Ruh. Rho. This can't be a good sign for a campaign.

Slate just posted another campaign-trail story that is just too delicious for words. I can't decide which I like better, the opening or the closing.

So I'm going to post both. Opening:

Be Like Dean!

John Kerry's voters ask their candidate to act like the other guy.

DES MOINES, Iowa—When I arrive at John Kerry's campaign headquarters Saturday afternoon for a "Kerry Country BBQ," the candidate's staff is buzzing about a tall young blond man who has arrived for the event. They want to prevent him from getting anywhere close to the candidate. Before I came to Iowa, I was conditioned to think of Howard Dean as the unpredictably exciting, insurgent candidate and to think of Kerry as the aloof, preprogrammed establishment contender. This is my first taste of what the differences look like up close.

What's all the fuss about the blond guy? I ask Kerry's Iowa press secretary, Laura Capps. "He takes pictures of himself with the candidates and posts nasty comments about them," she says. I'm not sure, but this may be a historic moment for the Iowa caucuses: The Kerry campaign is terrified of how their candidate will be portrayed by a blogger.

A fresh milestone for bloggers. Nice. But I really enjoyed the sense of life in this campaign HQ. Suellentrop is quickly becoming my favorite political writer. I say that at the risk of sounding like a suckup because I just started writing for them, or wrote one piece and hope to do more. I don't care. I wouldn't publicly bash a shitty writer I'm working for, but I sure as hell wouldn't praise him. And I didn't work for this guy or talk to him. Just like his stuff. What a breath of fresh air among the same stale crap we get from the rest of the pack. He did two wonderful pieces on Dean in the past few days, just moved on to Kerry. Hopefully he will keep going round and round. I bet he'll have lots of fun stuff from the Sharpton campaign.

(By the way, the blogger's site is ninedwarfs.com. (I'll check it out and get back to you. So far, I gotta love the name--especially since the guy is around 6'5''. He didn't get the shot with Kerry, so he posted Kerry's face on the head of a chicken.)

(One more note: Slate ran the pic with a caption that read: "Not Howard Dean." Heeheehee.)

So here's the closer:

At the two Kerry events I attended this past weekend, voters kept encouraging the Massachusetts senator, in effect, to be more like Howard Dean. After Friday's Kerry speech, a voter walked up to him and told him the Democrats must quit being passive. "Oh, I'm not passive," Kerry soothed. Today, he does something similar when an angry voter complains about the Leave No Child Behind bill. "Oh, I am so furious about it," Kerry says matter-of-factly. These are questions Dean wouldn't even be asked.

As I'm leaving the event, I run into a Kerry campaign worker. He stops me and asks me about Dean and what he's like. He says he'd really like to hear him speak, but it's not kosher for staffers to go to other candidates' events. Maybe if he goes in plain clothes, he muses. Everyone talks about what a great speaker Dean is, he says, but how does he interact with people? I tell him I was impressed.

The more I tell him about Dean, the more crestfallen he seems to get. Without mentioning Kerry, I tell him that Dean never appears to be trying to walk out of a room. He interjects: "That's a real problem we have, because Kerry's a senator, so he needs to be back in Washington. Dean's basically unemployed, so he can spend all day hanging out with three people." It's only a feeling I get, but I can't help wondering if he signed up with Kerry because he thought Kerry would win, and now he's questioning his decision. As I head out to catch my plane, I think that the girl on his right appears to be consoling him.

Nice huh. I love him going out on a limb like that with his impressions. And the final line is perfect. He's a really gifted writer. I don't find myself saying that very much about the drones normally covering politics.

If you haven't read about Dean's little challenge to top Cheney in fundraising, read about it here and I'll be back to explain in a bit. If you have, the end result was Cheney $300,000, Dean 509,000.

(Just back from a fascinating morning at the AF Academy. Starving. Will post in the next few hours.)

AP story here.

And a full explanation from the Boston Globe:

Vice President Dick Cheney got up yesterday morning, boarded Air Force Two and flew to Columbia, S.C., where he rode in a motorcade to a private home, shook hands, and posed for pictures with 150 donors at a luncheon. There he raised $300,000 for the Bush-Cheney reelection committee before flying home.

Over four days ending last night, Howard Dean outdid the vice president -- without leaving his campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vt.

In a testament to the power of Internet fund-raising, and the intensity of the Democratic presidential contender's support, Dean raised $344,000 for his campaign by the time of the Cheney lunch. All Dean's staff did was tell their supporters about Cheney's event via the Internet and challenge them to surpass the vice president's total.

By 12:30 this morning, Dean's total stood at $507,150, with contributions from 9,500 people, the campaign said, adding that the counting was expected to continue overnight. The drive, which started late last Thursday, ended at midnight last night. For the Republican-held White House, it was more direct evidence of a fund-raising phenomenon that Dean's eight Democratic rivals witnessed last month, when the former Vermont governor posted the highest total of the group for the second quarter of the year, $7.6 million.