“When [Frist] entered the Senate in 1995, I had taken him under my wing,” Lott writes. “He was my protege and I helped him get plum assignments and committee positions.”

Lott charges that the scheming and manipulation by Frist and other GOP colleagues were the reason he was forced from his leadership position in the Senate. He also claims that President Bush wasn’t particularly helpful when the Senate leader was feeling the heat and looking for high-level support. Are Lott’s recent barbs evidence that the Republican Party’s legendary solidarity is giving way to a mutiny? Probably not — not yet anyway. But Lott is one of a growing number of Republicans who have questioned their party’s leadership and conduct of the Iraq war.

At a lunch meeting yesterday for Rotary Club members, Lott called on President Bush to develop an exit strategy and wondered why the American military was “doing all of the heavy lifting” and why the Europeans haven’t been more involved.

While Democratic leaders must be enjoying their foes’ internecine squabbles, they probably shouldn’t get ahead of themselves. As for Lott, he retains his knack for insensitivity, as demonstrated by his remarks Wednesday about how the Iraqis will eventually have to govern themselves.

“Bring all the different religions and sects in your country together and rule and govern yourselves,” Lott said, “or you can go on killing each other like you have [in the Middle East] for 2,000 years, but you’ve got to make the choice.”

Messina begins the video by noting that “over the past few weeks, I’ve had people asking me about all the polls we’re seeing.” Those polls have shown Romney running an average of 1.6 points behind Obama, according to Real Clear Politics’ database, with the presumptive GOP nominee’s overall favorable rating moving up. Romney also seems to be doing better with women now than he was a few months ago, and he’s running at least even with Obama on the question of who would better manage the economy.

Messina’s first observation about this is sensible enough: “We knew this was going to be a tough race, and we knew that once Mitt Romney locked up the nomination, Republicans would get behind him and this race would be tight – just like we always knew it would be.” Hard to argue with this. A significant chunk of the GOP base resisted Romney deep into the primary season, but now that he’s their only alternative to Obama, they’re climbing on board.

But then he ventures off into spin-land:

“Here’s one more thing you can tell your friends when they ask you about the latest polls: We’re actually ahead of where we were at this point last time around. Remember the summer of 2008? Folks don’t remember it this way, but a lot of polls were saying we’d never pull it off. In fact, eight different national polls had us anywhere from neck-and-neck to down a few points. But you talked to your friends and neighbors, and voters who those polls counted out showed up on Election Day.”

This is some pretty bad revisionist history. There were polls that put Obama behind McCain in 2008, but with the exception of the GOP convention aftermath, they were all in the spring – not the summer. There’s an obvious reason for this: Obama was locked in an arduous, months-long Democratic primary campaign until June 7, when Hillary Clinton finally folded her tent.

At his lowest point during that saga – the Jeremiah Wright-dominated weeks leading up to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary – the Obama-John McCain horse race was basically even. On the day Clinton suspended her campaign, the Real Clear Politics average put Obama ahead of McCain by 2.5 points. A month later, he was up by 6. In other words, once Obama emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee, his position improved.

But the video doesn’t account for this. For instance, it cites ’08 and ’12 results from the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. According to a chart in the video, an NBC/WSJ poll from this point in ’08 put Obama ahead by 3 – one point less than his lead over Romney in the newest NBC/WSJ poll. See, he’s in better shape today! The problem: The ’08 poll is actually from late April of that year – basically at Obama’s lowest moment. Not included is the first NBC/WSJ poll taken after Clinton’s June withdrawal, which put Obama ahead by 6.

The way Messina tells it, Obama’s win over McCain was the biggest surprise since Truman ’48 – a silent majority of voters emerging from nowhere and confounding the experts. That’s just not what happened, though. Obama enjoyed a steady, if not overwhelming, lead throughout the summer, fell behind after the GOP convention, overtook McCain again in mid-September, and saw his lead explode when Wall Street melted down. His 7-point Election Day victory was exactly what the experts were predicting. Once he survived the Wright drama in April, Obama was always the clear favorite to win the White House — as basically any Democratic nominee would have been at the end of two terms of unpopular Republican rule.

This is the real reason why Messina’s claim that Obama is in better shape now than four years ago doesn’t hold water. On this date in 2008, there was good reason to expect that Obama’s lead was about to open up. He was running in a favorable climate and was just emerging from a primary battle. This time around, it’s possible that his lead over Romney will eventually balloon, but nothing about the current climate suggests it will. It’s understandable why Messina won’t admit this, but right now, Obama is definitely in a worse position than he was in ’08.

For Obama, this task is more urgent than ever in the wake of last Friday’s miserable jobs report. It is also, not coincidentally, getting more difficult to pull off.

Obama’s reelection prospects essentially depend on introducing context into the presidential race and getting swing voters to appreciate it. Romney, meanwhile, is relying on a much simpler formula – the tendency of these same voters to turn on the incumbent president when their economic anxiety is high. In the short term, the latest jobs report, which showed anemic job growth and an uptick in the unemployment rate to 8.2 percent, figures to ratchet up the public’s pessimism slightly. More alarmingly for Obama, it suggests the modest recovery of the winter may really have stalled out and that similarly depressing jobs reports could be the rule in the months ahead.

It’s impossible to quantify, but a relationship probably exists between the level of an average swing voter’s economic anxiety and his or her willingness to consider the context Obama is trying to introduce. This new ad, in other words, will probably find a more skeptical audience now than it would have a few months ago, when the news was filled with reports of decent and encouraging (though hardly overwhelming) employment gains.

At the same time, a climate of economic panic is also conducive to Romney’s own efforts to introduce context, in those rare instances when he wants to. This is one of those instances, with the Romney team pointing out the difficult circumstances he inherited – a sluggish economy, a big deficit — when he became governor in 2003. There’s something to their defense; Romney’s actual gubernatorial record wasn’t as spectacularly awful as Democrats say, although it wasn’t much to write home about either.

But the question here is how swing voters will interpret an argument like this. The less hope they have about where the economy is heading now, the more they’ll be tempted by Romney’s suggestion that everyone will feel a lot better if we just hit the reset button and put someone new in the White House. If that’s the mood swing voters are in, then they’ll be looking for excuses to ignore all of the red flags the Obama campaign is raising about Massachusetts, and Romney won’t have much problem winning the argument over his gubernatorial years.

“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.