Later, Dean would say that his comments about Republicans’ not making an “honest living” were directed not at hard-working Americans but rather at the Republican leaders who have failed him. That’s not how it comes across on the video or the transcript, however: Dean sure seems to be lining up a distinction between Democratic voters and Repulican voters, not Democratic voters and the Republican leadership.

While Dean’s speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause, his performance didn’t get any cheer from Edwards and Biden, both of whom are potential presidential candidates in 2008. Edwards said Saturday that Dean “is not the spokesman for the party,” dismissing the chairman as “a voice” with which he doesn’t agree. On ABC’s “This Week,” Biden said that Dean “doesn’t speak for me with that kind of rhetoric, and I don’t think he speaks for the majority of Democrats.”

So did Dean cross a line? Maybe. While the Republicans frequently offer up outrageous statements and outright lies about Democratic candidates, we’re having a harder time remembering instances in which leaders of the Republican party appeared to insult Democratic voters (other than by, say, not counting their votes or suggesting that their candidates were baby-killers or friends to terrorists). We’re sure that you’ll provide us with the examples we’re not remembering. In the meantime, though, the more important question is probably this: If Ed Gillespie or Ken Mehlman had said what Dean said last week, would George W. Bush or the Republicans who wish to follow in his footsteps feel the need to disavow the comments?

We think we know the answer to that one.

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.

That it’s come to this is, obviously, an indictment of the competence of McCotter’s political operation and, perhaps, the congressman’s judgment. (In trying to account for the snafu, he said that “someone… lied to me.”) But in a way, it’s also a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when your average backbench member of Congress becomes a minor cable news celebrity and mistakes it for having a genuine national following.

This is what led the 46-year-old McCotter to enter the Republican presidential race last July. First elected to the House in 2002, he gained a measure of prominence in the Obama-era through his House floor speeches and his appearances on the overnight Fox News show “Red Eye,” showcasing what Jim Newell called “his brand of ‘wry’ Republican and Tea Party humor, which is really just the same old nonsense with a twist of sarcastic condescension.” With Mitt Romney facing a skeptical party base, McCotter apparently spotted an opening and jumped in.

His campaign lasted for just two months, during which time he was roundly ignored by the media, donors and party leaders and finished dead last in the Iowa straw poll with a total of 35 votes – 0.2 percent. His most visible campaign activity consisted of pointedly tweeting about unrelated subjects during GOP debates he wasn’t invited to, and the most press attention he got came through sarcastic reporter tweets about the futility of his efforts. In September, he dropped out.

There may or may not be a direct relationship between that quixotic adventure and McCotter’s current nightmare. It’s possible his attempts to make it on the national stage caused him to take his eye off the ball on his House reelection, or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Either way, a presidential campaign that he thought would elevate his standing ended up having the opposite effect, and it looks more foolish than ever in light of this week’s news.

This is not the first time a story like this has played out. There’s the classic example of “B-1” Bob Dornan, the far-right Orange County congressman who tried to parlay C-Span prominence into a campaign for the 1996 GOP nomination. Unlike McCotter, he actually made it into the debates, but it didn’t matter. On the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, Dornan ended up literally begging a roomful of New Hampshire Republicans to check his name off so that he’d get at least one percent of the vote. They ignored him and he dropped out, then returned home to find his House seat in jeopardy. His vanity mission hadn’t gone over well with the locals, who ousted him in favor of Democrat Loretta Sanchez that fall. Dornan was last seen mounting a random 2004 primary challenge against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, falling short by 68 points.

McCotter may yet avoid Dornan’s fate, and when you consider that even Herman Cain managed to gain traction last year, you can at least begin to understand why he decided to give the White House race a shot. But if he had it to do over, here’s guessing McCotter would have spent less time worrying about the Ames straw poll and more time focusing on his own backyard.

This came at the end of a month in which Romney’s supposed “healthcare problem” dominated coverage of the race, with the candidate using a speech at the University of Michigan to plead with Republicans that they not consider his Massachusetts law as the blueprint for ObamaCare. Early polling wasn’t encouraging; already Romney had been (briefly) lapped by Donald Trump, and now Herman Cain was making a move. The only thing keeping Romney in contention, conventional wisdom held, was the lack of a truly credible alternative – someone ideologically acceptable to the base but with a resumé weighty enough to satisfy party leaders. Perry, the third-term governor of the nation’s second-largest state, seemed like he might fit the bill.

That Romney overcame this can, of course, be attributed to Perry’s utter incompetence as a communicator. When Perry finally entered the race in August, he immediately opened a large lead over Romney and – and unlike, say, Cain – had an opportunity to cement it by uniting the party’s opinion-shaping class behind him. But Perry’s trainwreck debate performances scared those Republicans away and hastened his demise.

But it’s also true that Romney was actually fairly well-positioned at this time last year. Healthcare was never that big of a problem for him, since it was simply the idea of ObamaCare – and not any of the particulars of the actual law – that enraged the GOP base. This allowed Romney to rail against ObamaCare while spouting gobbledygook to claim that he’d done something completely different in Massachusetts. If he’d defended the federal law for some reason, Romney would have been giving away the nomination, but he knew better than to do that.

The other advantage Romney enjoyed, as Seth Masket points out, has to do with the Tea Party-era evolution of the definition of conservatism. The policy positions that the right now demands were relegated to the fringes just a few years ago – meaning that there really never was going to be an alternative to Romney who was both ideologically pure and credible as a national candidate. Even Perry, as it turned out, had some ideological baggage. And besides Perry, Romney only had to fend off candidates that party leaders were never interested in lining up behind – Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann.

This doesn’t mean the nomination was in the bag for Romney the whole time. Perry was a legitimate threat (and Tim Pawlenty perhaps could have been one, had he shown any life on the trail), and a major chunk of the GOP base – white evangelical Christians, especially in the South – remained resistant to Romney even as it became clear he’d be the nominee. But the predictions of his imminent demise that popped up throughout 2011 seem a bit foolish now.

Is there a lesson here for the next time around, even given the odd circumstances and candidate roster that defined the 2012 GOP race? Maybe it’s this: If a front-runner seems wounded and vulnerable, don’t write him or her off until there’s a truly credible alternative on the stage.