A few last thoughts on the South Carolina Democratic Debate: Sharpton is absolutely right to question why for the poor to die for their country abroad is an "honor," but for the rich to pay taxes is a "burden," and to call for a less regressive payroll tax. I'm not sure what Dean was trying to pull off with his critique of Kerry's failed healthcare bills - it felt overly self-conscious and affected, even grasping. Kerry wasn't particularly smooth in responding, but came off better over all in that exchange. I wish I could say that Lieberman's touting welfare reform as the sort of "bipartisan accomplishment" he'd continue lost him my vote, but clearly he never had it in the first place. I do find it sad that the welfare system has been completely off the radar of these debates. I was glad to see Kerry get called on what Brooks called the "inner Moynihan" of some of his '90s rhetoric. He came off quite defensive responding to a statement of his on affirmative action, and preached fealty to the "mend it, don't end it" stance multiple times without allaying any fears about what kind of mending he plans to do.

Dean did an effective job making the case against the PATRIOT Act but framed in terms of stopping future assaults on civil liberties rather than calling to undo the recent ones. Why isn't anyone calling Edwards on his role in drafting it? Glad to see the way the rhetoric within the Democratic party has shifted over the past few years. Part of that, no doubt, is being out of power; part of that is the success of the "anti-globalization" movement in putting the issue, so to speak, on the map. For Dean to say that we've given global rights to corporations but not to workers is right on; to describe that as having done half the job but forgotten the other half smacks of a disingenuous attempt to reconcile his stance with his record. Kucinich laid out the case for single-payer health insurance clearly and sharply (and effectively dismissed the idea that the Clintons had pursued such a plan), and Sharpton made the compelling moral argument for such a system. What's most interesting to me about the other candidates' alternatives is that none of them mounted an argument (true, they're generally not very good ones) against such a system any stronger than Clark's "Let's fix the one we have."

Watching the Democratic Debate now. A couple thoughts so far: Somewhat should ask Joe Lieberman what it means to be "strong on values." Also, what it would mean to be weak on values, which of his competitors are weak on values, and whether the Bush administration could be characterized as "strong on values." Glad to see David Kay's charges getting some play here, given the way they've been underplayed by the media - or arguably overshadowed by the primaries. Dean is right to point the finger at Cheney, and Kerry did a deft job of avoiding either disputing or echoing his charge. I'm not sure what Edwards has in mind when he calls for a comission organized not by Congress but by "us, the people," although I'm all for it. Also, Edwards is in Congress too... Sharpton has joined Kucinich in calling for everyone to stay in for a long race to mobilize all their constituencies. I think there's a strong case for that. Also, he's right to point out that unlike John Edwards' dad, his couldn't have gotten a job as a mill worker.

My predictions for tomorrow: Kerry comes in first, simply because Dean hasn't had enough time to catch up after recovering from whatever combination of his combative stance in Iowa/ his overly-apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ his insufficiently apologetic response to his combative stance in Iowa/ media harping on an imagined combative stance in Iowa/ some combination of the above one may choose to blame for the beating he took in the polls in the past week. Dean comes in second and he and Kerry both pitch themselves as comeback kids; Kerry as usual finds the media more credulous than Dean. Dean comes in closer to Kerry than to the Edwards, who comes in third behind him, lacking the committed and organized constituencies Kerry and Dean have mobilized. Clark does not much, if any, better than he's been expected to the past few days, and likely even worse - in any case drastically worse than he was expected to a few weeks ago before Kerry stole his part as the anointed "Anti-Dean" and his campaign fumbled and failed to advance a coherent vision or take advantage of what could have been a real head start to build a machine in New Hampshire. If Clark does particularly badly, he strikes me as more likely than any of the other candidates to drop out shortly after, thus ending further embarassment and leaving his Presidential run as a whimsical coda on what many see as an accomplished career as a military public servant. Lieberman does worse than Clark, claims that he exceeded expectations, and argues that Kerry and Dean are both soft on defense and that only he represents a real choice between extremists. Kucinich does much better than Sharpton.

This is nice news for the Dean campaign; this is very, very good news for it. It'll be interesting to see what those who saw Mosely-Braun as a DLC puppet running to draw Black votes away from Sharpton will make of her endorsement of the man who calls them the "Republican wing of the Democratic party." Although, come to think of it, this year's primary schedule was also supposed to help assure the ascendence of a candidate approved by the Democratic establishment, and look how that worked out.

As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed: Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights," she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital. The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary: This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest. But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms: While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none. One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White. FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow's primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other. Five of the candidates - including Lieberman - made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.'s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.

This NY Times piece - "Mr. Inside Embraces Mr. Outside, and What a Surprise" is one of many analyses that will no doubt proliferate over the next few days trying to explain Gore's endorsement. I think Purdum is on the right track in noting Gore's drastic shift to the left since the 2000 election, as well as his series of strident condemnations of Bush policy over the past months. These have been, by turns, gratifying and maddening, I think it's safe to say, to those of us who were exasperated with Gore for leaving so little ideological distinction between himself and Bush during the actual campaign. Gore's piece in the Times after the Enron scandal tying corporate malfeseance to Bush's corporate politics made the right case - but it's a case that, contrary to what that piece also said - Gore never made on the campaign trail. Those conservatives who think (occasionally rightly) that they can convince American voters that the main fault line in their politics is between civil and uncivil politicians have tried to use Gore's move to the left as evidence that he's bitter and angry at his personal loss. I think it's much more that Gore, like Clinton and other New Democrats, recognize the appeal of Old Democrat values and so fall back on them once out of office both to bring nobility to their legacy and to convince themselves that they at least lost because they stood for something and not because they didn't. Dean's aggressive condemnations of the failings of this administration fit the message that Gore has claimed for himself since 2000. So it's shouldn't be surprising to see him endorsing someone who's ready to carry that message forward - and to see him endorsing the candidate who's running the kind of campaign now that many wanted him to run four years ago. What Purdum's analysis for the Times fails to mention, however, is what may really be the most compelling reason for Gore to endorse Dean now: he's winning. Gore, in the same way as, say SEIU, gains power from picking late enough to choose the one who'll win and early enough to be as formative in that victory as possible. Gore specifically, however, has the chance by endorsing Dean to merge their narratives - one populist fighter has the election narrowly stolen but four years later another arises to take it back - and drown out the alternative - the New Democrat establishment fouls up an election and it's left to a populist outsider to ride in four years later to fix it. Purdum asks whether this will hurt Gore's credibility, and I think the answer is no more than Gore's already hurt his credibility by governing and campaigning from the center and then moving to the left since. More importantly, he asks whether this will hurt Dean's candidacy, and I don't think it will measurably. Dean has successfully enough framed himself as an outside-the-beltway candidate, and campaigned that way long enough, that I think this will come off more as the beltway coming around to the Governor of Vermont than the other way around. More fundamentally, I think candidates can be effectively criticized, in extreme cases, for not repudiating deeply objectionable folks who endorse them, but that otherwise criticizing them for who endorses them is difficult to pull off. I think that Al Gore's endorsement will give Dean's critics on the left about as much ammunition as Jesse Jackson Jr.'s, Ted Rall's, Molly Ivins', William Greider's, et al gave his critics on the right: not a whole lot, in the long term. Speaking as one of those critics on the left, that Dean got Gore's endorsement says to me just that he's an effective organizer. Gore endorsing Dean may give some added momentum and visibility to Sharpton and Kucinich's campaigns, which could only be good for the Democratic party, but I don't see any of the other candidates positioned at this point to use it to frame themselves as the independent choice. What this endorsement does, as I see it, is move a slew of voters to consider Dean - or to consider him seriously - who hadn't before, and deflate much of the criticism from DLCers and others of Dean as unelectable or out of the mainstream. Much as Jackson's hashkachah (certification, roughly translated) marks Dean kosher for some to his left, Gore's will mark him kosher for some to his right. And it may mean that the Democratic establishment is learning not only the lesson of 2002 - what happens when you offer no viable alternative - but also the lesson of 1972 - what happens when the party leadership abandons the party's candidate.