill Clinton’s party.”

Cost makes a few claims that are worth exploring. One involves how Clinton became the Democratic nominee in the first place:

He was far from the consensus choice of the party in 1992. In fact, most of the major interest groups that dominate the party today either opposed him or were lukewarm to his candidacy in 1992. What put Clinton over the top that year was his domination of the Southern primaries, thanks in large part to the sorts of white, working class voters who now call themselves Republicans.

But it’s more complicated than that. Clinton did come to the 1992 race with a reputation as a “new Democrat,” a centrist Southerner who’d run the Democratic Leadership Council. Initially, he planned to play these credentials up in his primary campaign, believing that his main opposition would come either from Mario Cuomo or Tom Harkin. But when Cuomo balked at running and Harkin failed to ignite, Clinton instead found himself battling Paul Tsongas and his Wall Street-friendly message.

Adroit politician that he is, Clinton then ran as the defender of the party’s New Deal/Great Society coalition. He did clean up in the Southern primaries, but the most important part of his base was African-American Democrats – same as it would be for Obama 16 years later.  In Georgia, for instance, Clinton beat Tsongas by an overall 57-24 percent spread, his first win of the ’92 primary season. Among blacks, his margin was 74 to 14 percent. Among whites, he earned only a slight majority. As a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it at the time:

Mr. Clinton won more than 70 percent of the black vote. But he won only 53 percent of the white vote. That’s a majority, but it’s only a majority of those who asked for a Democratic ballot. It’s a decided minority of the white Georgians who voted Tuesday. Some exit polls showed a quarter of those who voted for Mr. Clinton intending to vote for Mr. Bush in November. In short, the Arkansan beat Paul Tsongas, a complex candidate from Massachusetts, and three other rivals who almost didn’t bother to campaign here and who didn’t buy television time.

In other key primaries, Clinton rallied senior citizens in Florida with Social Security-themed attacks on Tsongas and used strong labor support to score the commanding Illinois and Michigan victories that knocked Tsongas out. Some white Southerners who are now Republicans were part of Clinton’s coalition, but he mainly relied on a very traditional Democratic coalition to win the nomination.

As president, Cost claims, Clinton “offered a reformist agenda to Congress, but the congressional liberals stymied him in 1993-94.” One item he cites here is deficit reduction – a reference to the 1993 budget that Republicans unanimously opposed (and attacked as “the largest tax increase in history”). But the tax hikes weren’t at all a break with what Clinton campaigned on. In language that Obama himself might use today, Clinton spent the ’92 general election bemoaning that under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush “the rich got richer” while the middle class fell behind. With Republicans claiming class warfare, he vowed to raise taxes on those earning over $200,000. At the 15:20 mark of the first fall debate, for instance, you can watch Clinton making the case for taxing the rich:

Clinton did have to abandon his middle class tax cut campaign pledge, but it wasn’t liberals who forced him to – it was Alan Greenspan and deficit hawks like Tsongas. Far from stymying him, liberals were essential to the enactment of the ’93 budget, which in turn played a major role in the massive surpluses that would emerge by the decade’s end.

Cost is certainly right that there was liberal disaffection with Clinton throughout his presidency – whether on NAFTA in 1993 or welfare reform in 1996. But there was never anything approaching an intraparty revolt. Knee-jerk predictions that Clinton would face a serious ‘96 primary challenge after the disastrous 1994 midterm never amounted to anything, and his support from the party’s base remained healthy throughout his term. By the time he left office, a few liberals considered him a traitor, some were thrilled with his performance, and most were generally pleased but wished he’d been more ambitious and achieved more. (That last sentiment was the foundation for Bill Bradley’s and Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaigns.)

The right’s new caricature of Clinton as the voice of a conservative Democratic wing that no longer exists is as inaccurate as its old one. He was, and is, a complicated politician, skilled at tailoring his ideology to mesh with his target audience of the moment. As president, that trait enraged liberals and conservatives alike. It’s still unclear where, if anywhere, Clinton personally fits on the ideological spectrum. But in the 1990s he campaigned and governed as the leader of a Democratic Party that is very much recognizable today.

Update: I shouldn’t have lumped Cost in with Romney and Davis the way I did. As I made clear above, I don’t think his take on Clinton’s legacy is right at all, but he’s a smart and informed writer and it was wrong to imply that he’s actively trying to distort history.

This is consistent with the previous Marquette poll from a few weeks ago, which showed Walker ahead by six points, and a Wisconsin Public Radio survey last week, which put Walker up five. Is it possible that these findings are all outliers or that they were produced by flawed methodology? Are the numbers being pushed by the pro-recall side actually accurate? I guess so, but it’s a lot easier to see the incentive that Democrats have to come up with encouraging data to counter the conventional wisdom that Walker has opened a clear lead.

That said, it remains true that there’s no reliable precedent for predicting what turnout will look like next Tuesday. The expectation is that it will be significantly higher than it was in 2010, when Walker first beat Barrett, but there’s never been a gubernatorial recall in Wisconsin before, and there’ve barely been any across the country. There’s a wide range of possibilities in terms of how many people will show up, what their partisan breakdown will be, and what effect mobilization efforts by both parties and outside groups will have.

So yes, Walker still could be recalled. But for that to happen at this point, some reputable independent pollsters in Wisconsin will have to be wrong about what the voting universe will look like.

Undermining Romney’s perceived competence as an economic policymaker is, as Greg Sargent keeps explaining, critical to Obama’s November prospects. The Romney formula depends on economically anxious swing voters simply wanting to throw the incumbent out, a strategy that could well produce a victory in the current climate. Obama’s mission is to embed context about Romney’s own background and values into those same voters’ minds – to give them pause before simply checking off his name as a suitable vehicle for their frustrations.

The question, obviously, is whether voters will buy into the idea that Romney was a lousy governor – and, even if they do, if it will end up affecting their decisions. Two relatively recent campaigns offer some conflicting lessons.

Democrats would ideally like to do to Romney what Republicans did to the last Massachusetts governor who sought the presidency: Michael Dukakis in 1988. About the only attack that anyone remembers from that campaign was the racially inflammatory Willie Horton ad that an “independent” pro-George H.W. Bush group ran.

That spot highlighted a specific incident from Dukakis’s governorship, but what’s often forgotten is the degree to which the Bush campaign made Massachusetts the centerpiece of its efforts. A wave of attack ads in the summer and fall portrayed Dukakis’s gubernatorial tenure as a festival of tax hikes, rampant spending, criminal coddling, environmental pollution and general incompetence, each ending with the tag line: “Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts. America can’t afford to take that risk.”

(A good compilation of many of the Bush attack ads can be found here.)

Bush personally paid two high-profile visits to the Bay State, one to tour Boston Harbor – then known as the dirtiest harbor in the country – and the other to receive the endorsement of the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association.

”My opponent will say that he will do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts,” Bush said during the harbor swing. “No, that’s why I fear for the country.”

It’s hard to quantify, but the relentless attacks clearly damaged Dukakis, who enjoyed a lead of 17 points just after the July Democratic convention only to find himself trailing by the same amount in the campaign’s closing weeks. The numbers tightened in the final days, but Dukakis still lost by eight points. Exit polls found that nearly half of Bush’s voters said they supported him mainly to stop Dukakis. “The distortion of my record contributed a great deal to my defeat,” Dukakis acknowledged the morning after the election.

Four years later, though, Democrats nominated another governor with a record the Bush team believed was ripe for exploitation: Bill Clinton, whose state of Arkansas ranked near the bottom in a host of important-seeming statistical categories.

Of course, Clinton had other baggage too, mainly involving “character” issues and widespread concerns about his honesty, and the Bush campaign spent plenty of time highlighting those issues. Bush also tried to play up the tax increases that Clinton had signed as governor, but the attack was compromised by his own infamous “Read my lips!” flip-flop.

In the final weeks of the race, though, with polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead, Bush began criticizing Clinton’s gubernatorial record much more aggressively. In an October 19 debate, for instance, Bush replied to Clinton’s vow to be solely responsible for his administration’s economic policy by saying:

That’s what worries me — that he’s going to be responsible. He’s going to do — and he would do for the U.S. what he’s done to Arkansas. He would do for the U.S. what he’s done to Arkansas. We do not want to be the lowest of the low. We are not a nation in decline.

Clinton soon interrupted with this:

Jim, you permitted Mr. Bush to break the rules, he said, to defend the honor of the country. What about the honor of my state? We rank first in the country in job growth, we got the lowest spending, state and local, in the country, and the second lowest tax burden. And the difference between Arkansas and the U.S. is that we’re going in the right direction and this country’s going in the wrong direction. And I have to defend the honor of my state.

The Arkansas attacks never got Bush anywhere in ’92. That Clinton was prepared to counter dire-seeming statistics with happier ones of his own surely helped, as did his salesmanship skills. Perhaps a different candidate wouldn’t have defended himself as ably. On the other hand, it may also be that voters, unnerved by what seemed to be a rotten economy, simply decided to tune Bush out and to regard his attacks as desperate excuse-making and blame-deflection.  That’s exactly what Romney’s campaign is counting on happening this year.