With 17 percentage-point support, Sarah Palin was the top pick for president of 804 poll respondents who ID’d themselves as GOP or independents who lean GOP. Pawlenty was at 1 percent, along with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

It was a similar story when pollsters asked who “best reflects the core values of the Republican Party.” Palin again drew the most support (18 percent), with Pawlenty again at 1 percent, this time with more company. Besides Jindal, Paul, Guiliani, other 1-percenters included Colin Powell, both President Bushes, and even Ronald Reagan.

Pawlenty has traveled the country speaking about attracting voters to the GOP who are “not yet Republicans” – while also anticipating the proposed “purity test” with his chastisements for New York congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava and U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe for not towing the party line.

The poll was conducted Nov. 19–23 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points for GOP voters and five points for leaning-GOP voters.

Kline gave the GOP response to President Obama’s weekly address, reaching a bit for Labor Day relevance by tying fears about health care reform to fears about job losses. (Gov. Pawlenty had his turn delivering the Republican message last April before another holiday — Tax Day.)

It’s a new role for Kline, a strong, silent type whose conservative credentials helped him leapfrog more senior Republicans in June to become the ranking member on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Now he’s the GOP’s official point man attacking Democrats’ efforts to reform health care — though he’s outdone almost daily by his colleague in Minnesota’s Congressional delegation: Michele Bachmann.

She held a townhall on the topic; he won’t. But the man who once carried the suitcase containing the presidential Denny’s-style menu for nuclear war told a telephone townhall meeting that Senate Democrats passing health care reform by simple majority would be “the nuclear option, because it would cause the Senate to explode.”

The video of Kline’s Republican address is below. Here are the main themes:

Be very afraid

American families are worried … If you think that’s frightening, I’m sorry to say it could get even worse … No wonder Americans are scared … They also fear, and rightly so …

Au revoir, doc

What will happen to my coverage, and my choice of doctors? … the comfort of a familiar physician … Democrats’ plans may cost patients the right to see their family doctor …

Did I mention the re-set button?

It’s time to press the ‘reset’ button … It’s not too late to start over … honor American workers by hitting the ‘reset’ button on health care reform …

Roberts’ advice to Reagan included this:

It is also important to consider the precedent that would be set by such a letter. In today’s [Washington] Post there were already reports that some youngsters were turning away from Mr. Jackson in favor of a newcomer who goes by the name “Prince,” and is apparently planning a Washington concert. Will he receive a Presidential letter? How will we decide which performers do and which do not?

“The whole thing’s a scream,” observes David Weigel at our sister site, The Washington Independent. It’s well worth reading the Post’s full account for other delicious tidbits. For example, while dissing Jackson, Roberts judged Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” tour to be commendably “patriotic” —  suggesting that Roberts completely missed the album’s undercurrent of cynicism and doubt about the country under Reagan.

Strange that he would miss that, considering that he’s apparently a close reader of Springsteen’s hero, Dylan. In what’s thought to be the first occasion on which pop music invaded the sacrosanct realm of high court opinions, Roberts cited a Dylan lyric in an opinion last June:

The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Roberts’ predecessor as chief justice, William Rehnquist, liked light-opera legends Gilbert and Sullivan so much so that he not only quoted them in opinions but added fussy accessories to his judicial robes that looked like knock-offs from Gilbert and Sullivan costumes.

No word on whether Roberts wears a mid-’80s-style Springsteen bandana tied around his head while crafting opinions in chambers. Actually, Prince has provided a more judicial look in some phases of his career.

And Prince also gets political from time to time, most recently working federal bailouts and North Minneapolis’ progress (or lack thereof) into a jam on his latest CD. Indeed, at the time Roberts began writing his Jackson briefs, “Purple Rain” was days away from being released (the release date was June 25, 1984 — 25 years to the day before Jackson’s death) so youngsters would still have been digging earlier songs off his previous record, “Controversy”, including one called “Annie Christian” that mentions Reagan:

Annie Christian was a whore always looking for some fun
being good was such a bore, so she bought a gun
she killed John Lennon, shot him down cold
she tried to kill Reagan, everybody say gun control (gun control!)

Here’s a video of Prince, hand in pocket, performing a punked-up version of “Annie Christian” at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 21, 1981.

National Portrait Gallery (Obama: Warren Perry)

Think it was mere chance that got Minneapolis a mention in President Obama’s address to Congress? It turns out that the select occasions in the past when Minnesota’s biggest city turned up in presidential addresses have always been during serious talk about tough times. In fact, it happened first during the first State of the Union of the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover, annual message to the Congress on the state of the union, Dec. 2, 1930:

The world-wide depression has affected agriculture in common with all other industries. … The price levels of our major agricultural commodities are, in fact, higher than those in other principal producing countries, due to the combined result of the tariff and the operations of the Farm Board. For instance, wheat prices at Minneapolis are about 30 per cent higher than at Winnipeg, and at Chicago they are about 20 per cent higher than at Buenos Aires.

Herbert Hoover, address in Springfield, Ill., Nov. 4, 1932:

In speaking at Des Moines I gave some figures at which farm commodities could be sold in the United States from foreign countries, even in these days of distressing and even heartbreaking prices, if the tariff were reduced to a competitive basis for revenue. I can add some items that are especially applicable to the State of Illinois. … Your butter, which sells in New York at 22 cents, could be sold from New Zealand at this moment for 16 were it not for the tariff. And, as a matter of fact, your wheat, distressing as the price is, is selling in Minneapolis today at 12 cents above the Canadian price for similar grades.

Ronald Reagan, radio address to the nation on a House budget proposal, March 26, 1983 (on the other side of another economic crisis):

As inflation and interest rates come down and our tax cuts come on stream, families have more to spend or save, as you wish. And that is why savings and productivity are growing again. Recently I received a letter from the president of a family-owned lumber company in Minneapolis, one which — like so many other small firms — has been hard-hit by the recession. But now this man’s mood has turned optimistic. He told me that his sales for the months of December and January were the best for 3 months in his company’s 50-year history. And he wrote, “Mr. President, don’t get stampeded into some ill-conceived pump-priming scheme that will lead to another round of inflation boom and bust. You were elected to break that cycle. What you’ve done is working.” Well, my answer to that fine gentleman is, “I won’t be stampeded. I intend to do everything I can to protect this recovery all of us have worked so hard to achieve.”

Here’s a quote that’s worth a mention, though it doesn’t fit the pattern and came from a man who was not yet president. It’s a kind of bookend to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s remarks about Hurricane Katrina in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address last night.

George W. Bush, address accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Aug. 3, 2000:

And, in the next bold step of welfare reform, we will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food pantries and crisis pregnancy centers — people reclaiming their communities block-by-block and heart-by-heart. I think of Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry called “Sharing and Caring Hands” serves 1,000 meals a week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each day, Mary Jo washes the feet of the homeless, then sends them off with new socks and shoes. “Look after your feet,” she tells them. … “They must carry you a long way in this world, and then all the way to God.” Government cannot do this work. It can feed the body, but it cannot reach the soul. Yet government can take the side of these groups, helping the helper, encouraging the inspired.

Finally, one earlier Minneapolis mention by President Obama:

Barack Obama, the president’s weekly address, Feb. 7, 2009:

From the beginning, this recovery plan has had at its core a simple idea: Let’s put Americans to work doing the work America needs done. It will save or create more than 3 million jobs over the next 2 years, all across the country — 16,000 in Maine, nearly 80,000 in Indiana — almost all of them in the private sector, and all of them jobs that help us recover today and prosper tomorrow. … Jobs that rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges and levees and dams, so that the tragedies of New Orleans and Minneapolis never happen again.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and other presidents mentioned Minneapolis during addresses they gave while visiting Minnesota, but there the reference was clearly for parochial purposes. The quotes listed above are the only other presidential addresses that mention Minneapolis listed at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project Web archive.

There’s nothing new about the northern Minnesota reservation getting attention during tight election contests. As reported here last month, the director of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, Ed Rollins, is fond of recalling how he had to talk down hard-charging colleagues who wanted to recount what they thought were suspicious votes there (by “dead Indians”) in hopes of netting the Gipper a full 50-state sweep. And Red Lake has had experience with close races and calls for recounts in tribal government elections as recently as 2006.

The area has even found a way to play a leading role in the preliminaries to the historic recount that begins this week in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election. Last week the Franken campaign put forward what turned out to be mostly a rural legend about an elderly woman whose absentee ballot was rejected because after she had a stroke, her signature no longer matched the one on file. Even as it emerged that this wasn’t the case, the woman was never identified publicly — except that she lives in Beltrami County, where most of the Red Lake reservation lies.

Rollins’ use of the phrase “dead Indians” is disturbing — especially coming amid what one blog says were “lusty laughs” during some playful patter at the end of a segment titled “America Divided” that co-anchor Kiran Chetry had kicked off with a replay of Bachmann’s calling the country’s first major-party African-American presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, ”anti-American.”

In the most charitable light, Rollins seems to be asserting that through fraudulent means, Native Americans in northern Minnesota who were ineligible to cast ballots — possibly because they were actually deceased? — threw the election and denied Reagan a 50-state sweep.

It’s not the first time Rollins has nursed that particular surface wound to his professional campaign manager’s pride. On Nov. 14, 2000, in the midst of the Bush-Gore presidential election recount mess, he told CNN’s Larry King, “I’ve had many people second-guess campaigns that I’ve run, including why did I lose Minnesota when I was running Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1984?” Right-wing blogs say Reagan himself pined for a recount, but the Minnesota secretary of state’s office tells Minnesota Independent that no recount took place in the state’s 1984 presidential election, which Mondale won by an actual count of “about 3,700 votes out of 2,000,000 cast.” 

Here’s an excerpt from CNN’s transcript of today’s “American Morning” show:

CHETRY: Is Pennsylvania, even though it looks right now to appear to be leaning toward Obama still up for grabs because of some of the comments that have been made?

ROLLINS: Well, I’m not saying it’s up for grabs, it’s always been a very competitive and a very hard state for Republicans to win. Even in Reagan’s campaign that I ran 24 years ago, it was the last state to come into the line. So it’s a competitive state. 13 points, 14 points is a pretty darn good lead. And if I was Obama, i would go back one more time. I would do what the governor wants.

CHETRY: All right. Ed Rollins, always good to have you with us.

ROLLINS: My pleasure.

CHETRY: Thanks.

ROLLINS: Thank you very much.

ROBERTS: How did you screw up in Minnesota? 

ROLLINS: They voted a lot of dead Indians along the border. 1620 votes, I’m not bitter.

ROBERTS: Ed, thanks.

ROLLINS: Thank you.

Purely as a question of self-interest, John McCain’s exit-the-stage gambit makes sense. With cries of impending doom filling the air, he had nothing to gain by sticking around to discuss a subject he ill understands, all the while being pelted with quotations of the Hoover-like things he’s already said and done during his long tenure as a cheerleader of financial deregulation. On Monday of last week, McCain proclaimed the economy “fundamentally strong” even as Wall Street’s latest and gaudiest blowup was unfolding. Since then he’s faced erosion in the polls day after day.

There are those who think the real point of McCain’s whole exercise is to can the vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, but that’s a grace note if it happens, far less urgent than McCain’s own immediate need to find a pretext for disappearing until a bailout is done and the acute phase of the crisis seems past. The ploy also serves the larger Bush administration push to get a deal through Congress with a minimum of reflection and revision, as they so spectacularly succeeded in doing with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War resolution.

But if McCain’s move makes sense for McCain in a narrow and craven sense, the implicit (and sometimes express) embrace of it by news media and the opining classes is a measure of how theatrical and unserious our politics, and especially our presidential campaigns, have become. There’s a political issue of grave consequence at hand? We must cancel politics at once!

The economic crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a political crisis. The decisions being weighed now, about how to intervene in the economy to keep it from lurching to a halt, and how to minimize–or maximize–the long-term losses to the public at large, will shape the country’s options for decades to come.

We are already vastly in the hole from an Iraq War tab that Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates at an eventual $3 trillion. If the Paulson plan is adopted substantially as proposed (with no provisions, or just token provisions, for recapturing bailout funds from future financial sector profits), that additional debt will guarantee that for practical purposes, only two lines exist on future federal budgets: the Pentagon and debt service. In fact, we are already facing a domestic future that’s drastically circumscribed by Iraq War debt, but that’s hardly a reason to double down.

The enormous national debt functions in part as a political tool, a lesson the Republicans learned a generation ago. After David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, got over his initial disappointment at being unable to make deeper cuts in federal spending, he came to recognize that the political payoff of supply-side economics lay in the future, when accruing deficits would compel the dismantling of spending programs that were too politically popular to do away with under less dire budgetary circumstances. If Henry Paulson and friends sell this bailout with no consequential payback provisions, it won’t matter whether future presidents and Congresses continue to subscribe to neo-liberal austerity policies in principle. They will have no choice in the matter, because they will be broke.

In theory this is a moment of great potential for the Democrats, not just for purposes of this election but for reclaiming a popular constituency distinct from that of the Republicans. Apart from the half-a-loaf Dodd Plan — which, make no mistake, seems unmistakably superior to the Paulson heist — they have had remarkably little to say about the remedies for a crisis they ought to have recognized as a real election-season possibility.

Barack Obama’s refusal of McCain’s bait was one of the more gratifying things he’s done in this campaign. It was heartening to hear him say that now was emphatically not the time to stop talking about political solutions. There’s no question that Obama has seemed far more measured and presidential than the erratic, dithersome McCain — but who wouldn’t? Obama’s list of conditions for a bailout deal were quickly parroted in essence by McCain, and both amounted to affirmations of what internal dissent in Congress — driven in large measure by intransigent House Republicans — had already made an accomplished fact: On its own terms, the Paulson plan wasn’t going to fly. Finally even George W. Bush said as much last night.

Like the Iraq War, the financial crisis is being framed not as a debate over national direction but one over managerial competency. And managerial competency, vitally important as it may be, is not really a political issue. It is a subject that engenders discussions about the best means of executing a policy, not deliberations over what the policy should be. To the extent Obama and the Democrats accede in this — to the extent their actions suggest only that Obama would be a more responsible manager of crises like the present one — they are taking the politics out of politics, too.