It is a banner day for the United States Congress.  Just when you thought that Congress had gone as low as they could go, Rasmussen Reports released a new poll today that proved that the numbers aren’t just bad, they’re abysmal.

The percentage of Americans giving the U.S. Congress a “good” or “excellent” rating has fallen to just 9%.  This rating is the lowest ever, of course, but also the first time that the rating has slipped into single digits.

The conventional wisdom of course is that conservatives are still disgruntled that the Congress flipped into Democratic control and the thought is still not settled in the minds of most GOPers.  Liberals are said to be disgruntled that the Congress hasn’t waved their magic wand and cured all of the world’s problems, from health care to the War in Iraq.  And moderates are, apparently, just too confused or too disgruntled to care.

Though the poll’s scope is national and not just on the great Nutmeg State (if you can believe that), this may be a harbinger of trouble for newly-minted Congressmen Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney in particular.  You probably have read that old tale: as the outgoing leader of a major company is heading out the door, he meets his replacement in the CEO’s office. 

The new guy says, “Do you have any advice for me?”  The old-timer looks at his successor for a minute and replies, “Surely.  I’ve left two letters in the desk here.  When you get into trouble, open the first letter.” 

So several months later, the new C.E.O. is having a really difficult time and so he opens the desk drawer and takes out the first letter.  It reads: “Blame everything on me.”  So the leader goes out and blames the troubles on his predecessor - and it works.  The trouble passes and things go on smoothly for awhile. 

But things then get difficult again and, remembering how well the first letter worked, the CEO goes to the second letter.  It starts out this way, “Write two letters.”

Murphy and Courtney got into office by heaping blame on the old boss in 2006.  In 2008, they are the bosses.  More heavily entrenched incumbents like Larson and DeLauro also have some answering to do.  Congressman Shays has probably inoculated himself from a good bit of much of these negatives with his maverick style and long-standing in the 4th Congressional District that has withstood strong challenges already. 

Whatever the case, it remains crystal clear that the national mood is ugly out there.  Americans are searching for different answers from their leaders.

Genghis Conn is running with a terrific series of pieces this week, entitled “Figuring Out Your District”.  Genghis - the high priest of the Connecticut blogopshere - is breaking down each Congressional District in Connecticut and figuring out where the votes really are.

On Saturday, GC waded in to the First Congressional District, where 50 years of Democratic rule is being challenged this year by up-and-comer West Hartford Town Councilor Joe Visconti.  It’s been a decade since Kevin O’Connor waged his spirited race for the then-open 1998 First Congressional District seat, earning repute amongst Republicans for his 41% showing against then-Sen. John Larson.  Genghis sums up the fate of the district this way:

And it’s these towns that time and again have delivered huge margins for John Larson, and for Barbara Kennelly before him. Of course, this allows us to see just how ridiculously gerrymandered this district (or the adjacent 5th district) is. The 1st skips across the top of the state to connect Greater Hartford and the river valley with a few tiny towns around… Torrington?

And that’s the story in the First Congressional District that no one ever talks about.

He took on the Big Deuce yesterday.  He zeroed in on one of the keys to the 2nd CD with this graph showing the margins from 2006.  Simmons beat now-Rep. Courtney everywhere except UCONN and (narrowly) Greater Hartford, and the overwhelming results from Mansfield turned the narrow tide for Courtney.

While this type of analysis always draws a great deal of Monday-morning quarterbacking, Genghis has really done a terrific job with his series so far, and I’m looking forward to the rest of them.

It’s the height of summer and one of the fun new traits of the ever-expanding political campaign season is the newfound importance of the Summer Campaign.  Normally a time for politicians to visit festivals, fairs, and parades, the summer months have become in recent years a critical time for political campaigns, as they prep the landscape for the fall battle.

It is too early and too wasteful to spend heavily on television advertisements for most of the Congressional level players - leaving plenty of time for public policy announcements and PR stunts.  For example, State Sen. David Cappiello unveiled a series of energy-related proposals to reduce the cost of energy in Connecticut - from expanding the use of safe, clean nuclear energy to ending ethanol mandates.  Meanwhile, the Democratic challenger to Chris Shays, ‘Jimmy’ Himes, walked across Fairfield County on the theory that what voters really want to see is a very sweaty guy.

But when you are running for President, the summer season isn’t just for fried dough and the Moosup V-J Day Parade anymore.  Amongst planning for the National Conventions and fundraising, candidates are staking out their general election campaign themes.  For presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama - the candidate of “change” in the race, this means, well, changing positions.

After a primary campaign that was animated by the vigor and vitality of thousands of young liberal activists across the country, in which Sen. Obama pledged his commitment to preserving the post-Watergate finance reforms in Presidential politics, he callously wiggled out of the promise after discovering that he could raise more outside of the system.

After defiantly declaring that he would debate foreign policy with John McCain “anywhere, anytime”, Senator Obama responded to McCain’s town hall forum proposal with a limp-wristed “the usual debates plus two more when no one is watching” counter-offer.

And after spending more than a year worth of primary campaign decrying U.S. military involvement in Iraq and pledging an unabashed retreat from that nation, Senator Obama - briefly - attempted to refine that position over the holiday weekend.

Obama knows and is sensitive to the fact that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did their work on Sen. John Kerry starting in August of 2004, and is already hostile to any attempt to “swift boat” his candidacy - as has become a shibboleth for Democratic politicians everywhere.  The summer heat should not be a fair excuse, though, for wholesale position changes from the “change” candidate.

The Quinnipiac University pollsters showed that they aren’t just surveyors of the political landscape today as they cleverly stretched their Connecticut polling results into at least two days worth of news articles instead of the the traditional one.  On Tuesday, they dropped the news that the Governor has come off the peak of her approval numbers (though remaining high) and that Chris Dodd numbers are as stagnant as the CT economy.  Today, they released the Obama/McCain head-to-heads.

There aren’t many clever ways to spin the topline numbers.  The newly-minted presumptive Democratic nominee has a 21% lead over Republican presumptive nominee John McCain, with 56% saying they’d go with Obama versus 35% for McCain.

When you dig into the numbers, you don’t have to be qualified to park a remote control car on Mars to figure out what is going on.  President Bush is weighing in at 19%-78% approve/disapprove - basically,  John McCain is running a marathon with a dead elephant tied on his back.  Even Republicans have soured on the 43rd President, with 45% expressing their disapproval.

There is something a little curious about the Q Poll though.  It is widely regarded in Connecticut political circles as the “gold standard” polling outfit.  What they say matters, mostly because they are the only ones talking in the Nutmeg State.  But if you take a look in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio, you can see a pattern that seems to reflect a roughly 3-5% ‘Quinnipiac bump’ for Barack Obama.

In Pennsylvania, Real Clear Politics has the RCP Polling Average at Obama +7.7 over Sen. McCain.  Q’s last poll had Obama up by 12 points, though Rasmussen has it at just +4.  Since February 19, RCP has the results of 28 polls posted - Quinnipiac has done eight of them.  The numbers have been all over the yard - some with McCain up, some with Obama up, others having the two Senators at basically even.  But all eight Q polls have had Obama up.

Ohio is a different state and a different side of the same coin.  The Buckeye State seems poised to be Waterloo once again for one of the two candidates and there have been 24 polls since August 2007, according to RCP.  QU has done seven polls, and four have had McCain up - but in six of the cases, the numbers have been just enough different from the other pollsters to be interesting.  While other polls showed a bit of a rise for McCain in late March, Q’s did not.  They are consistently lower than the others.

Florida is a lousy comparison because most of the other pollsters are using much smaller sample sizes.  But if you do compare the two most recent that have similar samples - the other poll being a Strategic Vision poll - you see that QU is Obama +4 while Strategic Vision is McCain +8.

At the end of the day, this is going to probably be a difference in QU’s polling model - perhaps trying to model the anticipated wave of newly-registered Democrats.  Regardless, in the context of the current case, 3-5 points has only a minimal impact on 21% worth of spread.  But it is worth keeping an eye on.

It is also important to take the numbers seriously, but not too seriously.  It is barely July, the extent of the political battles between the two campaigns haven’t - for most normal people - even registered on the radar screen, and the ground-pounders aren’t out in force yet.  It will come.

John McCain’s campaign got a boost in New England today with the grand opening of their New England Headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire this evening.  The office will serve as the command center for all McCain Campaign efforts in New England.

U.S. Senator John Sununu fired up the crowd of 250 people with a rousing speech about his friend John McCain.  Former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Fergus Cullen, and numerous Republican elected officials from New Hampshire were also on hand for the opening ceremonies.

Chairman Chris Healy, a veteran of numerous Presidential campaigns that have taken him to New Hampshire over the years, took some time to say hello to old friends and take the Grand Tour of the new space.  The Chairman took his turn in the saddle, sitting and making calls to undecided New Hampshire voters and asking them to support John McCain in the November general election.

The mood at McCain HQ was upbeat and optimistic - they filled the office to the rafters for the event, even to the point of having people stuck outside the doors to the office in lieu of getting inside.  They were very positive about their chances to compete in all of the New England states - despite the conventional wisdom.

Senator McCain’ s campaign had previously announced that they are structuring their campaign with a dramatically different format than the previous Bush-Cheney efforts.  Command and control has been pressed out into nine different regions with ‘Regional Campaign Managers’ as the lead operative in the region.  The regional offices are only the most obvious edification of the campaign’s design.

As always, Chairman Healy was pleased to stand with fellow New England Republicans and once again publicly show his support for the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.

The pollsters at Quinnipiac University took the temperature of the Nutmeg State, and they found rising frustration toward the status quo.  The poll showed Governor M. Jodi Rell’s approval rating has dipped to 65% favorable, having shed 11% since the March 27 poll.  Countrywide VIP Chris Dodd came in with ratings at 51% favorable to 34% unfavorable, with just 14% of respondents saying they would “definitely” vote for Dodd in 2010 and 19% saying they would “definitely not” vote for Dodd.

Perhaps most troubling for incumbents across the board is the question about “how satisified” people are with the way things are going in the State.  24% of those polled said they were “very dissatisfied” and 35% said they were “somewhat dissatisfied”. 

It seems clear that, like much of the nation, people are getting fed up with the way things are going in the United States.  Neither political party can claim a monopoly on the blame for this one. 

Too many years of a President that can’t convincingly articulate a vision for the future of the nation, a poorly waged war, out-of-control wasteful spending, and flatfootedness on the economic crunch has soured people on the Republican brand.

The Dems, of course, though feeling the the Obama-brand mojo, haven’t done any better.  Democrats in Washington and Hartford continue to tend to Big Labor and Big Government at the expense of working-class values have not done any better in providing solutions.

Until this logjam of futility breaks and things start to move, the polling won’t get any better.