AP reporting Clark is calling it quits.

Good move, Wes. I feel bad for the guy, cause I would have loved to see him president, but he had not yet learned to be a candidate. I was hoping he could have turned into a formidable adversary for Bush, and in time that may or may not have happened, but he's just not ready yet. Great Veep, though. Sure hope Kerry picks him.

Best line I've heard in awhile, Jeff Greenfield explaining the rationalle for his exit, without visciousness, just matter-of-factly: " 'I almost finished second in Tennessee' is not a rallying cry."

No, it's not.

I was not actually rooting for this event, because it's best for the Dems to keep the race alive a little longer. Although perhaps this will help John Edwards mount a reasonable challenge, narrowing this to a two-man race. (Sorry Howard. I still love you and can't wait to see you return somehow someway down the road, but for this race you're invisible. Right now you're sort of embarassing yourself.)

Wes Clark is a very good man. And he realized when it's over, and he's doing right by himself bowing out when it's appropriate. Brings to mind a great opening/closing line from a great little Vonnegut story: "I grasp your hand."

Or unnoticable?

I cleaned up the sidebars a bit, cleared out some old junk (sorry Wes Clark), and moved my blogroll and featured sites to the right side, so you can get to them more easily.

Let me know if you like the change better or worse, or it's too trivial to notice. And while I'm at it, I'm open to suggestions for other changes.

This change will also allow me to add more sites to my blogroll, so I'm soliciting nominations now. (And an offer to exchange links never hurts, folks.)

And what do you think: should the blogroll be above the featured sites on the right or below? Which do you use more? Or does anyone actually ever use any of those links?

(And I was just kidding about Wes Clark being old junk--I just couldn't resist the chuckle. He did have to go. I actually intended to take his picture down after I got off the Dean/Clark fence and swore my full allegience to Dean last month. But I can only make these changes from my main PC in Denver, and I haven't been here much. The truth is, I still love Wes Clark and admire him something fierce, and hope to God if Dean or Kerry get the nomination they choose him for Veep. And if Dean can't get the nom, he's still my second choice as well, though it's starting to look a little iffy for him. Farewell General Clark. You're a good man, and I'll miss seeing your smiling face on my homepage every day.)

The "Iraq didn't work for Dean" meme has been playing heavily in the media the past two weeks. It was the basis for his appeal, and yet voters shunned him on it, they say. Therefore, his constituency has deserted him.

There are a few gaping problems with that logic:

First, the Dean phenom never had much to do with Iraq. That was a part of the appeal for sure, but a small part. The media seized on that early, because that was the only explanation they could come up with--at least one they could spit out in a single sentence. How the rest of the country went along with this, I'll never know. Oh, because the media always wins when they start their chants.

(The funny part is, Dean's main appeal COULD be summed up in a single word: McCain. He had the same appeal of candor/honesty/integrity that voters found so refreshing in McCain four years earlier. But McCain was able to shoot that down with the ludicrous argument that he didn't like Dean, that he thought Dean's views were alarming. BFD. The comparison had nothing to do with their policy stances. Why the press should give McCain the right to veto that label was preposterous, but that's the press.)

The fact that Iraq did not work for Dean is easily explained by the exit polling. It wasn't a major issue for people. It was way, way down the list of concerns. The newsmodels have taken glee in pointing to exit polling showing that voters opposed to the war voted more for Kerry. But when Iraq is fourth or fifth on your list of concerns, it's not a deciding factor in who you voted for.

But here is the crucial point: Just because Iraq didn't play a role in January, does not mean it won't play a role in November. And just because the issue did not work against another Dem who merely went along grudginly for the ride, does not mean it won't work against the president who planned the whole scheme and lied to us about his rationale.

We are in something of a lull in Iraq right now, at least in media coverage, since Saddam was captured. Unfortunately for Howard Dean, the primaries came at the wrong time for that to be an issue.

But it was red hot last fall, and it likely will be again next fall. We will have been occupiers for well over a year, the body count will likely continue unabated, and there will be no military exit in site. Worse, there will be a civilian exit completed or in progress. We will face the twin horrors of turning it over to a presumably enemy Shiite government, and still mired in a military occupation. It could get very ugly.

There is no way to know for sure what Bush's biggest weakness will be for the Dems to attack, but I will lay money it will be Iraq.

And Dean and Clark are the only ones in a position to fully exploit that weakness.

If primary voters are concerned about electability--and they appear obsessed with it--they need to look past the current lull in Iraqi coverage and take their best guess at how the situation will deteriorate in nine months.

And then they will see one inevitable conclusion: Nominate Howard Dean.

Great opening by Dean. Thank God.

Laid it all on the line in the starkest terms I can remember any politician stating his case.

Incredible tag line: "There was no middle class tax cut."

If New Hampshire voters can look past all the hoopla and just consider what it is they really want, I think they can still fall in love with this guy.

Or am I just projecting.

(Clark had a great opening, too, though nothing on the level of Dean's. His: I'm a Democrat now, and I can attract a lot of people to the Democratic party was pretty powerful. That boy is still my fallback.)

Wow, Kerry is not acting like such a windbag. I think I missed his first response, but on the second one, he ditched all the bullshit language and equivocation. Still rambled into minutae and put me to sleep a little, but he's ten times better than I last listened to him, which was a few months ago.

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)

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.

A good friend of this site who switched from Dean to Clark awhile back--mirroring my own dalliance, they I came out on the other end--wrote me several weeks back about an ex deaniacs for clark site he was building.

Sounded intersesting and I intended to plug the finished product, but I didn't find the message again in my ever-exploding inbox again until tonight. (A fringe benefit of sickness is all this time on your hands with no ability to go out an play or do anything too taxing. So you clean out your inbox, at least I did.)

Hennyway, what a sad coincidence that I read it just after publicly declaring my unabashed love for Dean, all the way. So I just didn't feel right linking to a site trying to persuade you guys away from him.

But here's the thing. I like this site. (At least as far as I've gone, which I admit it only moderately far.)  It's actually a really nice example of a way Democrats can disagree on their candidates without ripping each other--or the potential nominee--a new one.

This is especially important now that we have gotten to the point where there is about a 95% chance that either Dean or Clark will be the nominee (with the bulk of those odds going to Dean. But there will be a period where the opposition clusters around one opposing candidate, and it's hard to see it being anyone other than Clark. So there you go.)

The site in question is thoughtful and tasteful and non attacking. And I really enjoy the big graphic it starts with, even if I don't agree with it. No smearing involved, because no smearing is required.

Refreshing, actually. So here's the link.

Update: I screwed up the link. Fixed it Saturday night. Sorry.

From AP:

[New Jersey] Gov. James E. McGreevey plans to endorse Howard Dean for president and has asked state Democrats to begin campaigning for the former Vermont governor, state Democratic officials said Tuesday.

Officials said McGreevey's endorsement, which he plans to announce Friday, is part of a broader push by Dean to gain backing of Democratic governors and other party leaders. . . .

Campaigning Tuesday in Arizona, Dean won the endorsement of former Arizona Gov. and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. With a Feb. 3 Democratic primary, Arizona will be one of the first western states to vote in the race.

Dean's campaign plans to announce an endorsement from the leadership of the Democratic National Committee Hispanic Caucus on Tuesday as well as the backing of Peg Lautenschlager, attorney general of Wisconsin. That state holds a critical primary in February.

Dean has won praise -- but not endorsements -- from Govs. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. His campaign manager, Joe Trippi, meets with Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm on Thursday.

It all continues falling nicely into place. Things will only escalate, as he appears more inevitable.

Meanwhile, Madonna endorses Wesley Clark.

One of the major knocks about Dean is that he'll get shellacked in the south, which the Dems supposedly cannot afford.

Then why is he pulling ahead in one southern poll after another, in the Dem primary race? The latest polls are from Arizona and Texas (Clark in second in both; Dean leads in Texas by 2, Arizona by a whopping ten).

Yes, these are just against Dems, but he's doing better down there than the southern Dems--Edwards is barely on the map in his own turf.

Nice analysis and more numbers from Kos.