Bush gave about the lamest speech ever to the U.N. yesterday.

I guess Americans were ready to swallow anything after 9/11, even from that dufus, but the free ride appears over. Now he's increasingly seen as a dufus, even by Republicans. (Personally, I failed to see his presidentialness even after 9/11, with the lone exception of the memorial speech at the cathedral a few days after.) He is going to get so trounced next November.

Nice lead from the morning-after AP analysis just posted this morning:

Future of Iraq Reopens U.S.-U.N. Divide

NEW YORK Sept. 24 — President Bush resumed on Wednesday his wobbly drive for support of a methodical and deliberative transition to democracy in Iraq, lobbying German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a key critic.

The story ends with our two heroes, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark giving him the whump he deserves on the two main morning shows:

On Wednesday, Dean charged on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Bush "really poisoned the well with the allies on the way into Iraq and now, of course, he's going to have a hard time getting any help from them to get out."

One of Dean's Democratic presidential rivals, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, agreed with that assessment, telling NBC's "Today" show that "I think he (Bush) has really hurt us. ... We went in to Iraq on a lack of evidence ... Now we need help. No wonder he's having trouble getting it."

Some interesting ideas in today's op-ed by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post:

As Clark's campaign team begins to take shape, it seems likely that aides to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and onetime Clinton and Gore staffers will get many key positions. That Clark's candidacy is in need of professional management is beyond dispute, but the general runs the risk of losing his insurgent appeal if he permits himself to be cast as the candidate from Party Central. . . . 

Exactly. I've been worrying about that all week. He can use the help, but the worst thing he can do is be seen as the bigwigs' stooge, especially when he really was drafted by wide popular support. Or perhaps that's the second worst possibility:

But if Clark ends up positioned as the anti-Dean candidate, the consequences could prove more severe.

That would be a hug mistake.

I'm not sure I'm buying Meyerson's extended analogy to 1968, but it's interesting:

Indeed, the relation of Clark's campaign to Dean's bears some resemblances to that of Robert Kennedy's to Eugene McCarthy's back in 1968, another year when antiwar sentiment swept the Democratic Party. It was McCarthy who plunged into that race first, when Lyndon Johnson was thought to be unassailable, and McCarthy who caught fire with Democratic liberals increasingly angered by Johnson's deepening involvement in the Vietnam War.

Clark now faces a challenge similar to Kennedy's: how to campaign as a largely antiwar candidate, and the more electable one at that, without estranging the legions of Dean supporters who believe, as Gene McCarthy's followers once did, that their guy is the genuine article. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination is going to need Dean's volunteers . . . Having his potential handlers proclaim that he's the Stop-Dean candidate, by contrast, would undercut his appeal to many of his own supporters, let alone Dean's.

And his closing is indisputable:

Clark needs to be concerned that the Clinton-McAuliffe insiders don't turn him into the last, best hope to stop the Dean hordes. The first Democratic candidate in decades to enter the race with support from all quadrants of the party doesn't need a diversionary conflict within its ranks.

The Dean blog reports that he'll be on between 7-7:30 a.m., Wednesday morning.

(And they're up to $819,000 in the drive there to raise $5 million in ten days. Three days down, seven to go.)