This last weekend I finally got around to reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life In the Emerald City, a remarkable eyewitness account by a Washington Post reporter of the disastrous history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled Iraq from shortly after the U.S. invasion until the establishment of an interim Iraqi government in June of 2004.The book (published last fall) is a rich lode of infuriating but at times amusing (in a Keystone Kops kind of way) anecdotes about the CPA’s self-doomed efforts to fulfill the Bush administration’s fantasies of rebuilding post-invasion Iraq into an economically viable and stable secular democracy–without, unfortunately, much input from the Iraqis themselves, or any significant expertise. Like George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate and Larry Diamond’s Squandered Victory, it examines the huge consequences of letting the country fall apart after the invasion, and then undertaking an occupation staffed by well-meaning but largely unqualified people without the time or resources they needed to get much of anything right. But Chandrasekaran does a superior job capturing particular moments that epitomized the whole mess, such as the appointment of a 24-year-old with no serious financial background to run the Baghdad Stock Exchange; a large grant made to set up partnerships between U.S. and and Iraqi universities, at a time when the Iraqis schools couldn’t get funds for basic lab equipment, computers, or even electrical wiring; and on the very eve of the end of the occupation, a sudden transfer of nearly two billion dollars in Iraqi oil revenues to Halliburton to transport oil into the country from Kuwait. And as the title indicates, there’s lots about the deeply isolated and somewhat surreal life the CPA built for itself within the Green Zone, barracaded inside one of Saddam’s palaces, mostly knowing little about the country they ruled, unable to speak the language, and engaging in behaviors like the heavy and conspicuous consumption of pork and beer that were guaranteed to alienate Iraqis. Like other authors, Chandrasekaran traces the origins of the CPA fiasco to a series of huge mistakes (aside from the decision to invade Iraq in the first place), aggravated by the Bush administration’s general, underlying arrogance, and extensive bureaucratic infighting. The oddest remains the abrupt reversal of the original administration decision to quickly hand over the keys to Iraq to its pet assortment of exile politicians, which suddenly made a completely unplanned and inherently counter-productive occupation necessary. This about-face placed Paul Bremer, supported by a hastily assembled and untrained staff heavily composed of ideologues and political hacks, in a position to make a variety of other mistakes, ranging from the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the denuding of the Iraqi government, to the pursuit of conservative hobbyhorses such as privatization while the country ground to a halt and Iraqis turned anti-American. We’ll never know if Iraq would be in any better shape today if the administration had stuck to the original scheme and handed off power to the first Iraqi exile who arrived in Baghdad with an autographed photo of Dick Cheney, or just asked Grand Ayatollah Sistani to pick a transitional government. But it’s unlikely it could have turned out much worse.

This week’s frantic administration pushback against congressional efforts to rein in Bush on Iraq has certainly had its weird features.For one thing, whose brilliant idea was it to once again deploy Dick Cheney to make the case for the administration? Harry Reid nicely captured the question with this obsevation after Cheney went after him very personally: “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.”Indeed.Now I can understand why the White House doesn’t want to rely for its defense on one of those congressional bitter-enders like Sam Johnson, whose argument for staying perpetually in Iraq rests on his own belief that the U.S. should have stayed perpetually in Vietnam during the 1970s. But Cheney’s threadbare Iraq-Is-The-War-On-Terror number isn’t a lot more convincing. So it appears the administration is once again simply trying to bump up support from the GOP’s conservative base, where Cheney, while not wildly popular, is at least not viewed as an ogre.That interpretation, however, is at odds with a startling new line of “reasoning” adopted by Bush himself this week (via Greg Sargent at TPMCafe) in a press availability:

Last November the American people said they were frustrated and wanted change in our strategy in Iraq. I listened. Today General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course. But the American people did not vote for failure, and that is precisely what the Democratic leadership’s bill would guarantee.

Up until now, Bush’s line has been that he and he alone is in charge of Iraq policy, and elections and polls be damned, he’s sticking to his guns until the day he’s finally dragged out of the Oval Office. That tack did help with with his “base,” still sullenly angry about the election results. But now Bush claims he did bend to the results, which leaves two possibilities: (1) he’s engaged in a particularly cruel and dark attempt at humor here–you want some change, eh? Okay, I’ll give you change, hahahahaha–or (2) he thinks he can actually convince people that voters in November thought an escalation of the war was as good an option as a de-escalation.None of this adds up to a coherent public relations strategy, which leads me to the strong possibility that the Bushies are just flailing around hoping their attacks on Democrats either stick or produce some over-reaction they can exploit.

After reading yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of Congress’ so-called “partial-birth abortion” ban, I did a post over at TPMCafe suggesting, among other things, that the majority’s excrutiating effort to reconcile the decision with SCOTUS precendents on abortion might slow down the inevitable conservative drive to overturn those precedents and eliminate any constitutional right to choose.Unsurprisingly, most published reactions to the decision have avoided such nuances, and treat it as an unambiguous victory for the effort to definitively roll back abortion rights. Both sides in the abortion wars have perfectly legitimate reasons (the sub rosa criticism of basic abortion rights in the majority opinion) and less legitimate but understandable reasons (the desire to view any SCOTUS abortion decision as potentially apocalyptic) for taking this position. But they should all at least read the opinions and consider the future possibilities.Of all the criticisms I got for suggesting a less than clear victory for anti-abortionists, the most interesting was from National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru (one of my few remaining conservative friends these days), who said this at The Corner:

He [Kilgore] argues that “the failure of Alito and Roberts to join the concurring opinion by Thomas and Scalia calling for a reversal of all these precedents [Stenberg, Casey, and Roe] means that a further change in the Court will probably be necessary to produce a more fundamental shift in the constitutional law of abortion rights.” Well of course a further change in the Court is necessary, since Justice Kennedy has given no indication that he has rethought Roe or Casey. Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas do not a majority make. But are we warranted in concluding that Alito and Roberts aren’t for reversing those cases when a case that presents the issue comes up? I don’t see why we would conclude that. And whatever their reasons for not making a judgment of the issue now, their silence actually makes it easier to confirm another conservative justice in the future.

Ramesh clearly thinks the status-quo structure of the majority opinion is just a function of Justice Kennedy’s position, and that Roberts’ and Alito’s “silence” on the underlying issues represents a neutrality on Roe that they will abandon once a fifth vote materializes to overturn it. This is an impressively honest assertion of the dishonesty of the two Bush Justices’ current attitude towards this most important constitutional issue–a dishonesty that many abortion rights advocates also assert.I continue to think that the more Kennedy, Alito and Roberts say in published opinions that they respect Roe and its successor decisions, the harder it will be for them to overturn these precedents. But I’m clearly in a minority on that, at least now.

Were you exposed to any of the annual Tax Day shriekathon by conservatives about the horrendous tax burden of wealthy Americans? Jared Bernstein has a post up at TPMCafe that nicely simplifies the games played by those who try to make this case:

[I]f you want to make our tax system sound unfair, you do two things. First, you talk only about income taxes, ignoring payroll and other sources, and second, you talk about the share of taxes paid by each income class.

The first gambit excludes the highly regressive Social Security and Medicare taxes, largely paid by the middle class. And the second avoids all sorts of alternative and better measurements of the tax burden, most especially effective tax rates and after-tax income. The one good thing that’s come out of the Bush tax agenda is that progressives, who used to avoid saying much of anything on Tax Day, now have lots to say.

Some of you may have been offended or amused by GOP presidential candidate Tommy Thompson’s gaffe before a Jewish audience the other day, wherein he allowed as how:”I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition.”Thompson’s hilariously counterproductive efforts to dig himself out of his use of Jewish stereotypes are one thing. As Mark Schmitt usefully noted over at TAPPED, his remarks were also offensive insofar as they implied he wasn’t actually earning his pay during his many years of public service, as compared to his recent “private sector” gigs at places like Akin, Gump, where he is presumably pulling down big bucks to show the company flag while actually running for president.But let’s take this up another notch. The other planted axiom in Thompson’s riff is an even more invidious and important one: the idea that the ability to pull down large sums of money constitutes “earning”–in the moral, not the mechanical sense–that income, implying an identity between wealth and virtue.This is indeed an attitude that’s deeply engrained in the American psyche, and that does help explain our relatively high tolerance for economic inequality. But it doesn’t survive much genuine reflection.Since we have created the largest upper class in human history, is one to deduce that the current generation of wealthy Americans is the most moral, the hardest working, the most responsible group of people to grace the planet? Does anyone really think that, say, the millions of unfortunate people who couldn’t find jobs during the Great Depression were morally inferior to, or lazier than, today’s millionaires? Probably not, yet the self-congratulation that so often accompanies such wealth accumulation, particularly when accompanied by the belief that taxation is virtually theft, seems to reflect that point of view.There’s no question that any capitalist economy is going to reward some skills and assets more than others, and create some level of inequality, and much of the western world’s economic policy debates over the last couple of centuries have revolved around prudential questions about the degree to which such inequality is necessary or incidental to the efficiency of markets.But that’s economics, not ethics, and it’s more than a little important to keep them straight. The kind of inequality this country has today may or may not be a byproduct of economic forces that we must at least respect, even if we decide to override them in the interests of a more decent society, or in the pursuit of a more stable and long-term prosperity. But there’s nothing “natural” or “moral” about vast inequality, and its tribunes must be challenged every time they try to pretend otherwise, even through the sloppy use of words like “earned.”

I wound up watching hours of the television coverage of the Blacksburg massacre yesterday, probably because I know a whole lot more about Virginia Tech than about the sites of similiar tragedies in the past. And two aspects of the “story” jumped out, particularly during and immediately after the university’s evening press conference.First was the firm stonewalling by university spokesmen on the salient facts of the tragedy, to the point of telling reporters they knew “facts” that they were unwilling to disclose for unspecified reasons. It was painfully obvious that no one before the cameras in Blacksburg had any training in crisis communications; they appeared uniformly defensive and, well, uncommunicative. I obviously don’t know what university officials were telling thousands of anxious parents at this point, but if it was no more than what they were putting out publicly, it probably wasn’t very helpful or comforting.Second, and closely related to the first, was the speed with which the media shifted the “story” from the massacre itself to suspicions that Virginia Tech horribly mishandled the situation after the initial shootings, quite possibly missing a chance to prevent or at least mitigate the subsequent shootings. This storyline clearly fed and fed on the school’s refusal to talk. And the media also jumped quickly on state officials, implicitly suggesting they should have instantly materialized in Blacksburg to take charge of the situation. (One of the realities of public higher education in this country is the carefully constructed absence of direct, hierarchical lines of authority between state officials and university operations, compounded in cases like this by fuzzy and often informal relationships among state, local and university law enforcement personnel). None of this much matters in the long run, or is of any significance as compared with the underlying tragedy. But the interactive dance of defensive, stonewalling public officials and aggressive, competition-obsessed reporters has become a depressingly regular feature of “breaking news.”

I’m doing this post because my old friend Armando at TalkLeft has cited me twice in the past week for opposing partisanship, “contrast,” and “fighting” as elements of a Democratic political strategy, once quoting, slightly (but not unfairly) out of context, something I said back in 2005.His latest post selectively quotes from an analysis I did the other day of the Democratic presidential field, noting in passing that Gore and Kerry lacked an overarching message, but had plenty of policy proposals and lots of Shrumian “fighting” rhetoric. This somehow translates, in Armando’s view, into me saying that I said Gore and Kerry’s candidacies lost because they “fought” or were too partisan. Not true. All I said is that both candidacies (and yes, I understand that Gore won the popular vote and Kerry clame close) would have benefitted from a consistent, overarching message that complemented their vast policy agendas and their “fighting” spirit. No, I do not think wanting to “fight” Republicans represents a sufficient message for any Democrat; but that doesn’t mean I’m opposed, then or now, to a strong contrast in campaign messages, so long as there is a message other than “I oppose the bad guys.” As it happens, I was as unhappy as anybody with the weird, poll-driven reluctance of the Kerry campaign during the 2004 convention to attack the opposition; I was in the convention speechwriting operation, and chafed against the High Command’s edict that speeches barely mention Bush and rarely mention the GOP. As Armando suggests, the Kerry campaign got out of that mindset later in the campaign, and I’m glad they did. As for the “politics of contrast,” which Armando has repeatedly used me as a foil to promote, yes, of course, absolutely, if you don’t explain to voters why you’re different from the opposition, you can’t expect to win many elections. But just as obviously, there are legitimate questions about where to draw contrasts, and how much contrast is necessary. If contrast is the only thing that matters, then Democrats should just distance themselves as far from Republicans as possible, regardless of public opinion, principles, actual consequences, or common sense, and I doubt Armando or anyone else really thinks that makes any sense. He has his point of view about how far Democrats need to go to “contrast” themselves with the GOP on Iraq, but that point of view, however passionately and articulately advanced, is just a debating point between people who agree on the basics, not a self-evident position held by anyone who wants “contrast.” So don’t count me among the (largely imaginary) ranks of Democrats who never want to be partisan, don’t want to draw contrasts, and don’t want to fight. I continue to think we need a broader message that appeals to people who aren’t reflexively ideological or partisan, and I reject the idea that Bill Clinton (for example), wasn’t acting as a partisan politician when he talked about “progress not partisanship” in 1996 and 1998. Partisanship, contrast and “fighting” do need to be connected to a broader national agenda and a rationale for Democratic candidacies that transcends these tactics, and that’s all I’ve tried to say.

As a follow-up to my recent post on the Democratic presidential race, I would say there really isn’t any dominant conventional wisdom about the Republican contest at this point.Some observers think the field is a big mess, with the Big Three candidates (Giuliani, McCain and Romney) all sporting gigantic liabilities that could theoretically take them down before Iowa, but with no one else emerging or likely to emerge from the weak second-tier pack to win the nomination and unite the GOP.Yet some observers (in both parties) think the biggest of the Big Three, Rudy Giuliani, can pull off a miracle by winning the nomination despite his rich history of ideological heresies and marital issues, and then win the general election based on his personal charisma and his reputation and “America’s Mayor” on and after 9/11. And a few think a dark horse–most recently Fred Thompson–can snuff all the front-runners.The Giuliani issue is indeed fascinating. He’s totally kicking butt in the polls. Real Clear Politics’ average of GOP polls since March 21 shows Rudy up in the 30s, while McCain has collapsed into the teens, with Romney (the other member of the Big Three) stuck in the single digits, actually trailing Thompson and barely ahead of Newt Gingrich.But Giuliani’s manifold liabilities, especially on cultural issues, seem to be multiplying, given his recent reiteration of support for public funding of abortions (his lame-o follow-up pledge that he wouldn’t try to repeal “current law” radically restricting such funding was cold comfort to Right-to-Lifers, whose main raison d’etre is to overturn the “current law” making abortion legal in the first place). Now some analysts seem to think that cultural conservatives will look at Rudy’s overall record and platform and give him a pass on issues like abortion and gay marriage and immigration. But as I never tire of pointing out, these aren’t negotiable issues to culturally conservative voters, many of whom think legalized abortion is a second Holocaust; that gay marriage is a fundamental threat to the institution of the family; and that current immigration policies threaten the basic cultural integrity of the nation. At a minimum, Giuliani is going to face a nasty, scorched-earth demonization effort far more intense than the one that brought down John McCain in 2000, while providing a lot more raw material to work with than McCain ever did. You can count on it.An alternative argument, made most persuasively by Mike Tomasky, is that Rudy’s mastered dog-whistle politics, and might well, in office, give the Cultural Right whatever they want, despite his public positions. That may be true, but I doubt it will do him much good in running for the nomination, since (a) Rudy built a long record of untrustworthy behavior towards conservatives in New York, and (b) the Cultural Right has repeatedly been gamed by past Republican presidents, including those who publicly agreed with their demands, making conservatives vastly less likely to accept bare promises, much less dog whistles.The final argument you hear is more basic: today’s Republicans, like Democrats accepting Bill Clinton in 1992 or even GOPers Liking Ike in 1952, are simply so desperate to hang onto the White House that they’ll plunk for Rudy simply because he might win the general election.The analogy to Clinton is reasonable in one respect: like Clinton, Rudy faces a very weak field. Many people may have forgotten the grand irony of the 1992 nominating process: the same New Hampshire primary that threatened Clinton’s campaign and ultimately made him “the Comeback Kid” also croaked the candidacies of Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey, leaving Clinton to face two underwhelming rivals, Paul Tsongas and (later) Jerry Brown. It’s possible that Giuliani could win the nomination in 2008 simply because no one is strong enough to beat him, though this outcome would run a high risk of creating a conservative third-party candidacy. Indeed, as Tomasky pointed out in his (above-cited) article, there’s no way that Clinton was as far from the Democratic mainstream on major issues in 1992 as Giuliani is today. As for Ike–well, aside from the fact that the GOP was far less ideologically conservative in 1952 than it is today, there’s this small matter that Eisenhower, having supervised the defeat of Nazi Germany, was vastly more popular than anyone in public life in this day and age, definitely including “America’s Mayor.”Meanwhile, Rudy’s strength in the polls has fed the other boom, the otherwise unlikely effort to catapult Fred Thompson into the role of the “true conservative” in the race. The Thompson proto-candidacy really does make you wonder if George Allen might be headed towards the nomination if he hadn’t disgraced himself en route to losing his Senate seat last year. He was a lot more acceptable to conservatives than Thompson has ever been, and had at least an arguable record of accomplishment as governor of Virginia, whereas ol’ Fred warmed a chair in the Senate between stints as a mediocre character actor and a lobbyist. Maybe he’ll manage to run a campaign that strikes a chord stronger than “I’m not those other guys,” but until then, it appears his sudden double-digit position in the polls is simply a sad reflection on the field.There is a pretty firm CW about two other candidates: Romney and McCain. Despite his powerful fundraising numbers, it’s almost universally accepted in GOP circles that the Mittster has flunked his first audition as “the true conservative candidate,” mainly thanks to those toxic videotapes of his earlier protestations of cultural liberalism, along with exceptional hostility in conservative evangelical circles towards his Mormon faith. He may get a second audition before it’s over, but he’s so far shown no reason to believe it will go better than the first. Unlike Giuliani, he doesn’t have the positive national image that makes him look good in general election trial heats. He’s actually afraid to talk about his main policy achievement, his role in Massachusetts’ health care plan. So it’s hard to see what, exactly, would convert his money and on-paper strengths into actual votes.And there’s also general agreement that John McCain is in deep trouble. He’s lost about half his early GOP support in the horse-race polls; he’s actually running behind Thompson in at least one. And his one big gambit to regain conservative support, his increasingly visible support for the “Bush surge” in Iraq and his abrasive slurs on the patriotism of Democrats who are opposing it, may help him with the GOP base, but only at the price of all but eliminating his already-decimated positive image among independents and Democrats. And given just about any alternative, few conservatives really want to support McCain if he looks like a weak general election candidate harnessed to the GOP’s worst issue.Little needs to be said about the GOP’s other candidates. Tancredo will continue his bid to become the new Pat Buchanan of presidential politics, probably forcing other candidates to get shrill on immigration, which will help solidify the Democratic advantage among Latinos in the general election. Sam Brownback will serve a similar destructive function on abortion and gay marriage. Gingrich, if he runs despite a very late start, will be the ultimate fallback candidate, sort of Bob Dole with a lot of baggage, offering the party the option of just taking a dive in 2008. And Mike Huckabee doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Nor does Tommy Thompson. Hagel shouldn’t be mentioned unti
l he acts like he’s running.And don’t forget this: Republicans don’t have some Ultimate Savior out there who could run a credible campaign if push came to shove. In the extremely unlikely event that all of the Democratic Big Three crashed and burned, the party still has Al Gore, who would probably accept a real draft. The only person on the GOP side that could theoretically offer that is Jeb Bush, whose last name is almost certainly a disqualifier.So count me as a member of the “big mess” faction when it comes to an analysis of the GOP field. Rudy makes no sense; Fred’s got no game; Mitt’s stuck in neutral; John’s mired in a lose-lose relationship with the conservative base; and the rest of the candidates seem to be going nowhere fast.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at 84. Like a lot of baby boomers, no doubt, the news made me feel sad and very old, and perhaps wondering what Vonnegut had been up to during the decades after we all read his early stuff like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. I’m sure a lot of people who grew up in the 60s and 70s remember Vonnegut as part of a group of fiction writers who were considered de rigour at the time– a group that at least for my classmates at Emory University included Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Joseph Heller, and probably many others whose names and works I have completely forgotten. (Their non-fiction counterparts included radical writers like Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, R.D. Laing, and Emory’s own Thomas J.J. Altizer).Vonnegut was already an “old guy” back then, and it was his distinctive contribution to connect the cultural, political and literary preoccupations of the day with older traditions of pacifism, anti-authoritarianism, science fiction, and sheer anarchic whimsy. With the possible exception of Slaughterhouse-Five, which audaciously challenged (like Heller’s Catch-22) the morality of “The Good War,” Vonnegut’s work probably hasn’t aged as well as he did. But as he might have himself put it, “So it goes.”As it happens, I owe a small personal debt to the man: he made my surname cool, via his strange science-fiction-writer character Kilgore Trout. So I pray that Vonnegut may rest in peace, in whatever dimension he now occupies.

It’s become a commonplace observation to note that the 2008 presidential race, particularly on the Democratic side, is already achieving an unusually frantic pace. And perhaps the best evidence of that hypothesis is the fact that each of the Big Three Democratic candidates, Clinton, Obama and Edwards, has already been described, by the Conventional Wisdom of the Washington chattering classes and key elements of the blogosphere, as undergoing a potentially fatal “swoon.”HRC was the first to be thusly described, especially when Barack Obama entered the race and predictably started building support among the African-American voters who had previously tilted heavily to Clinton, erasing much of her early, big lead in the polls. The fact that this trend coincided with a MSM and blogospheric obsession with her refusal to apologize about her vote for the Iraq War resolution, compounded by her lukewarm appeal to independent voters, led some smart people to predict her early demise.Just a few weeks ago, of course, John Edwards had to put up, however briefly, with reports that he was actually about to drop out of the race, and/or would be capsized by public concerns about his wife’s health, and/or couldn’t raise any money.And now Barack Obama is suffering from a bit of a drop in support in the polls, explained by many as the result of his refusal to get specific on policy ideas, and/or to give Democratic audiences the red meat they expect. As a new and relatively balanced New Republic article by Noam Scheiber reflects, the emerging CW is that Obama’s buzz factor is fading (just as many Obama-skeptics in the punditocracy had long predicted), leaving him in a downward trajectory unless he changes course.Taking all these “trends” together, the lesson is that you shouldn’t pay much attention to the early CW on any of these three candidates. The best bet is that the Big Three are all viable and tightly bunched, which is mainly bad news for the Little Three (Richardson, Dodd and Biden) who need some oxygen to get taken seriously by the media, the activists, and the money folk.What’s more interesting to me is the extent to which the Big Three have taken varying courses in laying out a rationale for their candidacy.When you boil it all down, our last two presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry, were rich in policy proposals and Shrumian “fighting” rhetoric, but largely bereft of any overarching message (Gore, to be more precise, had several messages, but couldn’t settle on one for any length of time).Nobody needs Bob Shrum any more to convey an intention to “fight” Republicans. Obama is all message (the same message of beyond-polarization and reform that John Kerry rejected and Wesley Clark botched in 2004), and part of his early appeal is that he scratches a long-standing itch among message-starved Democratic and independent voters. It also enables him to simultaneously run to the left and right of his main rivals.HRC, so far, stands in the Gore-Kerry all-policy, no-message tradition, assuming that “I’m in it to win!” is a short-term, tactical slogan designed to deal with doubts about her electability.Edwards is the one candidate so far to put together both a clear message (an updated version of his “Two Americas” theme from 2004) and a lot of policy detail. But I strongly suspect that Obama and Clinton will soon catch up on that front, and then we’ll begin to see some real and congruent competition. The other thing that’s likely to happen is that George W. Bush will find a way to make moot the current tactical arguments among the Democratic presidential candidates over Iraq, which will make their opinions on other topics more visible and politically relevant.Each of the Big Three has a distinctive set of strategic issues to navigate.HRC is clearly the least vulnerable to mood swings, media narratives, or gaffes; she’s already suffered the most important setback, the loss of her overwhelming African-American support. She’ll be fine if none of her rivals, Big or Little, catch fire.Obama needs to overcome the current negative buzz about his campaign; continue, through heavy and broad-based fundraising and competitive poll numbers, to solidify his status as a national candidate who doesn’t have to win early; and unfold a policy agenda that satisfies the critics without pigeon-holing him ideologically.And Edwards, aside from getting past the rumors about the impact of his wife’s health on his candidacy, needs to continue his interesting tandem strategy of becoming the preferred choice of the activist Left, while maintaining his appeal as a regional Southern candidate, which could be very important after New Hampshire. So far, he seems to be pulling it off, as evidenced by his recently unveiled and impressive endorsement list in South Carolina (no, endorsements aren’t all that important in themselves, but in this case they do show he hasn’t in any way become toxic in his home region. He should say a prayer every night in thanks for Mark Warner’s noncandidacy). Unlike HRC and Obama, Edwards really does need to win or at worst finish a strong second in Iowa, but if he does, he could be in very good shape.This post does obviously reflect the CW in focusing on the Big Three, as opposed to Richardson, Dodd and Biden. But in this case, the CW may well be accurate, given the front-loaded caucus and primary schedule, the strength of the Big Three in the early states, the Little Three’s money disadvantage, and the absence of any issue on which the Little Three–with the possible exception of Biden’s relative hawkishness, which doesn’t look like a winner among Democratic voters in 2008–could distinguish themselves.The most likely dark horse is Bill Richardson. The good news for Richardson is that all the rumors over the decades about his alleged “zipper problem” are probably just bunk; we’d have almost certainly learned otherwise by now if it were otherwise. The bad news for Richardson is that he almost has to win in Nevada to have a prayer, and even then, he’s not well-positioned to win in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina.So: get used to the idea that the Democratic nominee will likely be named (to list them alphabetically) Barack, Hillary or John, and that you can ignore a lot of the daily buzz about the Big Three until people start voting, which will be soon enough.