Ugh. Stuck in Chicago for the weekend with no one to see; working most of the day, breaking for dinner and ready to head back; boss hassling me the past couple days, getting jacked around and frustrated . . . and of course I'm not writing. Even TV . . . God, how do you people manage without Tivo? How the hell am I going to keep myself company alone in this place without anything to watch? Only a few hours of good stuff on a day--what's the chance it will be on when I'm watching? Most of this crap is horrible! And so many commercials these days. Why would I want to waste my time on that shit?

Just got to suck it up for six months. Can I stand it? After that, just a week or two a month. I can take a week or two at a time, but on and on and on? Hasn't even been that long.

Maybe it's better to fly back each weekend. At least this way I come out feeling rested.

Actually, I guess it's been nearly two months. Guess I'm making progress. And I enjoy it a lot of the time, just not these deadly weekends plus the stress.

Last weekend was so nice. I just hate the idea of living weekend to weekend again. Five days to get two is not a good deal.

I sure don't feel like celebrating no holidays. Don't want to paste on a smile, don't want to see nobody, just want to gut it out and get it over with. All those holidays are just unpaid days I fail to get out of this hole.

Just wish I could go to sleep and wake up next May. In New York. With my debts paid off. And a new boyfriend.

It will get better, it will get better . . .

I guess in a flash it will be May. I'll just be a little bit older, a little bit closer to death.

(Sorry, gotta whine at least once a week lately. If I dont' vent it here, I'll explode all over the sofa.)

The Wes Clark strategy (and the starry-eyed Edwards strategy), hinges on Clark beating Dean soundly in a bunch of southern states a week after New Hampshire. The Clark plan is to stop the Dean momentum cold, and present a plausible alternative, with more wins, arguing that the first three states were flukes. (And/or ignoring the first, DC, but you can bet the Dean people will point to three straight wins, assuming they take the capital.)

There were endless problems with that from the start: Dean will still have huge leads in money, union support and organization, and most importantly, it's a momentum game, decided by Americans who love winners, and once Dean looks like a winner after the first three, it's going to be very hard for Clark to hold his leads in the following southern states.

Clark will need very large leads in those states going into the Iowa/New Hampshire to hold Dean off.

The growing problem with the Clark scenario is that he may not have any southern lead going into Iowa. Dean is now inching ahead even in southern states: polls released in the last day or so show Dean pulling ever so slightly ahead of Clark and Lieb in both Florida and crucial South Carolina. (And Edwards has dropped from first to fourth in the past three months on his own home turf in SC. That boy is over.)

Clark's hope now probably rests on doing three things at once: developing a bigger, broader, national following, regaining  momuntum in those southern states, and perhaps most importantly, rising from obscurity to post a stunning come-from-behind strong second in New Hampshire.

(On that last crucial point, he is finally a dramatically rising in New Hampshire. Both Zogby and ARG show big gains the past month, putting him close on Kerry's heals. ARG has him going from 4 to 7 to 11 in 4 weeks, with the latest numbers coming in Thursday.) But he's still more than 30 points behind Dean, who also continues to grow, closing in on 50% in a ten-person field.

And New Hampshire is just one piece of what Clark has to pull off. He's got a lot to accomplish in six weeks.

But it has been done before.

I wouldn't bet on it, but outside of the impending Dean steamroller, it seems the one scenario to watch.

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Much thanks to DailyKos for many of the links. Lots more analysis there, right on the money, as always. And a great piece this morning on how even the Dem insiders are coalescing around Dean, based in part on a recent Newsday piece.

Interesting that we're now getting some news analysis pieces--at least from places like Salon--asking whether Howard Dean has the whole race wrapped up.

(But Salon, of all places, again makes the eggregiously wrong statement that New Hampshire is the first primary. For God's sake, it's DC!)

According to Mario Cuomo, every insider he talks to says Dean already has it won.

I never believe anyone telling me anything is certain, but the odds for the others continue dwindling by the day. (It's been the same story since July. Dean's odds improve a tick or two every week, the window for the others just gets narrower and narrower.)

Interesting quote from Marist College Institute pollster Lee Miringoff:

. . . the more non-Dean folks who stay around, the better Dean is likely to do in the post-New Hampshire climate. The worst thing that can happen for Dean is to have a clear challenger. Either Dean has to falter early or people like Gephardt and Kerry have to disappear very fast." He paused for a moment. "But then," he said, "if Dean knocks them out clean after the first two rounds, it's going to be very hard for anyone to stop him at that point, because there will be two big nights with balloons and everyone rallying to the front-runner.

My main quibble with the piece: it lays out scenarios for gephardt, clark, edwards and clark with pretty equal disregard. (And doesn't even mention lieb, appropriately.) That is kind of silly, I think. Clark is the only one I can see with a reasonable scenario, and Kerry's is almost to silly to commit to print. The other two are in the middle.

That Wesley Clark, though. You never know.