I haven’t decided if I will liveblog the debate tonight or not. Probably not. HOWEVER I will provide links to everyone live blogging and will probably share whatever thoughts I have throughout.

So check back here around 7:30 and I will post links to everyone who is liveblogging.

In the meantime I am off to the gym!

As promised links to livebloggers:

The Texas Blue | Right Ring News | The Caucus | Jokers to the Right | The Fix | Political Buzz | Ohio Daily Blog | Conservatives Under New Thinking | AFL-CIO Blog |

Notes
Note to MSNBC…
1) Doing anything outside means wind in the microphone

2) If you amass a ton of people in a stadium
you have to expect they will make noise

3) Note to John Edwards & Barack Obama, if you are going to attack Sen. Clinton Read this because she is schooling you at the moment.

4) Wow, Edwards isn’t getting a lot of play from the audience

5) Kucinich is 10,000 times more entertaining than Gravel ever could be. Great sense of humor.

6) Obama seems really flustered tonight.

7) OK Obama was just waiting to get out that line about “the people who engineered the worst foreign policy nightmare” (paraphrased)

NOTE: Hillary said “islamic-extremists” so Rudy Giuliani can stop saying dems never use those two words together during debates

9) GOD THESE DEBATES BOTHER ME! They finally hit an interesting topic and rile up the candidates and they cut to a commercial so they can have a bunch of audience members ask questions. If they want people to watch these darn things and get something out of it they should probably just let these debates play out. You know, BECAUSE IT IS A DEBATE

10) Well this debate is quickly running off the rails.

11) Very emotional question from a man in the audience about health care for John Edwards. Edwards accidentally said he was “what was wrong with America” but it was a mistake and he got the crowd fired up afterware.

12) Clinton went a LITTLE too far congratulation herself (I am the AFL-CIO’s favorite sister). She had the audience, lost them a bit but regained at the end.

13) I said it before, I will say it again. If you put a few thousand people in a stadium, they will make noise.

14) Clinton defends lobbyists & Edwards defends lawyers

15) Obama says he doesn’t have “registered lobbyists as bundlers”

- But the people who bundle for him get money from lobbyists Chicago Tribune which I imagine people will point out after the debate

16) Obama avoids answering Barry Bonds question

17) Joe Biden once again uses a one word answer (he has done it previously) to much applause. Will end no bid contracts

18) Funny but REALLY dumb question “If you become president someone might start running against you immediately, would you be upset about it”. WTF is a person going to say to that?

Politics is largely about expectations and rarely about real perception.

One of my favorite things to watch are candidates who aren’t polling well or aren’t raising money (or both) discredit both factors. At the moment Senator Chris Dodd is on Chris Matthews program talking about how polls don’t matter. He doesn’t believe in them and said something to the effect of “people in Iowa don’t want a national newspaper telling them how to vote.”

He supported his reasoning by saying his own private phone banking has found that 70,000 people they’ve talked to across the country say they haven’t made up their minds yet on the candidates. So Dodd showed his disbelief in polling by citing polling numbers. Does something about that not sound right to you?

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Update: Kos says Dems don’t need Gravel and that he is a “joke”. So I guess that answers that.

The AFL-CIO Presidential Forum said former Senator Mike Gravel did not complete the proper paperwork and so they did not extend an invitation. Now personally I will be happy to have less candidates on the stage. With that said Gravel made one of the few interesting points in the last debate when he asserted Barack Obama was no sincere about keeping lobbyists out of his campaign because he employed bundlers.

His point pretty much went nowhere though and was pushed aside and so having him there probably wouldn’t add much anyway.

Today Rudy Giuliani echoed Newt Gingrich and said he sees a Clinton/Obama ticket and says he will defeat them easily. There is something I don’t quite understand about Giuliani’s electoral math though or his thoughts about winning the presidency.

He has continually stated he is the only Republican with a chance of taking NY State & California. But a Clinton/Obama ticket would undoubtedly guarantee a win for the Democrats. I couldn’t possibly imagine California not handing a victory to Obama and I couldn’t see NY State not handing a victory to Clinton or vice versa.

I think most Republicans can easily spot that NY & California won’t be heading their way anytime soon. Frankly they will have a hard enough time keeping non-amazingly-left-leaning states. So why would they vote for Giuliani if his big plan is to take NY/California and he just asserted the liberal/moderate dream team of 2008 running against him? Because he thinks he can rally Republicans against Clinton/Obama?

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Unlike this weekends Republican debate I am somewhat curious about tonight’s Democratic debate, though I will probably not watch the entire thing too in-depth. The only big reason I have interest, obviously, is because Obama & Edwards look ready to pounce on Clinton.

The Democrats seem like a party not ready to ever learn from its mistakes or at the very least learn the wrong lessons from them. After watching the primary season of 2004 in which Democrats bashed the daylights out of one another and gave Republicans a boatload of ammunition, I thought this election cycle the Dems might learn from the Republicans, pick a consensus candidate and move onto building up a national movement. Well, I seemed wrong in that thinking.

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