- Using racial slurs against each other during legislative debates over flying the flag.

- Getting convicted for election fraud in East St. Louis.

- And starting to dislike themselves more than Republicans do:

A poll on the political mood in the United States conducted by the Democratic Party has alarmed the party at its own loss of popularity. Conducted by the party-affiliated Democracy Corps, the poll indicated 43 percent of voters favored the Republican Party, while 38 percent had positive feelings about Democrats.

“Republicans weakened in this poll … but it shows Democrats weakening more,” said Stanley Greenberg, who served as President Clinton’s pollster.

Greenberg told the Christian Science Monitor he attributes the slippage to voters’ perceptions that Democrats have “no core set of convictions or point of view.”

Go figure.

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Update: Polling guru Gerry Daly of Daly Thoughts shares some non-glib feedback on the Greenberg survey…

I am not sure that the survey supports the claim that Democrats are starting to dislike themselves more than Republicans do– it did not give crosstabs by parties. What the survey did show is that voters in general are starting to dislike Democrats more in aggregate (although that is unfortunately still debatable. More people indicated subpar feelings about Republicans by a point than about Democrats.)

The survey asked people to rate various groups on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being a complete warm and fuzzy feeling, and zero being how America felt about Jimmy Carter in November of 1976 (I am kidding– zero meant a completely negative feeling). The mean or average rating given to Democrats was 9/10ths of a point below the mean score given to Republicans (Bush’s mean was higher still).

The part that cracked me up was they asked about feelings towards ‘new immigrants’– and Americans gave them a higher rating than they gave Democrats (but not quite as high as they gave Republicans).

They also asked about feelings towards ‘undocumented immigrants’, and they scored the lowest of any group tested by a considerable amount. Even avoiding the term “illegal aliens” did not soften the results.

Very interesting.

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