In my last post, I examined the odd twist to this year's Jon Corzine self-funding drama -- that unlike previous years, Corzine is loaning millions of dollars to his campaign committee, rather than simply donating the funds outright.

This, I explained, could, if Corzine wins reelection next Tuesday, create a massive conflict of interest problem, where virtually every entity in the state capable of writing a $25,000 check to the New Jersey Democratic State Committee could feel pressured to kick in a huge contribution, for the purpose of retiring Corzine's personal debt.

Here's the kicker:

Is Jon Corzine setting himself up for the Mother of All Conflicts of Interest?

A check of Corzine's fundraising reports, on file with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission, reveals an odd twist to the story of a man who's now spent more than $130 million of his own money in pursuit of higher office -- he's now looking for payback from his campaign committee after the election.

Corzine's most recent ELEC filings reveal that unlike his campaign efforts in 2000 and 2005, when he simply wrote a personal check and donated it to the campaign, this time around he is writing personal checks and loaning the money to his campaign.

He loaned his campaign $2 million on October 19, $1.2 million on October 26, and another $1.5 million on October 27. Grand total: $4.7 million to date.

Thus, Corzine, if he wins reelection next Tuesday, will be the first New Jersey Governor in anyone's memory to have a personal financial stake in the success of his campaign committee's fundraising.

This morning's survey release by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute is the best news Chris Christie has had in a long time. While he hasn't yet closed the deal -- he'll need five more days of hard, error-free campaigning to do that -- the greatest threat to his victory is on its way to becoming a spent force. The race for governor of New Jersey is, once again, his to lose.

That lede might upset the team running the campaign of embattled Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine. After all, they might think that Corzine's first significant lead of the year -- at 43-38 percent over Christie, with Independent candidate Chris Daggett drawing 13 percent of the vote -- would be cause for celebration.

It will be. But for Christie, not for Corzine.

"New York 23" ... Them's fightin' words.

These days, whether you're a conservative activist, or a Republican Party official, saying "New York 23" out loud leads to a shortening of breath, a quickening of the pulse, and a tightening of the muscles. Heads whip around to see who said it, and in what context -- friend, or foe?

With less than a week to go before the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District, tempers are flaring on the campaign trail -- and fingers are being pointed in, and at, a big white building at 320 First Street SE.

UPDATED

Barack Obama wants to help Jon Corzine win in New Jersey — so he’s coming back one more time. But will it, in fact, help?

Data from a Monmouth University/Gannett poll, conducted Oct. 15-18, suggests it might not — depending on how you look at it, and who’s doing the looking.

According to the survey, President Obama’s job approval rating in New Jersey is 53 percent approve, 39 percent disapprove. That’s a net plus-14 on the job approval rating. On the face of it, it looks like it would be a good move to bring him in.

But a closer look at the data reveals that among the few undecided voters remaining in the race, his job approval ratings are a bit lower — 44 percent approve, 35 percent disapprove. So that net plus-14 among all likely voters is only a net plus-9 among undecided voters. And his approval rating among those key undecided voters is less than 50 percent. So it looks like it’s still a good idea, but a bit less of one.

With eight days to go in the New Jersey governor's race, this new SurveyUSA poll and this new Eagleton-Rutgers survey make it clear -- independent candidate Chris Daggett, at 19 and 20 percent on the ballot test and climbing, respectively, has moved beyond "spoiler" status into bona fide potential governor territory.

To put Daggett's 19 and 20 percent in context, when former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura pulled off his upset victory in the 1998 governor's race, he polled at 21 percent on Oct. 18 -- and he polled at 27 percent in the last pre-election survey, before closing with 37 percent of the vote on Election Day.

So the question now is, what would it take for Daggett to close the deal and pull off the upset?

Why in the world is Barack Obama going to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds in Hampton Roads next Tuesday?

After reading this bombshell in this morning’s Washington Post — “Deeds ignored advice, White House says” — any words of support from Obama’s mouth to the assembled masses will ring hollow.

The post-mortem blame game is always the worst part of any losing campaign.

And, speaking from experience, I can say with confidence that most practitioners of the fine arts of the campaign would rather lose by a lot than lose by a little — when you get swamped, you realize there was very little you could have done differently to change the outcome, and you can mentally shake off the loss and look forward to the next campaign as soon as you recover from your hangover.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

That aphorism -- penned by the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana more than a century ago -- must be hanging on a wall wherever it is that New Jersey Republican leaders gather to swap campaign war stories, because boy, oh, boy, do these guys check every move they make against something that happened once in a previous campaign.

Remembering the past is a valuable tool in a campaign, where the most valuable resource is time, and there's precious little of it to waste. Done properly, remembering the past can help inform a campaign's decisions, and help it avoid obvious trouble.

But there's a limit to the value of memory, and a campaign should never allow itself to become a captive of its collective memory.

Writing about a well-researched subject is a daunting task. How can you, as an author, find something new and/or interesting to say about something that’s been written about a dozen, or several score, or even hundreds of times?

Craig Shirley has definitively answered that question: Give them the back story — and the back story on the back story.

In other words, sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

In “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” Shirley goes where, at last count, roughly 900 authors — including Lou Cannon, William F. Buckley Jr., Martin and Annelise Anderson, Steven Hayward, Richard Reeves, Paul Kengor, Andrew Busch, and Peter Schweizer, among others — have already gone.

Tonight is the final "televised" debate of the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign.

I put "televised" in quotes because while it is true that it will be televised, very few people will see it -- because the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission chose to pass on the League of Women Voters invitation to joint sponsorship with the ABC television affiliates in New York and Philadelphia, this debate will "air" on Saturday afternoon at 2 PM on Philadelphia's FOX affiliate, and Sunday afternoon on WWOR in the New York market. The debate will be up against college football on Saturday in south Jersey, and on Sunday, the debate will be programmed against a New York Giants football game.

Most people learn about debates not by watching them, but from news coverage afterward. In this case, that dynamic will be amplified.

If National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Pete Sessions were a movie golfer, he'd be David Simms, the fictional antagonist of director Ron Shelton's 1996 romantic comedy, "Tin Cup."

That movie, you'll recall, also starred Kevin Costner as driving range pro Roy "Tin Cup" McAvoy.

Tin Cup/Costner is the Errol Flynn of movie golf, the swashbuckling hero of derring-do, always ready to pull the three wood and have a go at it, even from bad lies in the rough and over water; Simms/Johnson, his nemesis, is Tin Cup's exact opposite, a "grinder," the kind of golfer who's perfectly happy with par, and who always plays the safe shot, even when the riskier shot isn't all much riskier.

A special election today in middle Tennessee will be crucial in determining whether Republicans or Democrats control the next round of redistricting in 2011.

Going all the way back to the middle of the 19th Century, Tennessee's legislature was safely in the hands of Democrats -- and with it, control of redistricting.

Even when Republicans controlled the governor's mansion during redistricting years -- as they did in 1981 (when Lamar Alexander was Governor) and 2001 (when Don Sundquist was Governor) -- the Democrats' majority in both houses was strong enough to override a gubernatorial veto.

Here's yet one more item for the file called, "If Sarah Palin Wants To Run for President, She's Got To Learn To Handle Press Inquiries Better."

Politico this morning has a piece reporting that former GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin is not wanted by the GOP nominees for governor in either of the nation's two marquee governor's races.

That she should not be a desired surrogate -- neither as a draw for a fundraiser, nor to generate earned media -- should not be a surprise.

In both New Jersey and Virginia, moderate suburban female non-partisans are keys to victory. Right now, depending on which poll you examine, they're either lining up with the GOP candidate or remaining neutral.

A Palin visit -- as much as it might energize the base -- could quite possibly do more damage than good for the GOP nominee.

Swing State Project analyzed the recent release from the Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey, and the numbers may help explain how Barack Obama did so well in traditionally red states last year -- and why both Republicans and Democrats are going to have to rethink their long-term Electoral College strategies.

According to the data, 21 of the 25 fastest-growing congressional districts in the country (as measured between 2000 and 2008) are currently represented in the House of Representatives by Republicans.

The only four of the 25 fastest-growing districts not represented by Republicans are in the suburbs and exurbs of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Raleigh, and Chicago.

Already enveloped by controversy over his personal life and use of state funds, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford just can't seem to catch a break.

The latest: His car was pulled over for speeding by a South Carolina state trooper who asked his driver, "You got a good reason for running 85?"

The driver allowed as how he was driving the governor, which didn't seem to faze the trooper, who responded, "Not a really good reason to be speeding."

"Dems beg Deeds for positive message," read the headline on Politico last night, over a story reporting complaints by Democrats Terry McAuliffe, U.S. Rep. James P. Moran, and outgoing Gov. Tim Kaine that Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds is relying too heavily on negative messaging against his GOP opponent, Bob McDonnell, and should instead re-focus his campaign communications efforts to highlight a more positive message in the closing weeks of the campaign.

It's the exact reverse of the situation in New Jersey, where it is Republican armchair quarterbacks -- yours truly included -- who have been urging the GOP nominee to re-focus his campaign communications efforts to highlight a more positive message in the closing weeks of the campaign.

In both states, the insiders running the campaigns have decided the surest route to eventual victory is to run a primarily negative campaign, raising the opponent's personal unfavorable ratings to toxic levels and doing very little positive that might threaten to draw coverage away from their negative message.

Imagine you're a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.

Now imagine you're the kind of arrogant liberal who believes he knows what's best for everyone within the sound of his voice, or within sight of his text.

But I repeat myself.

You're used to having your way in certain circles, and, let's face it, they're the kind of circles in which lots of people would like to have their way -- the Upper West Side, 30 Rock and Black Rock, 430 South Capitol Street SW in Washington, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, and even H-232 of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington.

But alas, your power and influence apparently do you no good in room 2354 of the Rayburn House Office Building, where this congressman retreats at the end of his long days transferring wealth from one class of people to another.

Well, Chris Christie’s campaign today demonstrated, yet again, its tactical brilliance.

Unfortunately, for Republicans who want to capture the New Jersey’s governor’s office again, it did so at the cost of demonstrating its strategic lunacy.

As anybody who’s paid even the slightest attention to the race over the last few months is now aware, the meta-story of the campaign is that incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine — who, based on upside-down personal favorables and job approval numbers, entered the campaign year trailing in every poll known to man — and was running so far behind just a few weeks ago that there was informed speculation Democrats would try to remove him from the ballot — has now scratched and clawed his way back into a statistical dead heat.

With four weeks left in the campaign, it’s a tossup.

The most disturbing thing about the Sacramento Bee's report that California gubernatorial wannabe Meg Whitman didn't vote for 28 years isn't that she didn't vote for 28 years, it's that her campaign wasn't ready for the accusation that she didn't vote for 28 years.

Not being ready to respond to such a charge is evidence of two major flaws in her campaign's preparation -- to wit, the failure to conduct a comprehensive vulnerability study on their own candidate, combined with the failure to prepare responses to likely attacks.

That the campaign wasn't prepared to respond to accusations about her poor voting record can be adduced from the fact that it took the campaign a full ten days after the story broke to go up with a counter-offensive in the form of a letter of complaint from campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds(late of the McCain for President campaign) to Bee political editor Amy Chance.

But that's not to say the campaign was mum for 10 days.

If you're Marco Rubio and you're counting on generating millions of dollars in contributions for your Florida Senate primary contest against a sitting governor of your own party -- a guy you're trying to paint as a big-spending, President Obama-loving liberal -- do you think it helps you, or hurts you, to have the support of George W. Bush's right-hand man?

To many inside-the-Beltway conservative leaders, Karl Rove was one of the architects of the disaster that was the Bush administration:

Rove was the one behind the establishment of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit (read: the biggest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society);

Rove was the one pushing for comprehensive immigration overhaul (read: amnesty for illegal immigrants);

Rove was the one pushing Bush to sign McCain-Feingold (read: Rove wanted to lock in John McCain's support for Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, and was willing to trash the First Amendment if necessary);

Rove was the one who drove federal spending to new heights (read: Rove was the one who drove federal spending to new heights).

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner clearly haven't figured out yet how to work together, left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas and NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions just as clearly have.

How else to explain Moulitsas' endorsement of Sessions' favored candidate for Congress in the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District?

Yes, that's the district newly confirmed Secretary of the Army John McHugh just vacated, where the anointed Republican candidate -- New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava -- has been the subject of local and national conservative scorn.

Since the announcement that President Obama would travel to Copenhagen to add his international prestige to the weight of Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, there's been much speculation as to his reasoning. Some have even suggested that Chicago's victory must already have been decided, and must already have been known to Obama, else he would not have agreed to go -- going, and failing to bring back the Olympics, would, in this view, have caused irreparable damage to presidential prestige.

But anyone who believes Obama would not dare make the trip without knowing ahead of time that Chicago's victory was already assured doesn't understand the politics of Chicago -- the fact is, Obama simply had to go, for his own personal and parochial political reasons.

In this, his decision resembles nothing so much as an updated version of French philosopher Blaise Pascal's famous wager.