My Creators Syndicate column for this week takes a look at the polls in the presidential race and notes evidence that the balance of enthusiasm no longer favors Barack Obama. Written late last week, this seems somewhat prescient. Monday's Gallup tracking poll shows Obama leading John McCain 46 percent to 43 percent, while Monday's Rasmussen tracking poll shows McCain ahead 47 percent to 46 percent—a statistically insignificant margin, to be sure, but the first time McCain has been ahead in this poll since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination June 3. The realclearpolitics.com average shows Obama at 46.6 percent and McCain at 44.3 percent.

Two items from Rasmussen I didn't have room for in the 750-word column format.

After 51 years as a reporter and columnist (who always remained a reporter) in Washington, Robert Novak has announced his retirement after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a prognosis described as "dire." Nothing short of deathly illness could have stopped Novak from reporting, and now it appears it has. I have been reading Novak's work since the beginning of the Evans and Novak column in 1963, and I have become more and more of an admirer over the years. Here is my review for the Weekly Standard, published just a year ago, of Novak's riveting autobiography, The Prince of Darkness. It was an honor to be asked to write the review, and a bit dicey, because Novak's book takes note of his not-on-speaking-terms feud with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. As I wrote in the review, The Prince of Darkness belongs on the short list of books that tell you just about all you need to know about politics and journalism in the last two thirds of the 20th century—the others being Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Robert Merry's Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Guardians of the American Century, and Katharine Graham's Personal History. Let me quote the last paragraphs of my review:

I was shocked and immensely saddened by news of the death of Peter Rodman last weekend at the tragically young age of 64. I have known Peter and his wife, Veronique, over I don't know how many years. Quietly but influentially, Peter served in various positions in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations; he worked closely with Henry Kissinger in the 1970s and in writing his extraordinary memoirs. Peter wrote often for National Review, and there are moving tributes on National Review Online from Michael Ledeen, Rich Lowry, John O'Sullivan, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and Mario Loyola. I can't improve on their contributions, but I knew Peter well enough to verify their picture of him as wise, learned, witty, and indulgent. Unlike many prominent in Republican and Democratic foreign policy circles, Peter did not seek to advance his own fortunes and was happy to accept subordinate positions if he could be of service. There is no one quite like him. And no one quite like his wonderful wife, Veronique, a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute.

ANCHORAGE—Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has been indicted for making false statements about receiving gifts, primarily from prominent Alaska business executive Bill Allen, the former chairman of Veco, a now defunct oil and construction company, in a major renovation of his home in the ski resort town of Girdwood 40 miles south of Anchorage, and for favorable trades of automobiles. The indictment also alleged that Veco sought favorable treatment from Stevens and that his office did things on behalf of the company. It is almost exactly a year to the day that federal investigators conducted a search of the Girdwood home. This is not the first indictment that has roiled Alaska politics. Several state legislators have been indicted and some convicted of bribery charges; in May 2007, Allen and a Veco subordinate pleaded guilty to paying $400,000 in bribes to state officials.

As it happens, I am in Alaska to deliver a speech. I was able to speak with a few Alaska insiders on Monday, and none seemed to expect an indictment of Stevens or of Congressman-at-Large Don Young, who has also been under investigation—especially so soon before the August 26 primary. Alaska pollster Ivan Moore, who has worked for Democrats and in past years for Republicans, said that most locals believe Stevens did not knowingly take gifts, and Stevens has long maintained that he paid Veco all it billed for the renovations. But he noted that Stevens's and Young's legal predicaments have been a "cumulative embarrassment" for the state. Former Democratic state legislative leader Ethan Berkowitz, who is running for the U.S. House seat, pointed out that he had spoken out on the floor of the legislature against Veco. But all he had to say about Stevens is that he had "a lot of respect for what he's done" over the years. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who is challenging Don Young in the primary, noted that Young has spent more than $1 million of campaign funds on lawyers. On Stevens's primary race against a little-known opponent, Parnell said only, "Most expect the senator to prevail." I stopped by Young's campaign headquarters, but it was shut tight as a drum, and aside from a few fliers on the reception desk, it seemed to have been undisturbed by campaign activity for some time. Young, like Stevens, is in Washington for the last week of session before the August recess.

This is my Creators Syndicate column for this week. I hit pretty hard on the environmental restriction groups, who like to portray themselves as pure representatives of the public interest. But, in fact, the people who run these organizations, just like the people who lobby for oil companies, have an economic motive: They want to keep their jobs. Presumably they aren't paid as well as the oil lobbyists, in some cases not nearly so well, but they're far from starving. They live in comfortable houses or condominiums in one of the nation's most expensive housing markets, they have (or many of them do) children bound for college, they (I'm presuming) eat out in nonfast food restaurants more than once a month. The environmental restriction movement has done a lot of good for this country. It helped build support for clean air and clean water legislation that, with perhaps the exceptions of some provisions, has been brilliantly successful public policy.

An affluent democracy acts wisely when it devotes resources to maintaining an ever cleaner environment. But some policies that the environmental restriction groups have pushed for operate irrationally. The Endangered Species Act is a gift for litigators who seek to stop economic activity; the current project is to have the polar bear declared endangered, and then have the Ninth Circuit prohibit any economic activity that produces carbon emissions on the grounds that it will melt the ice floes and endanger the current far-from-endangered polar bear. Lawyer/radio talk show host/blogger Hugh Hewitt has done a definitive job of setting out the environmental restrictionist strategy—and has suggested how to stop it. But there wasn't any room in my column for this.

The assumption among most observers seems to be that Barack Obama will get a bounce in the polls from his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East, and western Europe. But it's not apparent in the polls that have come in to date. Gallup tracking shows him with a 46 percent-to-42 percent lead, about what he's had since clinching the Democratic nomination June 3. Rasmussen tracking shows him ahead by just 47 percent to 45 percent and the day before had the race at a 46 percent-to-46 percent tie. The Detroit News poll shows Obama leading in Michigan by only 43 percent to 41 percent, and there is some good news for John McCain in the recent Rasmussen poll in Ohio showing McCain ahead 46 percent to 40 percent. This last is a contrast with another poll in Ohio, showing Obama ahead 48 percent to 40 percent, conducted by the North Carolina Democratic firm PPP, whose record this cycle seems to me to have been erratic.

I put more weight on the Rasmussen poll, and I also think there is something to this interesting post from blogger Sean Oxendine saying it is going to be difficult for Obama to carry Ohio. Oxendine is arguing that Obama's weak primary showing in southern and southeastern Ohio will make it hard for him to carry the counties that enabled Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to carry the state narrowly in 1976 and 1992. That thought occurred to me on the night of the March 4 Ohio primary, when I noticed that Obama lost Scioto County (Portsmouth, on the Ohio River) by an 81 percent-to-16 percent margin. Carter carried Scioto County 57 percent to 41 percent in 1976, and Clinton carried it 44 percent to 35 percent in 1992.

Here are Polidata's estimates of which states will gain and lose House seats and electoral votes based on extrapolations from the 2007 Census Bureau population estimates. Here's a list of which states are projected to gain or lose seats, for Bush 2004 and Kerry 2004 states.