Dean's List

The Dean's List has been expanded to include Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin. The Dean's List already included Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, according to the Washington Post. If you're wondering what the list is, it's just a coinage of mine. The nine states above are the states where presidential wishful (hopeful is just too optimistic) Howard Dean has aired television commercials, the heavy artillery of political campaigns. By comparison, John Edwards of North Carolina has targeted only New Hampshire and Iowa and the seven others haven't started at all.

Dean continues to set the pace (NYTimes) in fundraising, public profile, rhetorical fervor and punditry generation. I'm still convinced, along with most non-lefties, that he'll fade in the primaries. Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman is doing the rest of the pool a huge favor by staking out a right-of-center position which will guarantee him a loss in the primaries if he sticks to it, and will allow other Democrats to stay in the left-of-center arena by playing off him. Without Joe, the whole pack would run the risk of barrelling off to deep left field in pursuit of Howard Dean. With Dean and Joe holding the fringes, however, there's room in the middle for the others. Who'll be able to exploit that position and emerge with that ethereal "electable" image is a mystery, but that lucky man has the best chance of losing to Bush in November.