×
- So I'm back from a nice relaxing vacation in Death Valley (at least relaxing compared with writing about the primaries) and it seems that political reporters have gotten so sick of all the various surges and slumps and polls that they've decided to just ignore them unless something dramatic happens (maybe they agree with Steve Benen that they are, like Camelot, a silly place). And yes I'm linking to Mickey Kaus which makes me want to wash with steel wool, but the man actually says something I've been thinking better than I could have said it (via Matt).
- If you want a sense of what things are like on the ground and you've already read Tom and Dana's coverage you could do worse than read John Dickerson on the trench-warfare going on across Iowa.
- Meanwhile, who'd have thought the toughest bit of political reporting on the day before the caucuses would come from the Today Show's Meredith Vieira who, when Hillary Clinton says she was the first high-profile person to go to Bosnia, pointed out that she went with that other notable foreign policy luminary... Sinbad.
- And whatever our disappointments and frustrations with the process or candidates, we can be grateful to Iowa voters for placing Rudy Giuliani somewhere behind Ron Paul in the polls and hopefully in the final results (also see more ding-dong-the-witch-is dead celebrations here).
- Finally, it's worth noting that unless something dramatic happens tomorrow (like the Des Moines Register poll predicts), the actual winner will be determined by things like weather and which campaign manager made a dumb argument on a Sunday talk show. Viewing the Iowa race as a tie is the correct interpretation. Reporters have a tendency to wildly over-interpret all kinds of data, particularly close elections, and we should welcome a new willingness to admit that sometimes there isn't a clear winner and voters can be ambivalent. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
