I did not see Meet the Press yesterday, but lots of reports about them trashing the blogs for trashing the press, including this transcript snippet on Kos:

MR. TODD: [...] They're very anti-media. Reading the Dean blog is like reading Republican message points from years past and they're anger toward the media. They felt very mad at NBC News and Lisa Myers over the last couple of days over the story, felt like somehow NBC News took his comments out of context. So it is a little...

MR. RUSSERT: Which Lisa Myers did not...

MR. TODD: No, not at all, but it was...

(And Russert is such a lying sack of shit for defending her. Check out Atrios on last Friday to see for yourself how she edited the tape.)

But the joke may soon be on them. This new poll shows the number of people getting their news from the web rising sharply, while TV news continues to fall. My favorite quote from the story:

Four years ago, young people were far more likely to have said they learned about the campaign from nightly network news, 39 percent, than the Internet or comedy shows. Now, all three are cited about equally as sources of campaign news.

Yes, the nightly network news is right up there with the web and comedy shows (The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, etc.) Heeheehee. Now that's justice. When the network news becomes a joke, the public turns to the comedians.

Sounds reasonable. If you're going to get your news from a clown, may as well get it from a funny one.

We may be getting a two-man race after all.

While Dean looks more and more inevitable under most reasonable scenarios, Wes Clark is finally making his moves in the polls--nationally, and in New Hampshire.

The latest national poll showing striking gains comes from Rasmussen (via Kos -- Kos has everything politico). Dean is still ahead, but not by much. In the past week, Clark has gained four points--from 13-17--but it's mostly been at Dean's expense. They've gone from a 10-point gap to just 4.

And Clark is definitely solidifying his position as The Dean Alternative. A week ago he was just a point ahead of two rivals, now he's virtually double the closest competitor (other than Dean).

In New Hampshire, Clark is way, way further behind, but gaining much faster. The ARG tracking poll shows him gaining 8 points in the past week, from 12% to 20%. A bit of that has come from Dean, who dropped from 39% to 35%. Dean still holds an extraordinary margin of nearly two-to-one, but that's a lot better for Clark than more than three-to-one.

Perhaps more importantly, he has also emerged as the clear Dean Alternative in New Hampshire. He finally passed quasi-favorite-son Kerry for second place in the past week, and already commands double his support (20% to 10%). Voters there seem to be giving up on Kerry, and flocking to Clark.

You can see the latest numbers and a little analysis from ARG here, or the day-by-day movement here.

Why the sudden surge? I can't explain the timing, but I've always thought Wes Clark was a force to be reckoned with, and perhaps he finally got his pitch right and started connecting. (Or maybe it's those new sweaters that so much of the media seems to be mesmerized by. They made the front page of the Times last week.)

It probably also has something to do with all the flack Dean has been taking. The competition finally circled him this month and trained all the ammo they had on the same guy. And maybe supporters of the other guys have finally realized how hopeless their candidacies are and moved on to someone with a plausible chance to beat Dean--or Bush. Or was it the Madona endorsement?

In New Hampshire, Kos has been offering another reason the past several days: aside from the impotent force of Joe Lieberman, Clark has the whole state to himself. The rest of the pack is battling it out in Iowa, and those two skipped the state to focus on New Hampshire. Sounds reasonable. Doesn't account for his entire pickup--especially since everyone is still running TV ads--but some of it.

But one week from today, Iowa could change everything. If Dean can upset Gep on his home turf, he'll get a huge boost going into New Hampshire, and may well stop Clark's rise dead in its tracks. If he fails, the Stop Dean idea could gain momentum. He'll suddenly look much less invincible.

Either way, Clark will be frozen out of the media coverage, unless the press decides to run with the Dean Is Crumbling storyline, and chooses Clark as his potential vanquisher.

Every day the picture changes, but every day it leads more to the same conclusion: everything could hinge on Iowa.

Which leads me to one more plug for joining me in Iowa to make sure Dean wins. I had not intended to do it in this post, but since I ended up here:

Go here to sign up to join the Iowa assault, whether or not you want to be part of my (gay) subgroup. Then, if you want to join our big gay army (for dean), use our GROUP ID NUMBER is 1121 and our GROUP NAME RAINBOW STORM.  Or read my pitch on why I'm going here.)

___

Note: Edwards has also surged out of obscurity in the national, NH and Iowa polls the past week, but he's still far behind a shitload of others. Way too little, too late for him.

Update:

Kos just added new poll numbers from SUSA adding more confirmation to Clark's rise.

They show Clark leaping ahead by seven points in Arizona--a key primary the week after New Hampshire--and a much tighter race than the other polls in New Hampshire. There they have Dean falling ten points since Dec 14-16, and Clark rising 15 in the same time. SUSA's latest NH results (previous results in parenthesis:

Dean 35 (45)

Clark 26 (11)

Kerry 13 (15)

Zogby has the second set of results out in its new daily tracking poll of Iowa:

Dean inched ahead of Gephardt by one more point, to take a three-point advantage. Meanwhile, Kerry may be starting to pull away from Edwards. Hard to read to much into a single day's movement, though.

Full numbers for the people above 3 percent (first number is for Jan 9-11, second is for Jan 8-10):

Dean 26 (25)

Gep 23 (23)

Kerry 16 (15)

Edwards 12 (14)

Much more on the results here.

Thanks to Kos for the link.

Did we need any more evidence of how wildly out of touch the media is?

Yesterday, four Iowa papers announced their endorsements for the Democratic nomination. (The crucial Iowa caucus is now seven days away. And by the way, you can still join me in Iowa this weekend.)

The most important paper by far, The Des Moines Register, picked John Edwards. Big surprise, and kind of puzzling. The press pegged him as the likely frontrunner more than a year ago, but he has not impressed a sizable contingent of voters anywhere. Still, he can be somewhat impressive, and he's growing as a candidate.

The other three papers, that part was truly preposterous. From the AP story:

The Quad-City Times in Davenport, the Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Hawk Eye in Burlington endorsed Kerry, saying his foreign policy experience makes him the best candidate to face President Bush in the fall election.

Good lord. John Kerry? The incredible shrinking candidate? The man putting the entire country to sleep? This is the guy they see as our leader? The bullshitting windbag who couldn't give a straight/straightforward answer without three hundred pointless adjectives to save his life?

The role of a leader is to lead. Not to sport the strongest resume. John Kerry has been a fine senator. After a year on the campaign trail, it's become painfully apparent that the senate is exactly where he belongs. The senate is a deliberative body, and its members are rarely called upon to lead. Thank God. In our entire history, we have only chosen a handful of them to be president. John Kerry sits near the back of the current pack of senators running, because he has displayed no leadership ability whatsoever.

The voters have gotten this. The press? These people just have no clue. No wonder the profession is one of the most despised in the country.

I love this idea. I'm not entirely clear on whether it started with an idea from Atrios, or a decision by a dean supporter to take direct action. Possibly both happening separately, fusing and erupting into a little movement.

Here's what I do know. Just before Christmas, Jodi Wilgoren wrote an NYT piece that really pissed off a lot of the Dean supporters. I happened to be messing around on the Dean blog that day, and people were just in an outrage. Not because of the one piece, so much, as because of the endless string of jackass reporting. With so many jackasses writing such crap, a fair number of it was destined to rain down on the Dean camp to begin with. Add the fact that he refuses to pander to him, and that most of them are freaking clueless about his rise to prominence, and you have a pretty ugly situation.

For some reason, tempers ran high enough that day, that a person who posts under the name "Vet 4 Dean" posted this (comment? diary post, I think), at Kos:

Earlier today on DFA [the Dean blog, aka, Dean for America ], there was a good bit of discussion of the latest piece of "journalism" committed by Ms. Jodi Wilgoren in the NYTimes.  

Well, I decided it was time to lose my blogging virginity and created The Wilgoren Watch.

Any advice -- up to and including "Geez, what the hell are you thinking?" -- will be appreciated.  Please be gentle with me.  ;-)

Meanwhile, Atrios was bouncing around the idea of a wider Adopt A Journalist program. I'm going to take the liberty of posting his entire followup post on it from tonight:

There's an idea I put out there in the middle of the holidays. A bunch of people subsequently emailed me, etc..., and I pretty much ignored them. Not because I was being rude but because I was fairly busy and most importantly as I said in the original post I Don't Want To Organize It.

But, look, here's the idea - start a blog, pick a journalist, and follow them. Don't just follow them day to day, but be in depth about it. Archive all of their work, look for inconsistencies across their own writing. It doesn't have to be all nasty criticism. Criticism can be both good and bad - it's important to remember that.

Anyway, some had emailed me about setting up a centralized database/website/etc... I tend to think such a top down approach is a bad idea, at least at first. First we need volunteers - and the best way to do it is just start doing it. Once you've got it going, email me and other bloggers once you have some interesting stuff up. Once people seem to be working it consistently, I'll set up a special section in the blogroll and will encourage others to do the same. If there's duplication of effort - great! Eventually blogs can merge or whatever, it isn't a problem.

As for journalists - mostly what I'm talking about are people covering the '04 campaign, and mostly what I'm talking about are straight journalists and not the pundits. The pundits get plenty of attention - it's fun, but frankly we all overestimate their influence. One lowly scale AP reporter probably has a lot more influence than William Safire.

Jay Rosen of NYU has been following this idea. But, my plea is - Just Do It! I'm happy to support it, but I can't organize it.

Rosen has an interesting semi-chronology of the germination at the link above. My favorite passage:

Jan 6. Reporter Alan Judd of the Atlanta Constitution emails PressThink: "The idea of 'tracking' individual campaign reporters--as on Wilgoren Watch--is absurd. The people behind such efforts would be satisified with nothing other than stories effusively praising Howard Dean and blasting Bush as the great satan. What they advocate isn't press criticism, it's stalking."

What a turd. Journos who spend their careers stalking politicians, movie stars and victims of tragedies tend to have the thinest skins when anyone suggests examining their work.

I love this idea. Only wish I had time to adopt one. But I'll link to it once it gets going, and support it with encouragement any time I can.

I had high hopes for the D.C. primary, which will actually usurp New Hampshire's position as the first, this year.

Unfortunately, they settled for a compromise where it's nonbinding. It still could have been important, but five of the major candidates withdrew their names from the ballot. Weasels. All that's left are Sharpton, Braun, Kucinich and Dean.

Dean will win easily, but it won't mean much.

The W Post has a somewhat interesting commentary today on why it failed, and how it could have been a powerful moment in the drive to end the disenfranchisement of DC voters. (I can't believe they still have no representation in Congress. They have more people than Wyoming. Imagine of we just took away Wyoming's senators and congressman.)

Also a Rueters piece.

Zogby published its tracking poll of Iowa today, so we'll be able to see how each candidate jockeys in the final eight days--and most importantly, how they're trending. (The tracking poll is taken nightly. After the first three nights, the total of those three nights is reported; then each day, the latest night's numbers are added, and the oldest lopped off. So you always get a three-day total, and they publish how it moves each day.

Starting numbers, courtesy of Kos (who does not link to a direct source):

Dean 25
Gephardt 23
Kerry 15
Edwards 14
Undecided 14
Lieberman 3
Clark 3
Kucinich 2
Sharpton 1
Braun 1

Very, very close at the top. And Kerry's dream of beating Gephardt for second appears to be just that. When did Edwards move up so far, though?

The main thing to keep in mind in watching these numbers all week, is that caucuses are notoriously hard to poll for. Only about 4% of the population is expected to turn out. It can last three hours, usually on a cold winter's night. And it's not a secret ballot: you have to openly declare your vote, and try to convince your friends and neighbors to change.

So no one ever knows who will turn out, and that can mean everything.

Gep would seem to have an advantage there, since other polls have showed his support most solid (those who back him do so most definitively). But Dean supposedly has an army of 2,000 showing up next weekend, for a last-minute blitz. (Me included. Info on how to join us here.) Granted, I'm biased, but I can't help thinking that will do a lot for the final Get Out The Vote push. (Update: The Dean blog is saying they've got 3,500 volunteers coming to Iowa. I have heard conflicting reports.)

Enough to tip the balance? No telling.

Update:

Reuters story on the poll has some good info on internals . . .

Dean led among the very liberal, independents, young voters, the college educated and singles, while Gephardt led among union households, those with less than a college education and lower income voters.

. . . and on the surprising Edwards rise:

The survey also found growth for Edwards, who gained strength during the course of the three days and earned the endorsement of the state's largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, on Sunday.

"Edwards has picked up a lot of steam each night," Zogby said.

I was stunned by Edwards' increase. Since when did anyone start rallying behind him in any state?

Poor Kerry. More bad news. Not only is he out of the race for second, Edwards appears poised to pass him.

After raising expectations with the beating-Gep for second scenario, a fourth-place finish would sink him even worse. Heading into his humiliation in his homeland the following week. Poor guy. Will anything ever go right for him?

Great job by Atrios slaying these two revolting whores. (Look under Friday's entries, three separate posts.)

Update: Deliciously fun new reader and Salon Blogger Meg suggest we call them Media Tarts. Not bad.

I put join in quotes, because she's going to join us for a few hours, but it might be a stretch to count her officially as part of the group.

But she is going to be featured at a Dean event the night before the caucus, so draw your own conclusions.

Here are the details, embedded in a nice message that went out to the Rainbow Storm group headed to Iowa for the pre-caucus weekend:

Wanted to thank you ALL for being a part of this incredible effort.  Here is a little update.  On Sunday, January 18th from 4:00pm to 7:00pm, there will be an event in Des Moines (location to be determined but most likely the Embassy Club) that will feature Elizabeth Birch along with Minnesota State Senator Scott Dibble.  There will be an evite that will be available shortly but local Dean supporters are putting this together.  Also, we are working on other coordinatted evening activities and will update you further.

You can still join us. Book you plane tix today for a good 7-day advance price. They're still pretty cheap. Or hop in your car.

Just register here first, and use GROUP ID NUMBER is 1121 and GROUP NAME RAINBOW STORM.

More from me on why I'm going here.

I'm planning a blow-by-blow account while I'm there (shooting for at least 2-3 times a day)--all posted directly here, of course. And I'll see if others in the group want to post their responses here as well. Before I go, I'll set up a special link of some sort.

Dean 29 (43)
Gephardt 22 (23)
Kerry 21 (15)
Edwards 17 (10)
Other 8 (?)
Undecided 3 (?)

Dean 29 (26)
Gephardt 25 (26)
Kerry 18 (15)
Edwards 8 (8)
Clark 3 (3)
Undecided 13 (18)

Dean in a slight lead, with turnout the key factor in a caucus state.

I don't know what those huge Dean numbers in the previous SUSA poll were about. Seem a bit farfetched (and out of whack with the rest of the trendline).

Much more info at Kos. Much more insight on everything at the main Kos page.

Incredible piece from Arianna Huffington today.

Consider this opening:

I swear, if I hear one more Democratic honcho say that Howard Dean is not electable, I'm going to do something crazy (maybe that's what happened to Britney in Vegas this weekend).

The contention is nothing short of idiotic.

Consider the source. The folks besmirching the good doctor's Election Day viability are the very people who have driven the Democratic Party into irrelevance; who spearheaded the party's resounding 2002 mid-term defeats; and who kinda, sorta, but not really disagreed with President Bush as he led us down the path of preemptive war with Iraq, irresponsible tax cuts and an unprecedented deficit.

It gets better.

Now if we could just get the rest of the media to quit falling for ridiculous tripe, and then repeating it endlessly.

I had not had a chance to pick up Howard Dean's book, Winning Back America yet, but a really nice woman from Simon & Shususter wrote today offering to send me a copy if I would consider a review. So I'll try to read it in the next week and post my take here, and maybe there, on the blog site they have set up for the book.

That's my plug. Have a look if you're interested. Or you can find the book at Amazon here.

Ever since last fall, I've been toying with the idea of heading to Iowa or New Hampshire. I've really enjoyed the blogging for Dean, but nothing like actually plunging in physically. The Meetups were fine at first, but I got bored with them pretty fast. Iowa, I could reall dig my teeth into.

Especially Iowa right before the caucuses. I used to picture New Hampshire, but for months now, I've been predicting on this site that Iowa would be the real test, and how could I stay home when so much was at stake?

I was thinking about approaching my friend/boss to go, but he came to me first. So . . . 

A week from Friday, we're on a plane to Des Moines. At first it was going to be just the weekend, but they really wanted help with the last minute Get Out The Vote stuff on Monday, so we agreed to that, and then it just seemed stupid to get on a plane right before the event unfolded, so we decided to stay for the party. It better be a party. We'll do are best to help ensure a party.

We're booked till Tuesday morning. The plane tickets are purchased, so we're definitely going. (And my boss/friend actually decided to buy plane tix for the Out For Dean guys, so they'll be there as well.)

And yes, we did get roped into yet another homo group. Should make it all the more fun. We'll be part of The Rainbow Storm, though I prefer Dean's Big Gay Army, or perhaps homodeans (pronounced in four syllables: ho mo' de anz).

And . . .

And you're all invited to join us. Any gayboys or gaygirls or faghags or (dykestuds? there's no male equivalent is there?) wanna come? You can be gay, straight or questioning, but you're welcome to join our little group. You just need to get yourself to Iowa, and preferably with accomodations, but they can try to get you in with a family.

Or you can go with another group, or without a group, but it should be exciting, and you can still drop in and see us.

Go here to sign up to join the Iowa assault, whether or not you want to be part of our subgroup. Then, if you want to join our big gay army (for dean), use our GROUP ID NUMBER is 1121 and our GROUP NAME RAINBOW STORM.

I will, of course, provide a full report. Unless something goes horribly awry, I'll plan to post all weekend while I'm there, providing a play-by-play of the whole weekend, so you can live the campaign vicariously, if you choose to wimp out and remain in your comfy little houses.

This is two days old, but worth the wait. (And I was sick when I first saw it, and then locked out of my blog for 24 hours).

It started Friday with a revealing piece in the Times:

Bush Advisers, With Eye on Dean, Formulate '04 Plans

President Bush's campaign has settled on a plan to run against Howard Dean that would portray him as reckless, angry and pessimistic, while framing the 2004 election as a referendum on the direction of the nation more than on the president himself, Mr. Bush's aides say.

Interesting reading there--news flash! the Times writes something interesting about the election! (note to Times editors: it was because the piece relied on reporting rather than analyzing, a consistently embarassing task for your team)--but the real story came when a hot blogger named Atrios (aka Eschaton) picked up the ball and ran with it:

It's a short post, so I'm going to take a little liberty and post the whole thing (and advise you to check out the site--really good stuff there on a regular basis):

So, I didn't go all the way back, but doing a check through a Nexis search of news transcripts back through October, the first appearance of a talking head referring to Dean as "pessimistic" or discussing his "pessimism" was Laura Ingraham on the Friday Dec. 19 Hardball, followed by Mary Matalin on the Sunday Dec. 21 Meet the Press.

Look for it to be coming out of every Republican's mouth soon, and then it will increasingly creep into "objective" reporting. The process will go something like this. First, they'll quote Bush campaign sources describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll move onto Democratic campaign sources, often anonymous, describing Dean as "pessimistic." Next, they'll stop bothering getting the quote and just write things like, "Some have criticized Dean for his unappealing pessimism..." And, then, finally, process complete, campaign analysis pieces in print and the "objective journalists" on the roundtable shows, will just write/say things like "Dean's pessimistic rhetoric..." By the end no discussion or news story about Dean will see the light of day without the word "pessimism."

Man! Talk about nailing the sloppy media, and how they play right into the hands of the evil spinmiesters. That is exactly how it works.

Bad, bad media. Pitiful media. How can they be so self-unaware.

The good news is that Gore was a big wimp, and his campaign was clueless, and the Rove machine just flattened him, but Dean is a different story altogether. Dean fights back, and a fiesty group called the Dean Defense Forces organized as early as last summer to fight back.

Very fiesty group. Often too fiesty. I was begging some of them last summer to tone it down. That was just the embryonic version of the fight-back forces. It will be a very different response this time around.

Also, those labels tend to stick a little better if they're true, or they at least appear true, and the Rove team chose really poorly with the pessimism. Dean inspires exactly the opposite. Dean lights up his supporters with a message of incredible hope. That--and not the Iraq policy the idiotic politic press keeps pointing to--is what has fueled the Dean phenom.

When they were working with a big, bland, blank canvas like Al Gore, they could paint almost any picture they wanted onto the poor sap and make it stick. Dean already has a personality. Recasting him as a pessimist is likely to prove a bridge way too far.

You're overreaching already Karl. First tangible sign I've seen that understimating Dean may really pay off for the man.

DailyKos throws out a fascinating Stop Dean scenario this morning. (And if you're not reading Kos every day, you're missing out. He has emerged as the best politican writer in the country this season, without ever writing for a "real" publication.)

It starts with this quote from a pretty shitty Washington Post story this morning by the highly uneven Dan Balz:

Bill Carrick, one of Gephardt's advisers, said all the other candidates should be rooting for Gephardt to stop Dean in Iowa. "Every one of them needs us to win," he said. "We have to win Iowa. For better or worse this is Dean-Gephardt right now for the other candidates."

Hard not to see a lot of truth in that one, right? So Kos starts thinking: what if the other campaigns grasp the same truth by Iowa--as Dean looks more and more inevitable, and then:

The Iowa Caucuses are a peculiar beast. People cast an initial ballot for their guy. But, if their guy doesn't break the 15 percent barrier, they can change their vote to a more viable candidate. In essence, supporters will work hard to garner the votes of the other caucus goers to get their guy as many votes as possible.

In the past, each caucus was a self-contained election. There was little the candidates could do to sway the votes of their supporters. But we now have a dandy new tool called the cell phone, and the caucuses may never be the same.

In short, campaign organizers can now call each individual caucus and attempt to move their supporters en masse to whatever candidate they choose.

He fleshes out the scenarios quite nicely, and it might only take one campaign doing it--or even lots of caucusers knowing it--to eke out a victory for Gephardt in a close contest.

Scared me for a minute, but I was buoyed by the fact that a group of Dems are about as likely to get that organized and work together that well to defeat a common adversary as the outcasts on Survivor are to topple an alliance. You can watch week after week and scream at the television: "You can stop them! All you have to do is work together--it's so obvious!" until you're blue in the face. (Almost) never happens.

The second problem is that while stopping Dean has to be the #1 priority for every other campaign, they also know that the press is dying to turn this into a two-man race. That will happen eventually, but the real question is whether it will happen to late for any of them. But the only thing worse for them than a delay is to get boxed out as the alternative.

If Gep wins Iowa and the press--stupidly, but just watch them--christens the nom a Dean-Gephardt race, then they're really screwed.

So they might be more afraid of getting squeezed out before they get their shot at Dean than they are at Dean surging ahead a little longer.