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 [...]

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, [...]

noneed4thneed of Century of the Common Iowan launched a new online poll last week to measure his readers’ support of Democratic presidential candidates.  He held them in the past, and the results were always unscientific but interesting to see.  Now that campaigns are taking Iowa blogs a bit more seriously, however, Iowa bloggers can’t assume [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

I got a press release earlier today from the Obama campaign announcing that they have received 1,864 donations from Iowans (also noting predictably that the vast majority of Iowan donations are under $200).
So Iowa Independent did some digging, and it turns out that Edwards is beating Obama by some 600 donations: Edwards’s total is 2,468.
Obviously, [...]