Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 11/28/2003

		This Week (11/28)			Last Week (11/21)
1	Howard Dean	7350	22.3%	-0.4	1	7940	22.7%
2	John Kerry	5860	17.8%	+1.2	2	5780	16.6%
3	Wesley Clark	4720	14.3%	+0.0	3	4990	14.3%
4	John Edwards	4070	12.3%	-0.4	4	4460	12.8%
5	Joe Lieberman	3360	10.2%	+0.9	6	3230	9.2%
6	Dick Gephardt	3280	9.9%	+0.0	5	3480	10.0%
7	Dennis Kucinich	1750	5.3%	-0.1	8	1890	5.4%
8	Al Sharpton	1630	4.9%	-1.0	7	2080	6.0%
9	Carol Moseley Braun	957	2.9%	-0.2	9	1070	3.1%

Another fairly uneventful week (Thanksgiving and all). Dean continues to hold the lead while most everyone else coasted. Kerry's numbers have jumped slightly, but all within range of recent fluctuations. Nothing much to report.

The following is a chart of the Google News Media Share over the last few months:

(Methodology: All numbers are taken from the hit counts when searching on the Google News Service for news stories containing each candidate's name. Click on each name to rerun the search. You will get different results as the numbers are constantly changing. I make absolutely no claim that these numbers have any real meaning.)

The endorsements are (rock and) rolling in

Joan Jett wants to be a Dean delegate.

Unfortunate

Clark needs to learn not to be a willing vehicle for right-wing smears. All Democrats need to learn this.

The southern strategy

Excellent post by Digby on the question of Dean's Southern Strategy. His conclusion (my paraphrase): if Dean is only making a "feint" towards winning the Southern vote in order to not simply concede the South and let the Republicans take it for granted then bravo for him. But if Dean actually thinks he can win over the South through a simple class appeal (bringing poor blacks and whites together) he is being naive about how ingrained the racism is within rural white southerners.

I suspect Dean's approach is more calculated than idealistic (i.e., naive) because he appears to be to much of a pragmatist to think he can solve this problem over night. I'm not so down on the idea of making a class appeal to poor white southerners, but I understand where Digby is going with this argument. We can't let an idealistic, "can't we all get along" attitude blind us to some cold, hard realities.

The simple truth is that their is an ugliness at the center of the American character. It is racism. And, despite all our best efforts, it continues to cling to our hearts tenaciously. It could very well take hundreds of years to expunge it. But we have to keep trying.

The bright side

Liberal Oasis provides the silver lining perspective on the Medicare bill:

Yesterday was a day that Dubya and Karl Rove had dreamed of for a long time, the day that they stole the Medicare issue from the Dems, like Clinton did welfare reform.

But instead of getting ready to take a victory lap, they’re about to take a damage control lap.

Some readers may be frustrated that Dems didn’t successfully filibuster the bill, but this wasn’t anything remotely like a cave-in.

In fact, the job the Dems did to get the truth out about the bill, and to neutralize the AARP endorsement (Sunday notwithstanding), has been excellent.

And it has put Bush in a worse political position.

[...]

And the initial broadcast media coverage, which is usually heavily slanted to the victors, instead gave a fair amount of time to Dems and the underbelly of the bill.

This is an important point that needs to be hammered home repeatedly: just because you might lose a legislative battle does not mean you have to lose the spin war that comes afterward. By standing up against this bill and calling so much of it into question the Democrats have managed to give the establishment media something to report other than "another Bush victory".

If the Democrats play this right, the Republicans will curse the day they ever passed this bill.