(politics) causality bites, #2

A premium subscriber in Vincevang, OH directs my attention to recent polls suggesting that Wesley Clark may be gaining ground on Howard Dean, and all indications are that the beginning of this trend coincides exactly with the official JFW endorsement of the Clark candidacy. Even if one does not believe that the JFW endorsement has caused increased enthusiasm for Clark, it does appear indisputable that the JFW endorsement singlehandedly stopped the momentum caused by Gore's endorsement of Dean. Whether the JFW imprimatur is enough to counteract both Gore and now Bradley remains to be seen, but stay tuned.

BTW, and with apologies to my friend and Kucinich fan from Beauxbaton, this paragraph about the Democrat's race in Slate made me chuckle:

I have two questions for the Dean campaign. First, are you paying Dennis Kucinich to stay in the race? And second, why not? He's gold for you every time he opens his mouth. In [the most recent debate], Kucinich took three shots at Dean. He rebuked Dean for refusing to pull out of NAFTA and the WTO. Then he forced Dean to explain why Dean would leave U.S. troops in Iraq rather than pull out immediately. (Answer: to keep Iraq from falling into chaos and becoming an al-Qaida nest.) Then he demanded to know why Dean was proposing a pragmatic, politically viable health-insurance program instead of a utopian one. Perhaps for a small payment Kucinich could be persuaded to attack Dean for opposing gay marriage, supporting the death penalty, and accepting the divinity of Jesus.

I'm entertaining the idea of writing a song entitled "I Won't Be Your Sister Souljah" (to the tune of Dar Williams's "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono" for the Kucinich campaign.