Howard Dean's No Good, Very Bad Night in Iowa -- according to Slate, anyway. One word for last night's caucus results: wow. Not only do I agree that Howard just got sucker-punched, possibly for good, this also proves two maddening truisms about American presidential politics: Iowa doesn't mean anything, and Iowa means everything. The press is tripping over itself to re-anoint John Kerry and find out the first thing about John Edwards, while simultaneously purring "I told you so"s at Dean. What a bunch of Chicken Littles -- they're still just running after the easy story. Gephardt was just ruined from politics forever, where's the post-mortem on that? Is Kerry now the "front runner," and if so, what about Clark in NH? It's really starting to annoy me that all political journalism these days is either prognostication or post-game analysis, not actual reporting! My own post-game on Howard goes something like this -- get back to your roots, and quick, and stop trying to out-Democrat the other Democrats. John Edwards (who is this guy?) has it right with the "positive" campaigning -- give it a whirl, it'll be good for your blood pressure!