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 [...]

Yesterday, anticipation was mounting for Sen. Barack Obama’s ‘major policy address’ on Iraq in Clinton, IA. Fresh from the Senate hearing in which Obama challenged two prominent proponents of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, many believed that Obama would use the speech as an opportunity to emerge as a leader in the Senate for [...]

David Yepsen gets uncharacteristically snarky in his discussion of news that Sen. Hillary Clinton campaigned in Florida this week:
One thing we learned during Bill Clinton’s presidency was to study and parse his words carefully.
Apparently we’ll need to do that with his wife should she become president.
[...]
Hmmm. Clinton had pledged: “I shall not campaign or participate [...]

New reasons emerged this week to doubt the tier system most commentators use to describe the 2008 presidential horse race.
Conventional wisdom — here in Iowa and across the country — dictates that the three candidates to watch on the Democratic side are Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards.
Sen. Chris Dodd, [...]

Plenty of volunteers have crappy experiences in campaign offices, because that’s just how it goes.  Once you agree to volunteer, campaigns don’t put as much effort into making friends with you because they assume you have already drunk the Kool-Aid.  Unfortunately, when there are few clear distinctions between candidates and a long, contentious primary, staff [...]

And now, the post wherein I undermine whatever credibility I might have left by admitting that I watch the Hallmark Channel:
Yes, from midnight to 2AM central time each night, I allow the soothing action sequences and overt Republican undertones of the mediocre show Walker, Texas Ranger to lull me to sleep. It’s a guilty [...]

Tonight and tomorrow night, the band Third Eye Blind will play concerts in Council Bluffs and Des Moines, IA, to crowds that are expected to be quite large. (Where all the people are coming from, I’m not sure.)
But that’s not the story. The story is that, according to rumors, they’ll be sporting Barack [...]

The primacy of the Iowa Caucuses is Chet Culver’s top priority, but (1) should it be? And (2) does it matter what Culver’s priorities are?
On the first question: being chronologically first isn’t sufficient; and, taken to the extreme, it could be a bad thing. Idaho could decide to hold its primary tomorrow, and [...]

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 [...]