Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Good god but Joe Lieberman is dreadful. He's giving his speech right now and he is saying, as if this is a plus, that he is in a 3-way race for 3rd place.

Actually MSNBC is saying it's a two-way race for 3rd place and neither of those two places is occupied by the Lieberman campaign. They are instead saying that it's a two-way race for 4th place between Lieberman and Kucinich.

Chris Matthews is having none of it and cut away, denouncing the spin.

I am trying to get psyched about John Kerry. Not working so far but I do like the pashmina that his wife was wearing.

Right now I'm trying to get my mind around the idea that the Democrats should ignore the South and quit trying to please the region. It's an interesting approach, described well here by Slate's Timothy Noah calling the region "...the spoiled brat of American Politics"

Gore lost every Southern state, including his home state of Tennessee. Thus Lesson 1: Southern voters won't vote for you just because you're a Good Ole Boy. But Gore still came within four electoral votes of winning. If he'd taken Florida, which in many ways is not really a Southern state, he'd be president. (Some people still argue that he did.) Thus Lesson 2: Democrats don't really need those Southern votes.

Dean is on now, doing an insufficient job of crowd management. The talking heads at MSNBC have pointed out that Kerry does at least have an organization who knows how to handle little details.