REPUBLICANS ARE FRAMING REPUBLICANS. DEMOCRATS AREN'T.

Yesterday there was a bit of consternation in the lefty blogosphere about a some results from Gallup:

A new Gallup Panel survey finds each of the five best-known 2008 presidential candidates scoring similarly in ratings of public confidence in their ability to recommend the right thing for the war in Iraq. This suggests that despite public dissatisfaction with the war, it is not necessarily a winning issue for Democratic candidates....

Aside from Romney and Thompson, the five other candidates score between 50% and 55% on this measure of public confidence in their ability to choose the proper course of action in Iraq.

And, in fact, McCain and Giuliani have the best numbers, at 55%. (Obama's at 54%, Clinton at 51%, and Edwards at 50%). Oh, and Giuliani and McCain are in the high 60s on handling terrorism, while Clinton, Obama, and Edwards range between 48% and 53%.

Well, why wouldn't this be the case? People think they know a good deal about Giuliani and McCain -- after all, they've seen the two on TV a lot, presenting themselves exactly the way they want to be seen, as, respectively, a tough but sensitive and commonsensical guy who survived 9/11 and an upbeat but tough guy who survived the Hanoi Hilton. These vague, generalized media images make up the vast majority of people's opinions about McCain and Romney. Not even McCain's very visible cheerleading for an extremely unpopular war puts much of a dent in his rep. (And, of course, Rudy, is very pro-war, but he mostly talks in generalities about foreign policy.)

Somebody has to flood voters' minds with counter-impressions of these guys.

That's why I've been tearing my hair out for a long time about the Democratic Party's utter failure to try to frame the GOP front-runners as Bush clones on foreign policy (or even to remind voters that they're Republicans).

Maybe it's too much to ask, but I'd like there to be ads on TV and the Internet now running back-to-back near-identical quotes, on Iraq and other foreign-policy issues, from Giuliani and Bush, and Giuliani and Cheney; the same goes for Romney and Bush/Cheney, Thompson and Bush/Cheney, and, what the hell, McCain and Bush/Cheney. At the very least, the Democratic Party should be using ads to pound front-runner Giuliani's 2004 Republican convention line "thank God George Bush is our president" into voters' minds.

Voters haven't truly absorbed what these guys really think. If Democrats don't frame them, they'll continue to frame themselves. And this is an urgent problem, because Giuliani and McCain have a big head start.

This, by the way, is how Lieberman won in '06 -- he'd framed himself for years as likable and as a guy who's willing to buck party lines. That was enough to overcome a position on Iraq that was utterly repulsive to voters. Vague impressions deeply held often do that, unless a hell of a lot of effort is put into overcoming them.

****

OK, here's better news, from a Democracy Corps poll on the down-ballot 2008 elections:

* In the battleground of the 70 most competitive congressional districts (35 Democratic and 35 Republican-held), the Democratic incumbents, including the big class of freshmen, have quickly moved into dramatic leads in the named congressional ballot (52% to 40%.)
* In the 35 Republican battleground districts, the named Republicans trail their generic Democratic opponent by 5 points, 49% to 44%.
* In a poll across seven Republican-held U.S. Senate seats, the named U.S. Senators had a vote to re-elect of only 37% and were garnering only 44% of the vote against a generic challenger.
* ... the Republicans have weakened in the current period since April to their lowest thermometer score in the past half century.

Yes, it's a Democratic poll, but it's causing real agita at at least one top-shelf righty blog.

People absolutely want to go the Democrats' way -- but their fondness for, say, Giuliani could trump that in the presidential race even as Democrats do very well in other contests.