I wasn’t a Howard Dean supporter, although I greatly admired his campaign and I really liked his supporters. It was just my judgment that he didn’t have “what it takes” to win the 2004 election. I sensed a certain tone-deafness. I also sensed a lot of hostility from the establishment of both the Democratic Party and the corporate media. I was also someone who watched Dean’s post-Iowa concession speech with my jaw on the floor. I never made apologies for his self-immolating performance, which I considered to be confirmation of my instincts about the man’s limitations as a national politician. He really did screw up. But, my God, they played that clip of him until his political career was dead and cold and we all had a wake and buried it in the ground. The media assassinated Howard Dean. They killed him. It was completely over the top. So, I hope Roger Simon remembers that when he complains about how Ron Paul’s strong second place finish in the Iowa straw poll is being ignored. Yes, Ron Paul lost by less than a percentage point. And he got no credit for it at all. Bachmann went on five Sunday morning shows; Paul went on none. And Bachmann is easily as crazy as Paul, so what explains it?
It doesn’t matter what explains it. Back in 2000, Bill Bradley raised more money than the sitting vice-president and was ahead in the New Hampshire polls before he lost to Gore in the Iowa Caucuses. The media was so in love with John McCain that they hardly paid attention to Bradley, and in any case they supported Gore. Bradley lost the New Hampshire primary by about 4,000 votes. Then the media forgot he existed because McCain had pulled off the upset that Bradley could not. He still had more money than Gore and there were 48 states remaining to vote, but his campaign was killed from lack of attention.
The truth is the media puts its fingers on the scales in elections all the time. They’re doing it right now to Ron Paul. They openly rooted for McCain over Bush. They probably rooted for Obama over McCain. They always have a preference and they always find some candidate to screw over.
The bigfoot reporters move like a herd. I don’t know if there is anyone giving orders. I think it’s more like a consensus emerges and they find it impossible to deviate from that narrative. Ergo, Ron Paul has no chance to be president but Michele Bachmann is for realz.
Maybe, but a better explanation is that Ron Paul’s supporters are always vocal, they always raise a shit-ton of money, yet when it comes time for organizing and getting votes…he does shitty.
Maybe this year will be different. With proportional voting, he might get a nice kick from New Hampshire with a possible third place finish. But I doubt it.
Look, first of all, New Hampshire has no delegates. That people let it have influence on who becomes president is ridiculous. More people probably live in Orange County, California than in New Hampshire.
Secondly, if memory serves me correctly, Obama actually won one more delegate than Clinton from the NH primary, even though he lost the state, all of his momentum, and a chance to wrap up the nomination.
But, more to the point, Ron Paul can expect to do pretty well in almost every state in the country. In 2008, he came in second in 10 states and third in seventeen others. So, yes, he stands to do substantially better under a proportional system. But don’t count on our corporate media to inform you of that fact.
Not sure exactly what you said here that doesn’t correlate with what I said…complaining about New Hampshire’s influence is like complaining about the ratings agencies’ influence.
Just looked it up, and Obama and Clinton tied for 9 delegates. She beat him by three percent.
If you’re only getting 15% of the vote, third place doesn’t mean shit. Second in Nevada (14%), Montana (25%), Pennsylvania (after Mitt Romney dropped out with a 16%), and the rest with no other candidates. You can’t look at his second and third place finishes in a vacuum. This is going to June, and Ron Paul is not going to do well compared with Bachmann. I want to see how Perry does on a national stage before making an official pronouncement, though.
And yes, the corporate media is still a bunch of tools.
You’re right that it’s stupid to complain about NH’s out-sized influence, except in the context of counting delegates. Okay, so Obama tied Clinton in delegates in NH and yet it cost him hugely.
But in the end, what mattered was that she didn’t get shit for delegates even when she won. He netted like 16 delegates from Idaho the same night she netter the same amount from New Jersey.
People thought she had a good night. She had a disastrous night.
Some things matter because perceptions matter. Other things don’t matter because perceptions don’t matter.
With proportional representation, Ron Paul won’t win meaningful delegates even if he wins NH. Of course, it might give him momentum to do better and win more delegates down the line.
Oh for sure. Hell, a good chunk of politics is nothing but perceptions. But math didn’t lie, and that’s why Obama pursued the strategy that he did before Clinton even knew what happened. Yada yada, you know this as well as anyone.
But with regard to Ron Paul, I still don’t see where we’re disagreeing. I agree that the media is against him. But the reason they’re pimping Bachmann over Paul isn’t just because they’re against him. It’s because he has a ceiling on his support, and it’s unlikely that the ceiling will fracture or break in this season based on his history. He’s always been able to raise a lot of hard-core supporters and money, but has never had the ability to breakthrough — and that isn’t just because of the media.
As I said, this season could be different due to proportional voting that could propel him further, and the fact that the party is hinging on their sanity. But I highly doubt it…
Well, the source of our disagreement is that Michele Bachmann has the same problem that Ron Paul has, which is that the Establishment will destroy her. I mean Dean was thousands of times safer than Bachmann. And they capped his ass.
But even if the Establishment didn’t destroy him, I don’t think he would do well; he has a ceiling of like 15% support. That’s the point I’ve been making lol.
Bachmann may be destroyed by the MSM — the WSJ has already begun the drum beat today — but I think she will be able to put up a good fight (and if the Establishment let her alone, the nomination would be hers to lose, unlike Paul). Those are big differences, the most important of which is that Bachmann has a chance at the nom and Paul does not nor ever did. Although I’ve gotten worried about her way of campaigning in Iowa. I heard she skipped town early rather than shaking everyone in the local coffee shop’s hand. Stupid.
That coffee shop is metaphorical, not literal.*
Bogus reasoning.
The real audience for Bachmann’s ideas is probably smaller than the real audience for Paul’s. But you’re pretending that Paul is capped by the natural order of thing and Bachmann is not. The reverse is truer, although still not true.
Are you rooting for Bachmann?
Yep. Easiest to beat in the GE by far, not to mention I’ve thought she’d win the nomination since forever — way before it was cool, and way before Kos called it.
What I’m saying is that Ron Paul has a ceiling…Michele Bachmann does not. At least I haven’t seen her having one yet. That could change — and the Establishment will do everything they can to change it, just as they did to Pat Buchanan. We’ll see.
What explains it?
Well first I object to your characterization of Ron Paul as “crazy.” He’s not. He may be wrong on some issues, but crazy? If he is he’s crazy like a fox.
That said…this explains it. Bachmann is crazy and stupid. She can be used..as a strawman, as a designated loser, as whatever the controllers wish her to be. Paul is smart and strong. He will not be used. The controllers do not like that, therefore they are ducking him.
You also write:
I used to think that until I watched the Kerry/Dean hustle go down. hen the Swift Boat thing, the 2000 vote fraud routine, the runup to the Iraq War, the Peter Arnett firing, the 2004 vote fraud routine and finally the Obama coronation, from primaries to election.
I no longer think that way.
Instead I see it as a top-down, trickle down system. The really big media entities indeed do take orders, both from intelligence entities and their corporate owners. Once the fix is in, the smaller media outlets simply fall in line.
Please read carefully some of the “Operation Mockingbird” files that are available in many places online. CBS, The NY Times and Washington Post, Time and Life magazines and later a number of other media were in the pocket of the CIA as early as the 1950s, and if you believe that gangsters of any sort back off once they have some sort of control over a business there’s a bridge spanning the River Kwai that I want to sell you.
AG
Here’s how I see it.
The broad center of power in Washington is where it is because very powerful people want it to be there. It’s not precise because elections retain a large degree of unpredictability and sometimes swing wildly and beyond anyone’s control. But this is accounted for by keeping rather tight parameters on what is considered acceptable discourse and acceptable policy. The fringes can get a bit ornery, but the broad center doesn’t have much elasticity.
So, in one Congress the middle might be Snowe/Nelson and in another it might be Specter/Conrad, and in another maybe Hagel/Lierberman. The center can be tiny or it can get to be Gang of 12 to save the filibuster (which is the final way they keep control over the middle).
The truth is, neither Bachmann or Paul is remotely acceptable to the Establishment of this country. We have a social safety net for a reason. Very powerful people know that it let’s them keep their wealth, power, and a head connected to their necks. We also have a big-ass military for a reason. And a big ass federal government for a reason. The idiosyncrasies of the Koch Brothers aside, most of our elites are more like Jaime Dimon or Warren Buffett. They’re rabidly pro-business, but they’re not ideologues. We’ve had largely the type of government they’ve wanted us to have. A little bit of Poppy, a little bit of Clinton, but certainly not Mike Fucking Huckabee or Crazy Mike Gravel.
If anyone gets crazy and starts talking about ending the war on drugs or rolling back the empire or completely wiping out the social safety net, those people get knee-capped.
It’s for our own protection, Arthur. And theirs. From their point of view.
For our own protection?
Please.
They do not care one whit about “our” protection. If we go down we are just collateral damage incurred in the effort to protect the PermaGov middle. Nothing more.
Please.
Lose your house or get into serious enough financial difficulties that you cannot provide for you and your family’s health or welfare and see how badly “knee-capped” you are even if you have never said a word about their policies pro or con.
Just a little more collateral damage. And if you dropped some truth drug on them or took them in a back room and used some ‘a those lovely Abu Ghraib “persuasion” techniques on them, eventually that is exactly what they would tell you, too.
C’mon, Booman. Their “rabidly pro-business stance” is their ideology, and it is formed by their regard for their own self-interest.
Like dat.
C’mon, Booman. Are you really that credulous? You and I are just cannon fodder for their own goals. Bet on it.
AG
Well, I agree with all of that. But I don’t think it’s a rebuttal of what I said. It’s more of a misreading of what I said. If you think of our politics as the room between Truman and Eisenhower (but not outside them) or the room between Poppy and Clinton (but not outside them), then, yes, that’s the ideology of the middle, and it’s very pro-business. It’s very anti-hippy, anti-communist, but also anti-Bircher, anti-Ron Paul.
It’s America in the post-war era.
The problem is that their walls have been breeched. They got breeched in the early 60’s over race and in the late 60’s over war.
Crazy days have returned.
Another thing I generally agree with you about is the the hypnomedia is keeping a lid on things. Whether that’s good or bad, I’m not so certain.
High-fiving that post for the reminder about how US intel quietly controls the MSM on key issues. But that landmark report by Carl Bernstein in 1977 is well overdue for an update.
You’re burying the lede a little there, in that he did, you know, lose. Twice. If the VP is the de facto incumbent for the nomination, then if you want to be the man, you got to beat the man.
By the way, what happened to Bill Bradley? I know he went into finance/non-profit world or whatever. So why isn’t he a bigger public player in this time of taxes and budget commissions? Why the fuck are we stuck with Erskine Bowles? I mean, really, Erskine Bowles?
This would be more plausible if it weren’t for the specific financial interests Paul speaks out against. I mean, let’s face it, it isn’t his (abominable) stances on abortion or civil rights or even the gold standard that have rendered him “unserious.” As fucked up as that may be.
Bradley made some mistakes and was certainly not a brilliant campaigner, but part of the reason you need to win early is to have enough money to continue. Bradley had all the money he needed to continue. What he couldn’t get is an ounce of media time.
It was made worse by the fact that the Dems had no contests scheduled for like five weeks, while all eyes turned to the GOP contest in South Carolina.
Again — we’ve discussed this before — at least in a couple of big print outlets like the NYT and LAT, Bradley got extremely favorable coverage. When it was all over, he even held a final get together press conference which ended with Dollar Bill calling out many of the press to come to the podium to accept his thanks along with a token of his appreciation. The LAT reporter Matea Gold covered that unNixon goodbye and, iirc failed to adequately note its inappropriateness for a supposedly objective media.
Otherwise Bradley needed to produce a win in the first two contests against a not unpopular incumbent — those were and are the rules. No exceptions just because he was someone’s favorite candidate and he was running against someone from an admin some Dems didn’t like. Wall St Bill got even better media treatment than he deserved, IMO.
Show me where he is wrong.
Is he a racist?
I think not.
Is what he says in that paragraph not pretty damned accurate?
“Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.”
It’s been 47 years since that act was signed into law. Is segregation dead? Not anywhere that I have been, it’s just economically enforced now. Do we have a color-blind society? Maybe a little better than ’64, but color-blind? Please. Give me a break. Is “racial strife” much less predominant than it was in 1964? Go take a walk in Newark on a good, hot summer’s night and tell me what you see. If you’re black or hispanic, how’s about you and a couple of similarly complexioned friends dropping into some Irish bar in South Boston, an Italian one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn or a Tea Party stronghold almost anywhere in the country this coming Saturday night for a couple of cold ones and a little heart-to-heart talk with the natives about “racial strife.”
Take two asprins and call me in the morning from the hospital.
Please.
Paul is an ideologue. He backs his shit up, whether you agree with him or not. I really do not know if in some parallel universe where the gold standard remained in effect, the Civil Rights Act had not been passed and abortion had not been made legal things might be better or worse now than they are in this universe. I truly do not. I do know that we are living in some seriously fucked up times, for sure.
Disagree with Ron Paul all you want…I do…but do not try to demonize him.He thinks that we have gotten too big and too centralized. So do I. He thinks that such a position can be rolled back by force of law. I do not. I think that it’s too late for that and we simply must muddle on through doing the best that we can and hope that the real shit…revolution, anarchy, financial collapse and so on… does not hit the fan before we get out of this trouble.
But give him his props. He’s not “abominable.” He’s a thinker, and he’s a thinker who puts his ass on the line to back up what he thinks. Would that Barack Obama was more like him in that way.
AG
Man. Please.
This is some lazy shit, Arthur.
Yeah, you’re right, Arthur, that we’re still segregated. You’re right about most of what you’re saying.
But we have a black president. When that photo was taken, his existence was illegal in Alabama and his mother was a criminal for having mated with and then married a black man.
Don’t compare the viciousness of today’s racism to the state-sanctioned terrorism of Jim Crow. Elements of the Civil Rights Act have worked to perpetuate racism. The preponderance of the act is why you see this instead of this.
Yes, we have a “mixed race” president. Unthinkable in 1964. But that photo? The control mechanisms then and now have changed, but the result is about 90% the same. People of color who are not blessed with the kinds of talents that Barack Obama possesses in plenitude are still segregated in vile ghettos throughout this country while most of their white peers are living in relative luxury. Luxury relative to ghetto living, that is.
And don’t you dare give me photos of the old and the new “Ol’ Miss” football teams as supposed proof of racial progress in America.
I got yer “racial progress.” Right there!!!
Meanwhile, the people of color who can’t run really fast or benchpress 500 lbs…or of course make it into Harvard Law School…the mainstream, everyday, walking-down-the-street people who if they were white would be graduating from a mediocre high school, likely going to a mediocre college and eventually living a “normal” American Dream sort of life with a mortgage and 2.5 kids and a dog are instead scuffling for every dime they can get their hands on and wondering what the hell happened to them.
Sorry, Booman.
The “viciousness of today’s racism” and the “state-sanctioned terrorism of Jim Crow” are just two faces of the capitalism’s continuing need for cheap labor. Those who are easily indentiified as “the other” fill the bill whether it’s done at the point of a gun, the hustle of a politician or the trance-state of media.
Not much has changed, and what has changed…especially for the black population…is not at all necessarily “good” no matter how many times the media tells you that it is so. In 1964 there were well-functioning, working class black neighborhoods in every small and large city in the United States. Closely knit societies with a distinct and quite healthy culture. I experienced the last years of a few of those societies…Bson’s Roxbury, Harlem, black Atlantic City… as a young jazz musician and I speak from first-hand observation. Now? After the CIA-sponsored drug scourge of the last several decades and the following “gentrification”…read “whitification” or “monification”…of those neighborhoods? Pretty much the only functioning black culture is the ghetto street culture of drugs and gangsta rappers. Yes, there is now a black “middle class,” but by the numbers what is the percentage of African-Americans who live in middle class circumstances? Pretty low, in my experience.
Ron Paul may have a point, Booman. He may just have a point. On the evidence.
AG
I gave you the before and after photos for a simple reason. Merit. Today’s Ole Miss football team is probably 90% black versus the 1959 team that was 100% white. Today’s team reflects a true picture of talent. The correct people hold those positions. The 1959 team was horribly skewed. And it’s not just sports where this change has occurred. Sports is just the most dramatic example. As for ‘dance’ and entertainment in general, that’s probably the second most dramatic correction. But, you know, it’s easier to cut a hit single than it is to get a good education and become a doctor, lawyer, accountant, stock trader, or whatever. The point is, Ron Paul doesn’t have a point. He’s full of shit.
You speak of Paul just like the leftinesses spoke of Hillary Clinton during the primaries in 2007-8.
You lay out some vague set of ideas that don’t really hit the mark and then you throw an expletive.
It doesn’t wash, Booman. There is no way on earth of knowing what would have happened if the Civil Rights Act was not passed. Maybe…just maybe…the entire United States would have split up into separate nations along the lines of how the individual states handled the idea of integration. And then maybe the entire black population of the country would have emigrated to the integrated states.That would quite possibly have made African Americans less of a minority…perhaps even a dominant majority…in a number of American states. At which point we wouldn’t be anywhere near the same set of problems that we have right now. We’d have different problems. Better? Worse? Who knows? The resultant nations would certainly be smaller, and “too big to succeed” would not be one of the problems. Neither would being NATO’s world’s hired cop/contractor a problem and neither would we have an overreaching secret surveillance system on all of our asses 24/7 or a vast hypnomedia system trancing out about 90+% of the population.
Paul’s basic idea is that the closer a lawmaking system resides to a given population the, better.
I agree. The Federal government has gotten totally unmanageable.
I personally think that the U.S. should break up into smaller segments. That’s why I went to visit Thomas Naylor in Vermont recently, and that is what I predict will happen…through fair means or foul…over the next several decades or so. Had it happened in 1964, everything would been different. Better? Does not compute. No one knows. But different? Bet on it.
AG
I think this page calls for this:
Ron Paul and the Dysfunction of the American Left
I had the experience of watching Bradley at the California convention that year, and while I wasn’t fully committed to gore before the convention, I was afterword. While Gore made himself available – as a sitting vice president – to the Women’s caucus, where he gave a spirited performance (sitting a few seats down from Nancy Pelosi, that was one of the first times I really understood how biased the media was – the guy described as “wooden” and a “robot” was getting more laughs than a stand up comic), Bradley was MIA for much of the convention. I was a volunteer for the convention, so I was there for the whole thing. Rumors flew around about when Bradley was going to arrive, if he was going to arrive, etc. He was more like a celebrity than a candidate. At one point a rumor flew around that Bradley had gotten himself a room somewhere, and a couple of my fellow volunteers went on what must have been a futile reconnaissance mission to find him.
Finally, Bradley showed up, after literally marching into the convention center with his followers in some sort of weirdly staged action to make him look like Mr. Outsider despite his history in Washington. Since downtown San Jose is a ghost town on weekends, the effect was rather comical – like some great protest movement protesting nobody, or a bunch of extras on a movie set. When time came for speeches, Bradley re-used his old basketball speech, with no policy items, nothing specific, very much mailing it in. Gore gave an engaging and pretty standard stump speech that included more specifics, after having spent quite a bit of time answering questions in multipel forums earlier.
In the end, the media just wanted to hate dems and had a crush on Bush. Didn’t really matter who the dem nominee was. But Bradley came across the day I saw him as a bit of nice fluff, a way for those on the left who were too cool to be seen with democrats to have their moment before more than a few of them got distracted with other things and left Gore on his own.
I bring this up because of the example in the story, which implied that some sort of injustice had been done to bradley. I was actually amazed he had gotten that far.
Are you promoting that Dean Scream BS? Because it is BS and Diane Sawyer admitted it. The man was trying to be heard over an extremely noisy crowd.
you just don’t get it.
He had no idea what the moment called for. It was the first time most people had ever seen him. It was his biggest TV audience of the whole campaign and his best opportunity to make a good first impression. And he acted like the cameras weren’t on and he was giving a pep rally to his canvassers.
Let me guess. You were a Kerry supporter, right?
I’ve seen dozens of candidates give the same speech with similar mannerisms. The only difference was that in the other cases you can hear the crowd roar. It WAS a pep rally. It was NOT a campaign commercial or Face to Face interview.
It should NOT have been a pep rally.
Let me be perfectly clear about this.
I remember the moment perfectly. I was sitting on my couch thinking to myself about Dean needed to do. He’d just had a major disappointment, but he was doing really well in the New Hampshire polls. It was the first night of the real campaign, and most people were tuning in to see the results but hadn’t been following the campaign because most people don’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire and most people don’t follow politics until the campaign really starts. So, this was Dean’s chance to explain his whole philosophy, why he was running, and why’d make the best candidate to put up against Bush. He’d never had a bigger audience.
There were other candidates who gave concession speeches that night. Edwards, Gephardt,,,whoever else. And they understood the game. They didn’t give a pep rally.
So, when Dean came out and started giving a pep rally, my jaw literally fell open and I began gaping. And this was long before his listing of states and the YEEAAARGH.
That was just frosting on the cake.
He had no clue what the moment called for. No instincts. Just clueless.
Yep. Concur with all that.
Wrong time for Howie to be leading the troops in cheers — and even at that he vastly overdid it.
Of course, so did the MSM in their 24/7 Scream Coverage, with someone on (probably) CNN comparing it to Nixon’s disastrous 1962 Last Press Conference.
The Dean campaign also was slow to go into damage control and fight back against the media overkill. Missed a fair chance for a backlash sympathy factor for Dean.
Oh well, as Howard himself said, he started out just expecting to speak for some strong Dem beliefs — never anticipating he would get far. And eventually his amateur pol status came back to haunt him when it counted.
I utterly disagree. Dean didn’t lead a pep rally – he walked into one. He went into there expecting to cheer up dejected troops and the troops went nuts when he showed up. He got caught up in the moment (amateur move, to be sure), but tamping down that crowd would have been catastrophic. The only real problem with the entire episode was the moron(s) that handed the media the feed to his microphone instead of a feed from the mixer with the ambient crowd noise reflected. If the media ran with THAT clip then it would have been an entirely different narrative – Dean leave’s Iowa in third with the most energized troops.
That’s the myth that won’t die.
Even without the scream, that performance would have hurt him very badly. The troops could be ignored. What mattered a million times more than the moral of his troops was that he come across to tens of millions of Americans (who had never seen him speak before) as mature, serious, determined, and full of ideas to lead the country.
On the Ron Paul topic, the Daily Show just made the same point about media coverage with a motherfucking sledgehammer.
Good find, Joe. The footage of the nobody CNN anchor smugly instructing his reporter in Iowa to “show us Palin if you can find her, but spare us Ron Paul, OK?” was astonishingly insulting.
Stewart’s comeback to the murmuring, disturbed studio audience was awesome: “I know, fuck that anchor, right?”
Perfectly on target.
The media was biased last time as well. And here in Nevada, the Ron Paul supporters would have nothing to do with it. They were so dominant at the local Republican caucuses that they easily made it to the County and State Conventions and they were treated like garage there. They got together and got within moments of taking over the convention, (this is a Democracy, you know) which was then pre-determined to give it all to McCain, who had NO support in the state. The scumbag “leaders” of the state party escaped to their limousines and went to the airport to not allow any further proceedings.
So the powers that be in the Republican party illegally ended the convention because the Paul supporters had the numbers of delegates ready to overturn the Republican power structure for the whole state and replace them all with their own people. It was UGLY.
Ultimately the Ron Paul supporters got screwed and the party gave all their votes to McCain, who was absolutely despised universally in Nevada by everyone regardless of party because he supported the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Dump but did not even support transport of nuclear waste (to Nevada) through his state (Arizona – a connecting state) under any circumstances. But it’s totally safe, you know.
BTW- Harry Reid and Obama killed the project. It is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to dump Nuclear waste at that site ever now. What a dumb idea anyway, putting so much nuclear waste on a fault line, over the water supply and so damn close to the state’s largest city – Las Vegas. What a disaster in the making. And it would have been there for tens of thousands of years. WTF…
Uh, McCain practically tied Paul in percentage. They were tied in delegates. 13.73% for Paul, 12.75% for McCain.
Like I said, Paul’s supporters are always vocal and loud, and it appears he has more support than he does. But at the end of the day, he rarely clears 15%.
This doesn’t square with my recollection, or with the extensive archives of Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, whose smoking gun of anti-Gore bias is the press corps hooting and booing behind the scenes in… New Hampshire.
Don’t let it fool you. They wanted Gore to win the Democratic nomination. Doesn’t mean they wanted him to win the Presidency.
Nah. They blatantly preferred McCain to Bush and Bradley to Gore, but then Bush to Gore. Just type “Bill Bradley” into the Daily Howler search box and see his archives going back to 1999, when it was all happening in real time.
Was it the career killed? After all, 2006 was our victory through Howard Dean.