All the recent polling has shown that while there is a marginal uptick in the number of people who think things are going better in Iraq, there is no change whatsoever in the number of people who want to end the war.  In other words, people may think it's getting better, but it makes no difference to them.

You may be right that there's a diminution of intensity when it comes to opposing the war.  That's fine, because Democrats are positioned to clean up on the economic and domestic issues.  You might recall that we did pretty well back in the 90s when national security wasn't a major issue.

However, there's not going to be a "Bush was right" moment, and people should stop worrying about it.  The prospects for an Iraqi political reconciliation are hopeless.  And the odds are very slim that we're going to be able to maintain major force levels in Iraq from now until the next election without significant violence breaking out again, unfortunately.

All the available evidence suggests that there is no chance of public opinion shifting towards a "stay the course" position.  People are done with this war.  

There's a widespread Democratic belief that Iraq was their winning issue in the 2006 elections and a similarly widespread Republican one that illegal immigration is a winning issue for themselves.  

Neither of them is actually true.  They're emotional, righteous things for the activists, but where they have effect is pretty localized or selective- military families, places where Latinos have recently become the most visible non-white minority.

On Iraq, there's always a lull and a massive wishful thinking-based increase of hope in victory between rounds.  The game being played is one of musical chairs of warlords until only one ruler remains.  Every round seems the combatants get more efficient and smarter and better armed.

In Iraq we're down to relatively few real players- the previous rounds eliminated or subordinated most of them.  But the Sunni-Shiite problem remains unresolved.  The people tired of it all pretend to themselves that it can be settled with an armistice.  Thing is, civil wars end only with one side destroying entirely the other side's ability and desire to dominate to the extent of resorting to violence to fulfill it.  (The winning side's desire to do so neutralizes as well, as it comes to understand how little worth domination really has.)  We can pretend that the Sunnis of Iraq have given up that aspiration, and we can pretend that the Shiite side is no longer driven to crush them.  But it isn't so.  The key component of the game is now the Maliki government, which is a blatant Shiite front.

On illegal immigration...the phenomenon in public is that race and class resentments are coming to the surface and nationalist entitlement thinking is coming out in the form of rage.

It's not entirely racism or greed or fear, but a classism that in good times Those People are invited to come do our dirty manual labor on the cheap and in bad times we can just send them back to the slums they come from to waste away, unworthy as they are of our time and money and concern.  But over the years they have become a part of our collective American endeavor, though, and more so than just economically.

A few lesser politicians- Tancredo and such- are willing to play with the fire, lay on the few logs not already in it, and surf the wave of cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy, resentment, and mistaken entitlement.  The major politicians are standing by the fire, warming themselves by it and waiting until the emotional fuel is spent.