The Washington Post has a good profile of the many issues & problems facing Howard Dean & The Democratic National Committee:

It won’t be a summer of love for Howard Dean, with peace and understanding in short supply.

The Democratic National Committee chairman faces several formidable challenges. Some states are determined to move up the dates of their presidential primaries despite the potential for upending the nomination process, and the party’s convention in Denver in 2008 is already dealing with nettlesome labor and financial woes.

Dean’s biggest test will come next year when the DNC will primarily serve as a shadow campaign operation for the party’s presidential nominee.

I would genuinely be surprised if the Democrats were not able to pull off an election victory this cycle but I have been urging caution all along in this blog. Politics is exciting because at any moment things can and often do go horribly, horribly wrong. Parties & campaigns have a habit of imploding just when they look poised to triumph and things generally don’t go according to plan.

The left wing of the Democratic Party seems like it doesn’t just want a victory, it wants on on its terms & though the focus is 100% on the candidates right now once there is a nominee all those state party chairs, delegates, interests etc. will run out of the woodwork attempting to get their own messages and faces on the national stage with the nominee.

Right now expectations are enormously high on the Democrats. Everyone expects big things from them as a party giving them a larger amount of room to fall. The expectations are the complete opposite for Republicans, frankly I don’t know how things can get much worse for the president or the party. I am sure something will come up (Alberto Gonzalez seems to redefine the term dumbass at every turn) but after awhile there is so much bad news that new bad news just gets added to the bin without much consideration.

The Washington Post looked into soon-to-be-candidate Fred Thompson’s past and found the following:

“When you are taking a look at Thompson as a conservative,” said ACU Chairman David Keene, “the negatives come down to plowing around with John McCain on campaign finance and a general sense that he sided with trial lawyers because of his background.”

The media seems to be working overtime in order to find anything that could possibly disqualify Thompson as a “conservative”. Thus far what they found hasn’t made a great case for him as either a conservative or non-conservative.

Basically my take is that in a Republican field where almost no candidate in the upper or even middle tier truly represents what the Democratic Party as a whole is looking to be, anyone who says they do and has some kind of viability (lets face it, Brownback isn’t going to be president) will do well regardless of lobbying or supporting trial lawyers.

From the Wall Street Journal

Sen. John McCain’s well-known media team has resigned, an indication that his campaign shake-up is continuing to backfire and imperiling the Arizona Republican’s presidential candidacy.

Political ad-makers Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, veterans of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, on Monday emailed the new campaign manager — lobbyist and longtime McCain adviser Rick Davis — to say that they were quitting. The two men told friends they had considered leaving for days, as they hadn’t been paid and the campaign’s financial straits raised questions of when and how much they would be.

I don’t know if NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg is doing to run or not. I don’t think ANYONE has an idea even though they are spending plenty of time speculating. I will say that Bloomberg has done a great job of turning such speculation into endless media attention (not a bad thing when your last name is also the name of a giant media corporation). Bloomberg has done it again with mike2008.com a site that currently points to his official personal Web site.

The domain name has revived the the speculation of a Bloomberg.

One of the great advantages of the Internet and the current swarm of 24/7 media outlets is that you don’t actually have to run for president to begin running for president. Just ask Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Fred Thompson & of course Bloomberg.

The Huffington Posts’ Off the Bus section caught up with as many of the successfuly video submitters as they could find to get their thoughts on how they thought their questions were answered. Check it out.