I’m going to editorialize for a moment. I know this is a personal blog, and I should feel comfortable doing it without any pretext, but this is a touchy subject. Here, I attempt to explain why I think it is OK for a Democratic presidential candidate to criticize former president Bill Clinton. [...]

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 [...]

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.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has been receiving the most media attention among Democratic presidential candidates this week because of her new health care plan. Sen. Barack Obama was featured on NBC Nightly News Monday night to talk about, among other things, the tax proposal he is rolling out this week. Meanwhile, the national media [...]

On the heels of Sen. Barack Obama’s Iraq policy tour through Iowa this week, expect the Obama campaign to release a legislative endorsement announcement very soon. Sen. Joe Biden announced his second House leadership endorsement yesterday, which put the legislative endorsement mini-horserace back in the news. For those keeping score: Clinton is in [...]

Out of the saddle for a couple weeks, Iowa Independent’s usual liveblogger John Deeth is back to his old ways tonight, blogging from the Hawkeye Labor Council’s Democratic candidates’ forum in Cedar Rapids. Before the festivities have really even started, he delivers this succinctly accurate picture of what’s going on in caucus politics:
The [...]

I liveblogged the debate over on Iowa Independent tonight — or at least I tried.
So who won?  The talking heads can’t decide, but they are thrilled to have so many arguments to talk about.
 On framing, the winner is either Obama or Edwards, depending on who you think is best served by the discussion of lobbyist [...]

Big, important YearlyKos info-dump is forthcoming, I think.  Until I get that up, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about the differences between seeing a candidate in Iowa and seeing a candidate at a progressive bloggers’ convention.  This was going to be long and developed, but it turned out that there [...]

Here’s a little of what the mainstream Iowa media have been saying recently:
Using unfortunately-hackneyed boxing metaphors, Todd Dorman (Lee Newspapers) identifies the fundamental issues of the 2008 presidential campaign. A little “big picture” for me, but still noteworthy.
David Yepsen (Des Moines Register) blogs that the Obama-Hillary feud only helps the candidates not yet involved. [...]