Tim Blair

Ouch. GWB is gonna be down in the mouth.

What a dream Dem candidate Dean was for W.

Ahh well, best laid plans of mice & men aft gang agly & all that.

Still Kerry's in with a good chance, & I reckon he's the next best Dem candidate (from W's pov).

That French look will be a real vote-winner ...

If you end up telling the press to go away, that's a sign that something's wrong with your political campaign. But I'm no expert.

But Tim didn't he also win a Senate spot, courtesy of ABC Online,

The loss for Senator Dean, the former Vermont governor who had been considered the party's front-runner based on big fundraising and a series of major endorsements, opens the door for other candidates and turns what was shaping up to be a quick Dean victory into a dogfight.

Senator Dean congratulated Senator Kerry on his showing but said he would push on with his campaign.

"I think Senator Kerry is doing very well, so is Senator Edwards, I want to congratulate them both," Senator Dean said on CNN.

"But we're determined to win - we're determined in the end to win the nomination.

"We've got a 50-state organisation, and we're going to go on.

"I'd be delighted to finish in the top three. Certainly, we'd like to have done better but we worked hard, we've got a lot of great people working for us, and on to New Hampshire."

Sub-freezing

More than 100,000 Democrats braved sub-freezing temperatures to attend one of nearly 2,000 local precinct caucuses around the state and publicly declare their support for a candidate.

Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards have risen in the polls in the last week as voters took a fresh look at the candidates after the holidays, evaluating which one had the best chance to beat Mr Bush in November and responding negatively to an exchange of harsh attack ads by Senator Dean and Mr Gephardt.

Turnout was crucial and all four campaigns sent thousands of volunteers into neighbourhoods across Iowa to hunt for voters and get them to the caucuses.

Senator Dean had more than 3,000 out-of-state volunteers knocking on doors and Mr Gephardt's army of union members had more than 4,000 people on the street.

Edwards, despite his silly non-free trade stance which will hopefully go away after the nomination, is an interesting choice. I've been kind of fond of him since the New Yorker did a combo profile / insult on him a couple years ago.

He's tough as nails on terrorism, very good on giving equal tax cuts to us working folk, and he's got a nice personal touch -- you need that to win the White House; Dubya had it and Gore didn't. Edwards doesn't seem all grabby and scary like Clinton (who won *two* prez elections with that trait), but human / normal in a way you get to be when you've only spent a half-dozen years in politics.

Let's see what crazy New Hampshire does ... but at this point Edwards is the guy to beat. Nobody was even mentioning him a few days ago. He must've done a good job with the actual people. (I don't think Kerry will play beyond the very first primaries; once Dean is out of the Front Runner phase, people can relax and vote for someone they actually like instead of who they think can pound Dean.)

All you partisans out there should realize that the non-partisans are the ones who decide these elections. Dubya's approval is pretty wide but very thin. Give us somebody who seems a bit more on top of things, and a bit less chained to the goddamned giant corporations, and we might just go for an Edwards because he seems a bit less dumb & corrupt.

Oh, and the Drudge photos of Dean are awful ... http://www.drudgereport.com

Reminds me of Lake Wobegon's Senator K. Thorvaldson.

When it comes to tort reform, trial lawyer & Prez candidate Edwards talks pure ATLA boilerplate (ATLA = American Trial Lawyers Association). Any tort reform is a threat to the Constitution & the right to a fair trial & so on. Pure crap.

* * *

From “Dean Leaves King Ceremony,” by Tom Higgins, Des Moines Register, 1/19/04 (no longer at Website) http://miva.dmregister.com

Organizer Kimberly Baxter, administrator of the state's Commission on the Status of African-Americans, said Dean had alerted her that he planned to attend.

Yet:

From “Dean to News Media: Get A Life,” by David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com, 1/19/04
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/19/politics/main594091.shtml

“I think it was very disrespectful," said Donna Graves, who was on the planning committee for the commemoration ceremony. "The intent of today was not to look at Howard Dean.

“The planning committee didn’t know he was coming as we invited a lot of people. It was very hectic and this is a day that is supposed to be about Martin Luther King.”

Anyway, the press following Dean disrupted the King service, making Dean look bad. Dean said to the press on which he depends to follow him: “Get a new life!”
Once again we see how swiftly & regularly Dean deflects a disparaging focus from himself to somebody else, sometimes to whole lots of folks with whom he in fact is properly to be associated in some sense.
• Dean is the white governor of a lily-white state, so he says that talking about race means educating the whites, & that he’s the only candidate who talks about race to white audiences.
• Dean is obsessed with winning the Presidency, knows he seems it & that people are talking about his psychology & his odd followers, so he accuses Bush of having a complicated psychological obsession with winning the Presidency.

Dean's powerful, energized web presence didn't trnslate into real space. Who is reading these blogs, anyway?

Reuters might have called him Senator Dean, but at least Reuters did not call Howard Dean, "John Dean" like many of the US television commentators. (John Dean of the Nixon white house infamy).

The press has never recovered from the Nixon era. You'd think they'd been jailed in the millions; actually it was the heyday of journalism -- "reporters brought a (Republican) president down" and all that. They've been yearning for a new coup ever since. Sometimes I think they wish Dubya'd be caught strangling his secretary or something.

We've been hearing for months from all the news pundits say that Dean essentially had won the race. But they forgot to ask the voters, especially those of us in "flyover country"...

As usual, Lileks got it right:

"I have to note that I am not surprised Dean got pasted in Iowa. Why? Because this was IOWA, for heaven’s sake. It’s the Midwest. We can tell when someone is getting carried away with himself, and we know what to do: shun him, kindly. It wasn’t so much the substance of Dean’s recent comments; it was the persona behind him. I can imagine a nice Iowa lady of a certain age, sitting in a coffee shop, enjoying her pie, watching the TV crew pack up after Doctor Dean had blown in and out of Bev’s Chatterbox Cafe. “Well, he certainly does think well of himself,” she might have thought. Translation: she wouldn’t spit on his face if his nose was on fire.

This was not a rejection of the Dean message. This was a rejection of the messenger. He has only himself to blame; this race was his to lose, and he lost it. He inhaled his own vapors. Iowans decided that they wanted a second opinion - and I think New Hampshire voters will concur. But what do I know. "

http://www.lileks.com/bleats/index.html