Let me try to hash out a miscellany of unrelated little points I’d like to mention. The New Republic is not only a nearly-hundred-year-old institution fastened up with luminaries like Edmund Wilson and Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly, and not only does the current management sometimes see it in its heart to publish my articles, but the magazine now has a blog. (I’ve given it a look; and it’s really quite good.) It seems it’ll be run on the Tapped model, with none of the entries signed, though most or at least many will be written by staffer Noam Scheiber. I think that’s a good model for a magazine blog. Having a bunch of different people signing entries on a single blog makes for clutter and cacophony. Better to run them unsigned.
Whether they’ll be running any items at four in the morning remains to be seen.
Regular readers know that I keep a close eye on the Thune-Johnson Senate contest in South Dakota. For some time I’ve been saying that Johnson would do much better than people were thinking. This is a close race certainly. But 
the very latest round of polls leaves no doubt that Johnson holds a small but steady lead. A new Zogby poll has Johnson up 46-43. Monday on CNN Robert Novak said that Republican insiders were telling him that their polls showed Thune down by four, though I’ve heard rumors of a GOP poll showing an even deeper deficit.
In his commentary Novak said this was a “close race. It’s been going back and forth.” It’s definitely close. But what strikes me is that it really hasn’t been going back and forth. Look at the polls on this race over the last six months or so and you see a slow but consistent trend bringing Johnson from running behind up to ten points or so until today when he is in every poll running at least a few points ahead of Thune. It’s a tight race. And it’d be foolish to be complacent. But I’d be really surprised if Johnson doesn’t win this one.
Also of interest, the latest St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll — also done by Zogby — has Senator Jean Carnahan up by seven points over Jim Talent. That’s supposed to be one of the close races. So that’s an important result.
