Tonight’s Democratic debate, in which candidates stick it to the man on issues like health care, climate change, taxes, etc., has been brought to us by the following companies:

Cialis
General Motors
Liberty Mutual Insurance
United States Mint
Ditech “Fix Your ARM” Mortgages

The traditional media’s expectation is that the candidates need to take the gloves off tonight and really get at each other on “the issues.” My expectation: candidates will look like they’re taking the gloves off, but they’ll still talk past each other.
To follow along, check out John Deeth’s liveblog on Iowa Independent.

In case you’d like to hear what I sound like with allergies, you can listen to me live on Taylor Marsh’s webcast at 3PM eastern, 2PM central today.
I had a nice conversation with Taylor yesterday, and we’ve made arrangements for me to come on her show to talk about the presidential race in Iowa every [...]

I posted yesterday that one key indicator of Iowa Caucus success is whether caucus goers have had a chance to meet you — that is, how many appearances a candidate has made around the state. The total number of events were roughly 120 for Sen. John Edwards, 100 for Sen. Barack Obama, and 60 [...]

Just saw a scan of this Florida GOP mailing at Marc Ambinder’s blog:

The Florida GOP has been trying to use their control of the legislature to disenfranchise Florida Democrats, all in an effort to make them angry at the Democratic party nationally. The mailing (above) that they sent out also includes a voter registration [...]

On OpenLeft Monday evening, Mike Lux had this to say after his trip to Iowa last week:
My overall sense of the Iowa race so far is that Hillary’s team has run the smartest race; that Obama’s team is taking the biggest risk (with the biggest potential upside); and that the Edwards team is still very [...]

Today Gov. Bill Richardson released a powerful YouTube video attacking all of his opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination for their plans to leave residual forces on the ground in Iraq. The ad is extremely critical, and it includes cameo appearances from big name bloggers who aren’t necessarily endorsing Richardson’s candidacy, but are (at [...]

The Florida Democratic Party just can’t catch a break. First, Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill to move the state’s primary to January 29, 2008, in violation of agreed-upon national political party rules. The Democratic National Committee then announced that if Florida went ahead with its plans, it would be stripped of its [...]

Chris Bowers compiled data from the Washington Post to give us a pretty clear picture of “where the campaign is being waged.” These are the top 15 states for presidential campaign events since January:

Iowa: 1,240
New Hampshire: 571
South Carolina: 268
California: 238
D.C.: 174
Florida: 146
Nevada: 111
New York: 103
Texas: 93
Illinois: 73
Michigan: 55
Virginia: 38
Georgia: 37
Pennsylvania: 37
Massachusetts: 36

These make Iowa [...]

I wrote this as part of last night’s analysis of the AARP/IPTV “Divided We Fail” Democratic presidential debate, but then I realized that it was really a separate argument that might warrant its own discussion. So here it is, reproduced:
Conventional wisdom (because David Yepsen already blogged it) is that Sen. Barack Obama was the [...]