Lagging approval ratings, however, may not sink the president’s agenda, even as his allies in Congress confront a historically daunting midterm election. The logic of so-called base politics, the Bush-era strategy that focuses on rallying committed Republicans instead of rushing to claim the center, may keep congressional Republicans close to Bush — and get them reelected — in 2006.

According to recent polls, the unease of a few key, swing demographic groups has depressed the president’s approval ratings since last November. Bush is “losing the elderly, women and independents compared to his high point at the time of the election,” says Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who teaches political polling. The elderly are clearly concerned about Bush’s Social Security reforms, Blendon says, and, along with jittery independent voters and women, have become more skeptical about Bush’s foreign policy. In Tuesday’s Gallup poll, only 44 percent of respondents said they think that invading Iraq in 2003 was not a mistake.

Most of the wavering on Bush is in the middle of the political spectrum. As Gary Jacobson, professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, explains, Bush is “the most polarizing president we’ve ever had. He maintains almost rock-solid support among Republicans — his numbers are in the 87-to-90 range. It’s just among Democrats where he’s under 20. And then [for] independents, he’s in the low 40s.” This “tells you … the electorate is likely to remain highly polarized between the parties” in the next election, Jacobson says.

Historically, low presidential approval ratings and waning support among independent swing voters before a midterm election spell disaster for the president’s party. According to James Campbell, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the president’s party, on average, wins about 1.3 seats in the House of Representatives for every point of presidential approval. Bush’s current approval rating is higher only than that of Harry Truman, who lost 55 House seats in 1946; Ronald Reagan, who lost 27 House seats in 1982; and Bill Clinton, who lost 54 House seats in 1994.

Sixth-year midterm elections — that is, congressional elections held in a president’s second term — also are infamous for eroding the ranks of presidential allies in Congress. According to Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, second-term presidents after World War II have lost an average of six Senate seats in their sixth years.

There have been signs recently that some Republicans in Congress are taking a cue from the past and distancing themselves from Bush. The Bush-backed U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement passed by only two votes in the House largely because of local opposition to the treaty in Republican-held congressional districts in the South. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist broke with the president and reversed his earlier position on federal funding for stem cell research. Bush had to settle for a recess appointment of John Bolton because an unusually hostile Senate held up the weapons control expert’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations. And the president’s high-profile Social Security plan has stalled in Congress for months.

But, notes Barry Burden, an assistant professor at Harvard who teaches the politics of Congress, “the last two midterm elections have not followed the historical trend.” From the Civil War to 1994, only once did a president’s party add congressional seats in a midterm election. In 1998, however, Clinton gained seats in the House, and Bush won seats in both chambers in 2002.

Congressional seats are generally safer than they used to be. According to Campbell, “The number of seats that could change, that are really in contention, … [has] declined substantially in the last quarter century” because incumbents now outspend challengers by 10 or 12 times, limiting the potential for large swings in the balance of power.

He adds, “There are fewer split-result districts than there have been for many decades,” meaning a greater number of congressional Republicans win in districts that voted for the Republican presidential candidate now than in the past. Disapproval of the president is generally concentrated in Democratic districts.

A structural oddity of congressional elections — what scholars refer to as the “geographic spatial advantage” of the GOP — also encourages Republican candidates to ignore the disapproval of independents and actively associate themselves with the president’s agenda.

“Democrats are overly concentrated in New York, Chicago and California,” Blendon says. “When you win a Democratic [congressional] district, you [might] win by 65 to 68 percent. The Republicans have more districts, which they [might] win by 55 or 57 percent. Which means [more] of the 435 districts … have a Republican majority by a smaller margin than their share of the president’s approval rating would suggest.”

“In 2000, Gore [won] by half a million votes out of 105 million cast,” Jacobson explains. If “you redistribute those votes into the current congressional districts, you get 240 districts where Bush outpolled Gore and only 195 districts where Gore outpolled Bush. So Democrats have more of their support wasted in districts which are overwhelmingly Democratic. Republicans are spread around more evenly.” There are also more solidly red states than solidly blue ones, giving most Republicans a similar electoral advantage in the Senate.

So as long as consistently Republican voters come out to vote in 2006, this skewed districting means that Democrats should not expect dramatic gains in Congress or more cooperation from the other side of the aisle in 2006 — even with Bush’s approval rating hovering in the mid to low 40s.

“If there were signs that Republicans were becoming disenchanted with Bush, that would really be interesting” because they might not turn out to vote, Jacobson says. “But I don’t see much sign of that.”

“What [Bush is] worried about is turning out Republicans, and if he can do that, they have more districts,” Blendon says. “His whole focus isn’t the normal focus — which is, ‘It’s independents, stupid’ — in the off-year election. His focus is motivating the base of his own party to turn out in their Republican-oriented districts.”

The advantage to Republicans of playing base politics — the so far successful GOP electoral strategy of emphasizing hot-button issues such as judicial nominations, restrictions on abortion, support for the war and teaching intelligent design in public schools to motivate conservative voters in districts with small Republican majorities — may keep most Republicans in Congress loyal to President Bush, even those facing imminent elections.

“The Republicans see themselves as needing terrorism, national defense, low taxes and the president’s leadership on those issues to be reelected,” Blendon says.

Despite the unease among some Republicans in Congress over Social Security and stem cell research, wooing the party’s base is still a priority for GOP lawmakers. CAFTA’s passage in the House over the objections of a mobilized opposition to the lowering of trade barriers counts as a presidential victory. This summer, the Republican Congress has also been pliant in passing White House-backed legislation popular with elements of the party base, OK’ing Bush’s long-stalled energy bill, a massive transportation bill and a law protecting gun companies from criminal liability.

Bush has the added advantage of senators who are angling for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Sens. George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas are both beginning campaigns to grab the conservative Christian vote in the primaries after Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., announced he would not run for president. As for their GOP rivals, “the Chuck Hagels and John McCains of the world want to make sure they are in good with party activists, and at times that might mean cozying up to the president,” Burden says.

“At the moment,” Blendon says, “the president and Karl Rove and his other advisors have convinced the Republicans in Congress that this strategy is going to work for them. Stick to the Republican issues, turn out the base, stay with where you are on the conservative agenda, don’t worry about the approval rating, and you’ll still do very, very well.”

Will playing base politics continue to work for Republicans? “There is not a lot of history of this being successful,” Blendon says. “Usually … in these off-year races independents … are very important.

“The agenda has been very conservative, very partisan, and [independents may] do what they have done before, which is just switch sides on their vote.”

A case in point is last week’s special election in Ohio’s 2nd District, in which the Republican candidate won with only 52 percent of the vote. Bush won the 2nd District with 64 percent of the vote in 2004, and no Democratic House candidate has received more than 40 percent of the vote there in decades. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich opined last week that the Ohio election “should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans … Clearly, there’s a pretty strong signal for Republicans thinking about 2006 that they need to do some very serious planning and not just assume that everything is going to be automatically OK.”

Turnout for the special election was less than half that of 2004.

What’s more, with the midterm election still 15 months away, the continued loyalty of GOP lawmakers to the president is not written in stone. “If [congressional Republicans] panic,” Blendon says, “and they really begin to wonder, ‘Won’t this be like other elections where independents will turn out?’” support for the president and his agenda may erode.

For now, though, Republicans in Congress “really, strategically, have convinced themselves that the president’s got it right, that they can turn out these very high proportions, and they don’t have to shift their agenda,” Blendon says. “They’re tied to his fortunes.”

But while Bachmann may be even crazier than Palin on questions of public policy, she seems to manage to hold things together as a candidate. She can answer questions from the news media. She is putting together a professional campaign rather than relying on amateur advisors. She takes care to point out frequently that she is a former tax lawyer, and she does not engage in Palin’s visceral anti-intellectualism, giving herself the aura of a plausible president, at least in the minds of Republican voters. Bachmann may well combine Palin’s most powerful traits without her crippling organizational failures.

Sometimes she skillfully answers questions from the press, and sometimes she has meltdowns. She can also do anti-intellectualism with the best of them — she got into politics in part in order to attack educational standards and push “Intelligent Design” — and while she is not quite as organizationally challenged as Palin, she has had her problems.

In fact, Andy Barr just wrote about those issues in February, when Bachmann’s spokesman and district director both left their jobs:

But even without any fireworks, the two exits add to a long a long line of recently departed Bachmann aides, as her office has had an extremely high turnover rate since the Minnesota Republican was first elected to Congress in 2006.

Bachmann has had four chiefs of staff leave since coming to Congress — Rich Dunn, Ron Carey, Michelle Marston and Brooks Kochvar. The Minnesota firebrand also had her campaign finance director Zandra Wolcott leave during the middle of her reelection campaign last year.

I think Barr may have left out one of her chiefs of staff or two? As an unnamed “conservative Republican House member” told Politico when Marston quit for unknown reasons in 2009: “When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship.” (Her current chief of staff is taking a “leave of absence” in order to work on her presidential campaign.)

So, how seriously should we be taking Bachmann? Isn’t it more or less appropriate to continue treating her as a very popular sideshow? (And if she ran for real would she really want people dragging out stories like the time she claimed lesbians kidnapped her and trapped her in a bathroom?)

The fact that she has managed to convince 50% of suburban voters in a Republican district to send her to Washington does not actually make her more a more credible candidate than Herman Cain, who has at least run a major industry lobbying organization.

I agree Jennifer Rubin on one thing: The similarities between Bachmann and Sarah Palin are mainly superficial; they’re both attractive ultra-conservative women who routinely say stupid, extreme things on television. I am pretty sure Michele Bachmann is smarter than Sarah Palin. I also think she more sincerely believes the sort of rube-pleasing bullshit Palin cranks out primarily for attention. Bachmann is relentless, while Palin is erratic. Palin actually governed for a while, before giving it up for celebrity. Bachmann has never legislatively done anything, at all. Palin seems driven primarily by resentment, paranoia, and profit, whereas I imagine Bachmann probably thinks she’s doing the Lord’s work. She really would like to impose some sort of libertarian theocracy, where the government has no authority to regulate anything beyond the stoning of abortionists and homosexuals.

So I dunno. She might do OK in Iowa but the wheels would come off that campaign very shortly afterward.

When Minneapolis’ City Pages first reported [6] on Bachmann’s relationship with Markell in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said [otherwise], I don’t know.”

And boy, according to Olive Tree Ministries, we live in very interesting times:

So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

But wait! Before all that happens the antichrist needs to show up and convince everyone he’s the Messiah! But who could that end up being? Some people say Obama, but Bachmann’s church fingered a different suspect.

Before Bachmann was a Tea Party-affiliated Ron Paul fan obsessed with “liberty,” remember, she was a traditional religious right fanatic with a degree from Oral Roberts University, who got into politics through antiabortion activism and who became famous for a school board run during which she and her allies supported teaching creationism in government-funded charter schools. (She is a home-schooling activist, which made a school board run kind of weird, but she was outraged at the idea of state standards forcing her to teach her children about anything other than Austrian economics and eschatology.)

When Bachmann was running for Congress in 2006, her official website bio said she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope. WELS confirms that they still “identify this ‘Antichrist’ with the Papacy,” in case you’re curious.

Bachmann has denied that her church believes this, but … it is definitely one of the fundamental doctrines of her church, according to her Synod’s doctrinal statements. I mean, if Bachmann doesn’t believe it, there are some very nice mainline Lutheran denominations to choose from, though they might be a bit squishy on biblical literalism and hatred of homosexuals.

In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here, via Dumb Bachmann, is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Trump’s is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It’s not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

“Where’s the Birth Certificate?” by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn’t have realized that your entirely pointless search for the “long-form” birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book’s publication.

Corsi has a lot of other arguments against the president’s constitutional eligibility (he’s British!), but there’s no getting around the fact that the title of the book has been rather definitively answered.

“Condi vs. Hillary” by Dick Morris, 2005

Shameless Republican P.R. guru Jim Wilkinson, inventor of the entirely false Jessica Lynch story, went to work for Condoleezza Rice when Rice took over at the State Department. He did his usual effective if slightly heavy-handed image management. The lowlight was probably when he literally slipped a note to Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley asking if Rice planned to run for president, a thought that had not yet occurred to anyone, because Rice had never run for anything.

While the Beltway press entertained the notion, because it was fun to play pretend, only one man wrote a book about how Condi must run for president, because she and only she could beat Hillary Clinton, who was a 100 percent lock to win the Democratic nomination. That man: Dick Morris, who is wrong so often about so many things that it’s hardly worth pointing it out anymore, except for the fact that this book is such an amazing time capsule of a bizarre time in American politics.

Rice never expressed any interest whatsoever in running, making this book irrelevant before it was ever written.

“The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, 2006

Just go back and read this fawning tribute to the influence and genius of Matt Drudge that ABC News published to promote this book upon its publication. “The Way to Win” posited that a campaign based around sucking up to Drudge and emulating Karl Rove in every way was the key to victory in 2008. A month after this lengthy tribute to his infallible genius came out, Rove suffered the humiliation of the 2006 midterms.

“The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” by Peter Beinart, 2006

Peter Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic, and under his leadership, that magazine really, really loved war, a lot. (He is also responsible for the New Republic endorsing Joe Lieberman in 2004, which even sometime owner and all-time nutjob Marty Peretz thought was a bit odd.) Beinart went all-in on the Iraq War, and his magazine spent much more time and energy berating antiwar liberals than it did questioning the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After John Kerry lost in 2004, Beinart was pretty sure it was the fault of squishy antiwar Democrats, and Michael Moore.

And so he expanded his essay on the subject of how antiwar liberals are as bad as Communists, plus they love terrorism, into a book, about how Democrats must once again embrace complete and total war, everywhere, like they did in the good old days of the Cold War.

Of course, on the way to filling out his Very Important Foreign Policy book, the Iraq War got worse and worse, and the extent of the Bush administration’s malfeasance became clearer and clearer, so Beinart is a bit apologetic about having been dead wrong about the defining foreign policy issue of his time as a serious and respected political thinker. (He is currently a “senior fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Being antiwar helped the Democrats generally in the 2006 elections and a candidate who spoke out against Iraq from the very beginning ended up actually winning the presidency in 2008. (Whereupon he began acting a bit Beinartian, so maybe Peter got the last laugh, as the Democrats who take “tough stands” against pinkos usually do.)

Honorable Mention, Finance and Economics division:

“Dow 36,000,” by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett, 2000.

“The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy,” by Jerry Bowyer (foreword by Larry Kudlow), 2003.

“America has won the war on terror,” Bush shouts. “Tonight, I am proud to say, Osama bin Laden is in hell.” The president explains that the terrorist mastermind was “taken out” by American forces in Afghanistan, along with the entire senior leadership of al-Qaida. Crowds spontaneously gather in celebration outside the White House, with handmade signs (“THESE COLORS DON’T RUN,” “LET’S ROLL”) in plain view of cable news cameras set up beforehand according to a White House communications office suggestion. A professional-quality sound system blares Lee Greenwood. Then, fireworks.

Thrilling night-vision footage of a daring firefight in a labyrinthine cave is immediately provided to news channels. All of them air it, without noting that the video was edited by the Pentagon prior to release, and its contents unconfirmed.

In background briefings to national security journalists, the Pentagon credits the kill to one lone unnamed but slightly Schwarzeneggerian special forces officer acting on intelligence procured by one lone unnamed but remarkably Jack Bauer-like CIA officer who personally “interrogated” the al-Qaida courier until he revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts.

One senior administration official speaking on deep background reveals the courier was interrogated instead of monitored and trailed because of credible intelligence indicating an imminent attack — possibly biological or nuclear — on an unknown American landmark.

Files on bin Laden’s captured cellphone reveal him to have been in constant communication with al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a Pentagon source.

Editorial writers at most major U.S. newspaper proclaim a second moment of harmony to rival the first one directly after 9/11. Once again, there are no Republicans and Democrats, just Americans.

The following day, the president flies to New York where he gleefully models a profane anti-Osama T-shirt sold by a ground zero-area vendor. The photo makes the front page of the New York Post under the headline “LAST LAUGH.” Bush proclaims a “National Day of Celebration” and gives everyone the following Monday off from work.

The Guardian notes that British Ministry of Defense officials cannot confirm any details of the Pentagon’s story.

Newsweek magazine puts Donald Rumsfeld on the cover, naming him “Washington’s King of the Comeback.” (Time goes with a write-around feature on the American Commando.) To combat Rumsfeld’s sudden popular resurgence, Condoleezza Rice aide Jim Wilkinson instructs Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley to ask Secretary Rice whether the death of bin Laden makes her more likely to mount a presidential run in 2008. Rice’s demurrals do nothing to end gleeful cable news speculation that she’ll run against Hillary (and win) in 2008. Chris Matthews can barely contain himself.

Mainstream journalists join a chorus of Republicans and right-wing commentators in jeering and mocking liberals casting doubt on the official story of bin Laden’s death. Those with reservations, based on actual evidence, about the official story are compared to Truthers by Richard Cohen, Joe Klein, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and just about everyone else.

A month later, a BBC investigation reveals that bin Laden’s death cannot be confirmed and the entire story as presented to the American media was most likely false. The American press, reluctant to “politicize” the death of bin Laden in the face of overwhelming national support for the president, is very cautious in reporting “new information” out of Afghanistan.

Well after the 2006 midterm elections, leaked memos prove that high-ranking U.S. military commanders warned the White House that the story that OBL had died in a U.S. raid was false and the rumors of his death elsewhere were still unconfirmable.

The next year, a book reveals that the crowd outside the White House the day of the announcement was made up mostly of off-duty Republican congressional aides, lobbyists and political consultants. (None of the firefighters present were from New York.)

In 2007, the Washington Post’s ombudsman and managing editor agree that printing the inaccurate story provided to them by administration officials was the right thing to do. “Each piece had multiple, credible sources,” the M.E. explains, naming none of them.

“We may never know the full truth about the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden,” Time magazine writes shortly after a Senate committee investigation into the administration’s exaggerations and falsehoods is unable to issue a final report due to a partisan split. While “it seems certain that media accounts of the mission were distorted,” the liberal bloggers and foreign news outlets that exposed the distortions are almost certainly “guilty of exaggeration themselves,” with their claims that the Pentagon “manipulated information.”

President Bush wins a third term.

While working for Mr. DeLay, Loper took a trip to the Marianas Islands with Michael Scanlon, super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s co-conspirator. They went to the Marianas Islands to deliver favor money to two legislators in order to bribe them into switching their votes to support an Abramoff ally in his campaign to become speaker of the House. They switched their votes, Abramoff’s buddy got the job, and Abramoff was rehired and “resumed lobbying for the continuation of abusive labor practices in the islands.”

This guy, a bagman for a corrupt lobbyist before he became a corrupt lobbyist himself, is now in charge of policy, for the speaker.