Howard Kurtz -- The money chase and other essential reading

I can't fault Howard Dean for opting out of a broken system. Not when he would be facing an incumbent president who will have raised $180 million while turning his back on public financing. Any Democratic nominee who relied on public money, with all its rules and limitations, would be putting himself at a crippling, 4-to-1 disadvantage.

Why Congress allowed the system to atrophy is another question. The $45 million spending limit for the primaries is way too low. The state-by-state limits are silly and unenforceable, resulting in campaign staffers staying in motels just across the Iowa line so the bills won't be counted against the Iowa budget. And hamstringing one candidate while another vacuums up fat-cat cash is just plain undemocratic.

New York Times -- "In the past week, Dr. Dean lined up two important labor endorsements, and on Saturday he became the first Democrat to withdraw from the public campaign finance system. That strategy, though potentially risky, will allow him to far outspend his rivals and further establish himself as an unconventional driving force in the primaries. . . .

"Democrats across the country are expressing admiration for Dr. Dean's evolution as a candidate and no longer view him simply as an intriguing if quirky doctor from Vermont who would like to be president."

Time's Joe Klein questions the man's rationale: "Dean's whoosh of a campaign hasn't featured very much creative policy thinking. Think about it: Apart from his early stand against the war in Iraq, what has distinguished Dean's candidacy from that of the other Democrats? The propellant for the Dean surge has been almost all style and process -- the Internet successes; the monthly Meetups; his stirring, plainspoken pugnacity; the joyful abandon of his campaign -- and the sense of community he has aroused in his supporters."

Is the right ready to unload on the doctor? "Who Does Howard Dean Think He Is?" asks the cover of the Weekly Standard, with Dean mounting a donkey backwards. He tells Opinion Editor David Tell: "I actually get the Weekly Standard. Yeccch."

The Philadelphia Inquirer provides the Burlington perspective:

"They see him on TV, firing up the liberals, and they're dumbfounded, because they always knew him as a tightwad governor who spent 10 years excoriating liberals. They see him wowing the 'flatlanders' (that's everyone outside of Vermont), whipping them into a frenzy, and they can't square that with the little guy who wore frayed shirts and goofy ties and delivered speeches that lulled listeners into a stupor.

"As Kurt Wright, a Republican who serves in the part-time legislature and runs a Kwik Stop convenience store, said, 'It was always a joke in the hallways about how bad his State of the State speeches were. So wooden and robotic. And I'm not being partisan, because I think President Bush is terrible, too. But these days, whenever I hear Howard, I find myself thinking, 'Is this really Howard, or am I watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers?' "

"I love George W. Bush," says the Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery. "I worship the man. I wake up every morning glad he is president. When annoyed by small things -- traffic, the weather, an overcharge -- I say to myself, 'President Bush,' and at once feel better. I like his worldview. I like his dogs and his wife and his mother. I think he looks cool in his shorts and his t-shirts. But it isn't these things that make my heart flutter: It's that he drives the people I hate the most nuts.

"The Germans created the word schadenfreude to describe the pleasure one might feel at the woes of one's allies, but no one has yet coined a word for the happiness that can come to a person when those who annoy him complain. Open the paper, and there they all are: the hard-faced women who refer to abortion as 'choice,' the soft-faced male writers who look a little too pampered, the actors, the artists, the faculty hotshots, the with-it, the urbane and the urban, the concerned, the refined, the sincere.

American Prospect's Nick Confessore is ready to crown the nominee:

"A well-informed labor source tells me he thinks this race is over: Dean will now have the two largest, wealthiest, most effective political unions working together -- 'which they usually don't,' he notes -- to elect him. AFSCME is the largest union in Iowa, which means Dick Gephardt will have a tough time pulling out a victory there. The AFSCME-SEIU combo also gives Dean a lock on New York and various states in the industrial Midwest. And they are two heavily black unions, which gives Dean a nice bump off this whole (overblown) Confederate flag flap.

"I think that this will also strengthen Wes Clark in a certain sense, by sending the anybody-but-Dean forces into overdrive. But if Dean does get those two endorsements, he will definitely have increased his edge."

The Note reels off countless reasons why Dean is looking good:

"1. Dean will raise more money in the year before the election than anyone else seeking the Democratic nomination, and that historically in the modern era is (with one exception) the iron-clad predictor of who wins in both parties.

"2. Beyond money, this year Dean has dominated in message and media, two other fabu things to have.

"3. None of the other candidates can overtake Dean in the fourth quarter -- they can theoretically do damage to him (although, outside damage with the Chattering Class, we doubt that too), but they can't cripple him.

There just aren't enough people paying attention yet. . . .

"5. Fair or unfair, the media has not held Dean to the same standards as the other major candidates. Wes Clark's entry into the race sucked up a lot of publicity and took the spotlight off of Dean at the one moment when critical mass was being reached.

"6. At the same time, some of Dean's explanations for his alleged inconsistencies and flip flops are actually pretty convincing.

"7. Dean's core supporters don't care about Sunday show gaffes and pratfalls, New York Times editorials, or what Terry McAuliffe or the Dingells think. . . .

"10. Most Washington Democrats who are scared out of their wits about Howard Dean as their nominee have never been to a Dean event and don't have a genuine understanding of WHY he has succeeded this year . . .

"12. Governors do well as presidential candidates, and the members of Congress who are running against Dean still for the most part haven't learned not to talk like they are from Washington ('We CAN get Breaux-Gilchrest out of conference!!!! We can DO it!!!! And then passed by both chambers!!!'). Dean talks like a real person, and voters like that."

Need any more? Well, there's this:

"16. Dean can theoretically win a general election race against President Bush, but not without growing significantly as a candidate and a person, including and especially in his rhetorical and symbolic relationship to faith, family, freedom, and national security."

Newsweek lays the war at the doorstep of the vice president:

"Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian's long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon's mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

"A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying water for the neocons or anyone else's self-serving agendas. 'That's an urban myth,' said this aide, who declined to be identified."

The official can't deny it on the record?