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.