I am impressed with Howard Dean. As an "outsider", he has an advantage in that he didn't go along with all of the Democrats and give Bush a free hand to have preemptive strikes anywhere he sees fit. He is like a Jesse Ventura or John McCain in that he has come out against the "me to" mentality of the candidates of the Democratic Party.

Bush's decline in approval ratings
continues:

54 in NBC/WSJ poll

http://www.msnbc.com/news/862957.asp?0cv=CA01&cp1=1

I am so, so, so impressed with Dean! Given how far behind he was monetarily and in name-recognition, his progress in the polls is incredible.

Dean has show real sustained momentum. My fundraising stats are old, so they shouldn't be taken to heart at this point, the PragPro PPI Index (see website, http://thepragmaticprogressive.blogspot.com shows only Dean gaining this week with regard to news visability and polling. The focus group that Frank Lutz assembled was flawed in that it only provided snippets of the candidates speaking, with the members of the group dialing in there feelings towards the speakers...no way to do a focus group.

I've been a Howard Dean fan for quite sometime now and I'm impressed at all the positive news he's been receiving. As the primary season begins to unfold, he'll be a definate contender. Right now he needs the money, so I hope that all of us who are committed to his campaign, start contributing to this worthwhile endeavor. The real race in 03 is the money race.

Bush is simply not performing.

That Luntz focus group was a joke. They were mostly conservative. More conservative, I would argue, than even the average moderate Volvo driving NH Democrat. And Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster, who gleefully let them trash the other candidates. Never once on Hardball or in the Fienman Newsweek piece was it mentioned that Luntz is a Republican.

Don't believe the hype.

If I had not known better, I thought I was watching the Faux News Channel. Notice how all the "major" characters were mentioned...then trashed.

From The New Republic:

WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Stage Left
by Ryan Lizza

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Post date 01.23.03 | Issue date 02.03.03 E-mail this article

There is a weird respect among Washington journalists for presidential candidates who come before their most loyal supporters and insult them. In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton spoke before a black audience at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Rapper Sister Souljah, who had spoken to the group the evening before, had recently told The Washington Post that blacks would be justified in killing whites. Clinton criticized her for those comments, angering his audience and insulting Jackson. The move cemented Clinton's reputation as a centrist Democrat who was not held hostage to his party's interest groups. The media cheered, and the phrase "Sister Souljah moment" was born. In subsequent campaigns, George W. Bush won praise when he criticized House Republicans for trying to "balance their budget on the backs of the poor," while pundits swooned for John McCain when he said his party was bought and paid for by corporate special interests.

So when the six Democratic presidential candidates spoke before a core Democratic interest group, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Tuesday night, one question that hung in the air of the Omni Shoreham ballroom was, which Democrat would "Sister Souljah" NARAL? The answer was nobody. Prior to the event there was some whispering that Dick Gephardt might try to burnish his general election bona fides by criticizing partial-birth abortion, but it didn't happen. As an aide to one candidate explained, the NARAL event was "box-checking." There remains an iron triangle of Democratic constituencies--blacks, labor, pro-choice women--whom every candidate must appease during the primaries. Tuesday night, the six Democrats dutifully checked the abortion box.

ohn Edwards seems to go through cycles of exceedingly high expectations and intense media buzz punctuated by disappointing public performances that leave one wondering, "What is all the fuss about?" Last May, for example, a crescendo of Edwards hype came crashing down after a less than impressive encounter with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press."

Since then, the rollout of the Edwards campaign has again been masterful. Almost every Bush official I have ever asked has told me that Edwards is the Democrat the White House fears the most. Democratic operatives are flocking to his campaign. Expressing a sentiment apparently common among young Democratic staffers, an unemployed press secretary for a losing Democratic Senate candidate recently told me that Howard Dean's people keep leaving messages for her--but she's holding out for a spot on the Edwards campaign. Jennifer Palmieri, the smart and savvy press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, just signed on as Edwards's spokeswoman. And the senator's recent Sunday interview with George Stephanopoulos was well-received, suggesting that he'd honed his TV style since the "Meet the Press" fiasco.

But Edwards's NARAL speech was another unexpected dud. Edwards is still better at retail politics than he is at wholesale politics. The charm he exudes in small groups rarely comes across before large audiences. The second line of his speech--"When I was in law school, my friends and I did talk about Roe v. Wade ... unlike some people we know"--was supposed to be a joke. Nobody laughed. Before Edwards spoke, Kate Michelman, NARAL's president, stepped on one of his best lines, quoting Justice Harry Blackmun's warning that "a chill wind blows" for abortion rights. "That wind is blowing at gale force," she added. Edwards quoted the same Blackmun line and warned, "The chill wind blows even harder now." But, worst of all, Edwards had the ill fortune of being followed by Al Sharpton, who was funny, served up a freezer full of ideological red meat, and left the podium to cheers from an audience packed with wealthy white women. By the time Sharpton was done, the only thing I remembered about Edwards's remarks was that he is now claiming to be the champion of "ordinary people" rather than "regular people."

Joe Lieberman's speech was short and mono-thematic. Here it is in digest form: "We value women's health. ... Those are our values. ... American values. ... Constitutional values. ... Constitutional and American values. ... Neither side has a monopoly of values ... an American value ... an American value ... an American value. ... I am pro-values." Lieberman hasn't figured out how to talk about values without simply repeating the word over and over again, but putting abortion in this context is part of his experiment to run as a centrist who refuses to cede the "values" issue to Republicans while simultaneously locking up the support of key liberal constituencies. He has been aggressively courting African Americans and last week buried for good the reservations he once expressed about affirmative action. He followed the same script this week, assuring the fiercely secular pro-choice movement--a group that could be suspicious of his religiosity--of his unflinching support for abortion rights. "There are probably going to be many issues that we disagree on," he said of the Democratic field, "but not this one."

The candidate who most needed to reassure NARAL, though, was Gephardt. For his first decade in the House, Gephardt was staunchly pro-life. Of the four contenders with a congressional voting record, Gephardt is the only one without a 100 percent rating from NARAL over the last few years, having voted for a partial-birth abortion ban and for legislation banning emergency contraception for minors at school health centers. So Gephardt had the unpleasant task of explaining exactly how he came to see the light on the issue of abortion--without reinforcing his reputation as a politician who has been on every side of every issue. (Even as Lieberman was being whacked this week for retreating on affirmative action, few noticed that Gephardt had abruptly reversed himself on taxes: The man who refused to talk about the Bush tax cut in 2002 now wants to roll it back to pay for national health insurance.) Gephardt's fickle reputation isn't new. As one rival campaign reminded me this week, Michael Dukakis beat Gephardt in 1988 by running a TV ad about Gephardt's reversals that showed acrobats doing flips.

For a politician who is known for being emotionally restrained, or even inert, Gephardt gave a deeply personal and eloquent speech about his journey from young prolife Baptist to seasoned pro-choice presidential candidate. He was insistent that he had endured a long personal struggle with his conscience over this issue. "The first realization was that there is no balance to be found between incest and responsibility or between love and assault," he said. And, while Gephardt didn't have a Sister Souljah moment on partial-birth abortion, to his credit he didn't apologize for his record on the subject either. Of course, in terms of general election politics, a pro-choice candidate who talks about abortion in the language of personal conscience and who parts company with the pro-choice movement on partial birth has pretty much the ideal political profile. "The public wants politicians to say they support choice but with limits," says Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. Still, when Gephardt proclaimed that he cast his first pro-choice vote in 1986, it was hard not to remember that that was exactly the moment he was preparing for his first presidential run.

hile most of the candidates wrapped their pro-choice beliefs in the soft glow of moral language and studiously ignored the most difficult issues of abortion policy, Dean did the opposite. His style is to grab the political live wire that everyone else is terrified of touching. And so Dean took partial-birth abortion, NARAL's most controversial and difficult-to-defend position, and made it the centerpiece of his speech, insisting that the term itself was an artifice manufactured by the right. "This is an issue about nothing," he proclaimed to the most boisterous applause of the evening. He then moved on to the next most divisive issue: parental notification. One of his twelve-year-old patients became pregnant after she was raped by her father, the Vermont physician said. "You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea."

The Dean campaign has been going through cycles that are the opposite of the Edwards campaign: Long periods where everyone forgets about him are followed by bursts of great publicity and hype. He's on the cusp of another one of those surges. All recent reports from Iowa and New Hampshire say that he is electrifying the party faithful. His campaign has attracted some of the die-hard Democrats that toiled for Bill Bradley in 2000. Eric Hauser, Bradley's former press secretary, has offered to help Dean, and Rick Ridder, a senior adviser to Bradley, is now Dean's campaign manager. It's the same at the grassroots level. One top Democratic strategist notes that the "shock troops of New Hampshire" that worked on the ground for Bradley are now working for Dean. On Tuesday night, Dean had another little weapon in tow: Senator Jim Jeffords, a potentially handy sidekick for winning independents in New Hampshire. "He's my man," an excited Jeffords exclaimed.

Yay Jeffords! :)