Last night, the Iowa Christian Alliance held a dinner and invited former Sen. Fred Thompson, who came to the dinner as part of his second swing through Iowa as a presidential candidate. Thompson was told he would not have an opportunity to speak at the dinner, only to attend.
Iowa Independent’s Jay Wagner described how [...]

The Register was a little late with its coverage of Sen. John Edwards’s decision to accept matching funds, but the article that did go up included some interesting quotes from Sarah Swisher, Iowa political director for the SEIU. Here’s how the Register presented it:
An Iowa union leader who closely follows politics said she respects [...]

Recent hay has been made of Michelle Obama’s poetic (almost Obama-esque…) statement in Davenport this week that “If Barack doesn’t win Iowa, it’s just a dream, but if we win Iowa, then we can move the world as it should be.” Commentators read it as the campaign’s official “We have to win Iowa” declaration. [...]

Two weeks ago today, I broke the story that Angelique Pirozzi, who was Sen. Hillary Clinton’s Caucus Director(responsible for overseeing the campaign’s field program in Iowa), was fired.
Cityview’s Civic Skinny took a little longer getting to it, covering it this week, but they overstate the problem a little bit, calling it a “revolving door”:
Pirozzi’s departure [...]

I interviewed former Congressman David Bonior, who is Sen. John Edwards’s national campaign manager, this afternoon. We spoke at length about the campaign’s decision to accept matching funds, and he mentioned that right now it looks like the campaign has about $9 million in cash on hand. Noting that the public financing decision [...]

I’m all for writing critical articles about candidates rather than just rewriting their press releases and posting them, but did CNN really need to use “Edwards eyes $105M from public kitty” as the front-page title link to the story about Edwards’s decision to accept public financing? Really? The story itself is actually fine, [...]

It looks like the oft-maligned practice of shipping celebrity endorsers from out of state into Iowa is starting up again for this campaign cycle. This weekend, “sexy plumber” and Desperate Housewives star James Denton will make a two-day trip through Iowa with former Sen. John Edwards’s daughter Cate.
They will tailgate at the University of [...]

Wednesday night’s debate was the best high-stakes (DNC sanctioned, nationally televised) debate yet. And it demonstrated one counterintuitive fact about debate formats: candidates seem more like windbags when they have time limits (that is, when they have a specific block of time they are allotted no matter what they are saying) than when the [...]

Sen. Chris Dodd’s campaign announced yesterday that it has added two new senior staffers to its Iowa team: Nikki Budzinski, who is coming from the IAFF (that endorsement has led to a number of press release-worthy endorsements and additions), will be their Political Director. And Joe Zepecki, who “served as a consultant to the [...]

Who won the Democratic Presidential Debate Thursday night at Dartmouth? Everyone but Sen. Hillary Clinton.
The issues that commentators expected would plague the former First Lady’s campaign months ago have begun to emerge. From the “old stuff” Sen. Joe Biden referred to (”He then pointedly said he was talking about ‘policy, policy’ issues,” notes [...]