In today's Altercation, Eric writes:

Of course, I’m not married to a Kerry/Edwards ticket. I’d take an Edwards/Kerry ticket. I’d take a Kerry/Clark ticket. I’d take a Clark/Kerry ticket.  (I am not so crazy anymore about a Clark/Dean or an Edwards/Dean ticket, and a Kerry/Dean ticket is impossible.  And a Dean/Anything ticket is a ticket to disaster, and not because of the scream, but let’s hope I don’t have to write more about that.) But a Kerry/Edwards ticket, with the caveats above, is an extremely strong one and so long as the party’s base stays fired up—and it will, thanks to the flyboy—and should be able to beat Bush/Cheney in a fair fight.

He's thinking the right thoughts, and as far as the world today is concerned, he's right...all the candidates are starting to attack GW for the incompetent that he is. The problem is that it took Dean to get the other candidates to do that. Earlier, Eric realizes that without mentioning it when he says:

...while the pundits and the SCLM are married to this DLC-friendly notion that Gore’s populism, beginning with his convention speech, lost him the election. In fact the opposite is true. The speech, compared by that great man of the people George Will to “sauerkraut ice cream,” gave Gore a thirteen-point bounce and landed him briefly ahead of Bush. It was only when he began to play for the middle again that his lead dissipated by enough to allow the Supreme Court to hand Bush the election despite his having lost both Florida and the national count.

My worry is that Kerry has show himself, a few times, to be too willing to play by the Washington-Press-Corp-Playbook. Too willing to decide that the important things are what they say are important, whether that's his hair, "Clark as Republican", or whatever. Dean is the only candidate so far to really decide that he wants no part of this high-school-clique, set his own agenda, and went out and got himself where he his despite the anchors of the networks.

While I think that Clark, Edwards, or Kerry would all be excellent presidents, I think that without the Dean-type-candidate, they're all going to succumb to the Al Gore syndrome, and run campaigns that are trying to suck up the the press corp clique, which are entirely uninspiring to the voters, instead of running campaigns that tell us the truth.

In summary..what I would love, although it is entirely unlikely to happen, is a candidate that would, essentially, call Bush a liar while in a debate with him. Ask him what he's been smoking, ask him what (impartial) agency is backing up his crappy numbers, and just generally, point out his 2004-"What-the-fuck" moment. I don't think that Kerry or Clark have that in them. Edwards, maybe. Dean, for sure.

wow.
a convert.
My old friend Noah enabled RSS just for me.
I feel so special.

Now, if he's cool, he'll also figure out how to use the "content" namespace to make the entire content of his posts available via RSS...like all the other cool kids.

If he's even cooler, maybe I can show him how to get mod_perl enabled so he doesn't have to run MT as a CGI, too. Go, go Gadget Memory Usage!

And if he were ultra cool, he'd figure out the second half of my name....