Clear language, vague pols. Anyone who took the time to read the relevant parts of the Supreme Judicial Court's Goodridge decision knew that the notion that it was "vague" - as this AP story puts it - was ridiculous. The decision couldn't have been any clearer that marriage was the only way to give gay and lesbian couples the same "protections, benefits and obligations" as married heterosexual couples. The "vague" line was put out by politicians such as Attorney General Tom Reilly, who oppose gay marriage but who also have (had?) some support in the gay and lesbian community. Such straddling is no longer possible.

Read this letter from Reilly's two predecessors, Scott Harshbarger and James Shannon, former governor William Weld, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, and Boston Bar Association president Ren Landers and you'll see what I mean.

Still, today's advisory opinion casting aside the civil-unions alternative is just a little bit surprising. The courts follow public opinion just like the rest of us. And with the right-wingers gearing up for a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, it seemed that there was at least a possibility that one of the justices would change his or her mind in the cause of pragmatism. Such is not the case. Which means that a monumental battle is about to unfold.

Next up: the constitutional convention, a joint session of the legislature scheduled to be held next Wednesday. If the amendment passes by a simple majority, and then makes it through the following session of the legislature as well, then it will go on the ballot in 2006. I wouldn't be surprised if Senate president Robert Travaglini, who saw his hope of a civil-unions compromise go down the drain today, decides to postpone it. After all, he presumably wouldn't want to move ahead unless he knows what's going to happen. And, right now, everything is scrambled.

A Janet Jackson comment that's actually worth thinking about. Mickey Kaus comes up with something to say about the Janet Jackson episode that's so smart it bears repeating: "The issue isn't nudity but the implicit endorsement of acting out male fantasies of violent and invasive non-consensual sexual behavior." You can skip the bit about the Muslims, though.

Put him on Mount Hackmore. Where, oh where, does the Globe's Dan Shaughnessy get all those ideas? I agree "Nuf Ced" - Shaughnessy probably never saw Karen Guregian's Herald column. (No one would be stupid enough to lift something from the day before in the same city.) But hadn't someone on the Globe's sports desk read it?

Cutting and running. James Carroll today moves way to the left of ... Dennis Kucinich. Here is what Carroll writes in the Boston Globe:

If our getting into the unnecessary war was wrong, our carrying it on is wrong. The US military presence in Iraq, no matter how intended, has itself become the affront around which opposition fighters are organizing themselves. GIs in their Humvees, US convoys bristling with rifles, well-armed coalition check-points, heavily fortified compounds flying the American flag - all of this fuels resentment among an ever broader population, including Saddam's enemies. It justifies the growing number of jihadis whose readiness to kill through suicide has become the real proliferation problem.

The occupation is its source and must end. "The day I take office as president of the United States," a true American leader would declare, "I will order the immediate withdrawal of the entire American combat force in Iraq."

And here is what Kucinich said at last Thursday's Democratic debate, in response to a mischaracterization of his position by moderator Tom Brokaw:

BROKAW: General Clark, your friend, Congressman Kucinich, would pull the United States troops out of Iraq right away and go to the UN and say, "You go in and take over the peacekeeping there."

Would you tell him about what happened when we had UN peacekeepers in Bosnia?

KUCINICH: Tom, you've mischaracterized my position.

BROKAW: Well, tell me what you would do.

KUCINICH: My position is that we go to the United Nations with a whole new direction, where the United States gives up control of the oil, control of the contracts, control of ambitions to privatize Iraq, gives up to the United Nations all that on an interim basis to be handled on behalf of the Iraqi people until the Iraqi people are self-governing.

Furthermore, we would ask that the UN handle the elections and the construction of a constitution for the Iraqi people.

When the UN agrees with that, at that point, we ask UN peacekeepers to come in and rotate our troops out.

We help to fund it, we would help pay to rebuild Iraq, and we would give reparations to those innocent civilian noncombatants who lost their lives - to their families.

Kucinich's position is a model of responsibility, and would actually address the very real problems that Carroll identifies. Carroll's diagnosis is accurate. But his prescription would so obviously lead to chaos that it's hard to know what he was thinking, or if he was.

Speaking of not thinking ... The Globe's Brian McGrory offers this today in the course of blasting the knuckleheads (and worse) who went berserk after the Patriots' Super Bowl win:

The same college kids who sat in their dorms when America launched a dubious if not spurious war in Iraq, whose idea of a grave social injustice is a 2 a.m. bar closing, took to the streets en masse Sunday night, turning over cars, igniting fires, and harassing anyone who got in their way.

Now for a refresher course. Here is the lead of a piece that ran in the Globe on November 4, 2002:

An estimated 15,000 protesters converged on Boston Common yesterday for a three-hour rally to demonstrate against a possible US war with Iraq. The turnout, estimated by police, rivaled any Boston peace rally since the Gulf War, organizers said.

Here is an AP story on the massive antiwar demonstrations that took place across the nation on March 29, 2003. An excerpt:

About 60 miles north at Boston Common, a police-estimated crowd of 25,000 protested the war. Nuns, veterans and students listened to speakers and musical acts before marching to Boylston Street for a "die in," during which they collapsed on the streets to dramatize war deaths.

And here is David Valdes Greenwood's Boston Phoenix piece on the same demonstration.

Did the particular kids who actually poured out into the streets, flipped cars, and battled with police on Sunday night take part in antiwar demonstrations? Probably not. But their more-mature peers certainly did, and in huge numbers. McGrory's shot was not only cheap, but ill-informed.

Nuts and sluts. Media Log has nothing much to say about Janet Jackson's boob shot, except that it was a football game, for crying out loud, not some late-night cable thing, and no, she and Justin Timberlake shouldn't have done it. (I'm assuming it was deliberate.) But an FCC investigation? Ridiculous. A firing or two should suffice.

Two less-than-earth-shattering observations. First, a number of critics seem very concerned that sex was injected into the Super Bowl. By all means read this nutty rant on the right-wing NewsMax.com site. But I think we ought to be more concerned about the message it sent to girls about what they need to do to get ahead. This wasn't about sex; it was about subjugation.

Second, I agree with Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times: the erectile-dysfunction ads were a hell of a lot more disconcerting than anything that took place during the halftime show.

Media Log versus Fox News! I'm going on the Fox News Channel's Big Story with John Gibson today at about 5:20 p.m. The topic (I'm not making this up): Are the media giving a free pass to John Kerry? (Suggested subtitle: Are they kidding?)

Kerry and the lobbyists. In case you missed it, here is the Saturday report by the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei on John Kerry's reliance on campaign contributions by lobbyists. The nut:

Kerry, a 19-year veteran of the Senate who fought and won four expensive political campaigns, has received nearly $640,000 from lobbyists, many representing telecommunications and financial companies with business before his committee, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

That $640,000, as it turns out, is more than any senator has received from lobbyists over the past 15 years.

The New York Times covers much of the same ground.

Of course, this pales when compared to the special-interest money that George W. Bush has raised. But anything that dilutes the Democratic message is potentially troubling. It's not hard to imagine Bush flinging this charge at Kerry in a debate, should Kerry be fortunate enough to win the Democratic nomination.

And on television, everything flattens out, with Bush's anticipated $200 million looking more or less equivalent to the pittance that Kerry is likely to bring to the table.

Mixed messages. The Zogby tracking polls now show John Edwards up by five in South Carolina and Wesley Clark just barely ahead in Oklahoma. Kerry seems to have solid leads in Arizona and Missouri.

What does this mean? Who knows? I suspect that the Clark campaign is dead, but that the general hasn't figured it out yet. That leaves Edwards as the last man standing, unless Howard Dean's strategy of winning by losing every primary catches on.

Could it be that, after Tuesday, the nomination will essentially come down to a Kerry-Edwards face-off? If nothing else, it would confirm John Ellis's "Rule of Two."

Post-radio radio. For some time now, I've watched with bemused disdain as various critics wax rhapsodic over satellite radio. This piece, by Dan DeLuca in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer, is typical.

I'm not saying DeLuca's wrong - heck, I've never heard XM or Sirius, the two competing services. Rather, I'm saying that his and others' enthusiasm is misplaced. Corporate consolidation destroyed free radio. Now, to replace it, there's something fairly cool, except that you have to pay a monthly fee. For this I'm supposed to celebrate? And it's still a top-down, corporate-owned model.

There's another, ground-up model that is slowly coming into focus. I'm not quite sure what to call it, but for now let's call it "MP3 to Go." Let me explain it by telling you what I did this morning.

Just before I left for work, I downloaded Christopher Lydon's two-part interview with Franz Hartl and Dan Droller, two young political activists who are behind something called Music for America. I've written about Lydon's MP3 interviews before. This time, though, I was able to skip the time-consuming step of burning what I'd downloaded onto a CD.

The secret: iTrip, a little gizmo from Griffin Technology that plugs into my iPod and transmits an FM signal to my car stereo. Mrs. Media Log got me one for Christmas, but it's taken a lot of trial-and-error to get it working properly.

First, because we live in an urban area, signal interference made it all but useless. I solved that by finding a heretofore undiscovered button on my dashboard that lets me lower the antenna. Then, the extraordinary bass that the iPod puts out was threatening to blow my car speakers - until I found a "Bass Reducer" setting that brought the boom-boom down to something like a normal level.

How was the interview? Well, okay. Hartl and Droller are a couple of idealistic kids who got involved in the Dean campaign last March, after the mainstream media virtually ignored the massive February 15 protests against the then-pending war in Iraq. There's a lot of blather about "open-source politics," the power of blogs, the Internet as an organizing tool, and the like. They're certainly not wrong - for that matter, I think they're heading in the right direction. But this probably sounded a lot more compelling a few months ago, when Lydon first posted it.

The larger point is that radio - or something like it - may slowly be evolving in a DIY direction even as corporate owners push homogenized garbage over the free airwaves and hypersegmented content over the satellite services.

"MP3 to Go" isn't by definition a free, grassroots service. For instance, if you go to Audible.com, you'll find all kinds of things you can pay for - audio books, or recent broadcasts of NPR fare such as All Things Considered and Fresh Air, allowing you to time-shift your listening. But the point is that the satellite is closed. "MP3 to Go" is open, available to money-making and free services alike.

"MP3 to Go" is by no means at the tipping point: it's still a pain in the ass. (Although the popularity of file-sharing shows that plenty of people will do it.) But it's an incredibly promising technology for inventing a new kind of radio, and one that isn't the least bit dependent on the corporate model that we've all come to detest.

If someone can figure out a way to eliminate another step or two, this is going to take off.

The Great Kerry Debate, Round 3. Jon Keller and I continue to slog it out over John Kerry at the New Republic website. I've weighed in twice, and Keller once; he's supposed to come back at me this afternoon.

Quote of the day. "Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?" - Paul Krugman, in today's New York Times.

So old it's new again. John Ellis was way too quick to award his "Dean as Dot.Com" metaphor prize to political consultant Craig Crawford. Logically, shouldn't the award go to the last person to use what has become a mindless cliché? If so, how about Andrés Martinez in today's Times? "Howard Dean's implosion calls to mind the fate of too many high-flying dot-com companies in the wake of the 2000-2001 crash," Martinez "informs" us.

Actually, not only is the metaphor lame, but it's wrong. I recall seeing an exit poll from Iowa (Media Log is too lazy to look it up) showing that, of caucus-goers who made up their minds by researching the candidates' websites, Kerry won. It's as though Jeff Bezos's nightmare finally came true: that Barnes & Noble had come up with a website that kicked Amazon.com's ass.

The Dean campaign isn't a dot-com that went bust. It's a dot-com that fell asleep while its biggest bricks-and-mortar rival figured out a way to beat it at its own game. It's - no! enough! I don't want Ellis to make fun of me, too.

Tuning in. Mediachannel.org, running on fumes not all that many months ago, is doing all kinds of cool stuff these days that Media Log has not had time to keep up with. Anyway, pay a visit. And read this piece by Timothy Karr on the media's obsession with the horse race over substance.

And now, for an opposing view. In theory, we should all be rapturously in favor of a focus on "the issues." In fact, it's not quite that simple. Yes, we should know that Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Sharpton opposed the war and that John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman were in favor. (God only knows what Wesley Clark really thinks. And by all means, insert your own 500 words' worth of Kerry caveats here.)

But let's take one of the more nebulous issues Karr cites: health care. The media could, I imagine, dwell at great length and in great detail on how Kerry's plan differs from Dean's, and how Dean's, in turn, differs from the single-payer system favored by Kucinich and Sharpton. But is that really what the media ought to be focusing on?

The fact is that all of the Democratic candidates have serious plans to do something significant about the 43 million Americans who are uninsured. I have no doubt that some plans are better than others. I also have no doubt that, if one of them is fortunate enough to become president, he will start rewriting his plan as soon as he moves into the White House. I don't care. I just want to be assured that the person I vote for is serious about solving the problem.

Where the media fall down is in giving a pass to candidates who aren't serious. In the 2000 debates, for example, the wretched moderator, Jim Lehrer, cut off a discussion of prescription-drug benefits by telling Al Gore and George W. Bush that, since each had a plan to deal with the issue, it was time to move on. As Jack Beatty observed on the Atlantic Monthly's website (sorry; can't find the link), Lehrer completely missed the fact that Gore had an actual plan, whereas Bush had nothing but a few patched-together talking points so that he could bluff his way through. We saw that last year, when Bush finally put together a bill that had more to do with further enriching Big Pharma than with helping any actual elderly people. Lehrer gave Bush exactly the pass he was looking for.

But does anyone seriously doubt that the Democratic presidential candidates intend to address the health-care crisis? Of course they do. The eye-glazing details can wait.

New in this week's Phoenix. John Kerry has staged one of the most impressive comebacks in modern politics. Can he sustain the momentum through the South? (Yes! More horse-race coverage!)

Also, CBS caves - again - to its benefactors in the White House over its refusal to air the MoveOn.org ad.

James Taranto, scientific know-nothing. I usually enjoy James Taranto, who compiles "Best of the Web" for the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site. Yeah, he's a right-winger, but he's got a sense of humor.

Which is why I was surprised to see him rolling around in the muck of anti-intellectualism. Earlier today I linked to a New York Times op-ed by Paul Epstein explaining some of the paradoxical facts about global warming. Among them: though the equatorial regions are likely to keep heating up, changes in ocean currents and the balance between salt water and fresh water caused by the melting of the polar ice caps could actually make the temperate zones cooler. Epstein's was a model of sophisticated, understandable scientific explication, told in an astoundingly concise 455 words.

Well, Taranto saw it, too. And here is Professor Taranto's summation:

When the weather gets warmer, that's because of global warming. When the weather gets colder, that's because of global warming too. "Global warming" thus is unfalsifiable; adherents insist all contrary evidence actually supports the theory. This isn't a scientific hypothesis; it's a conspiracy theory.

The notion of global warming is not holy writ, and it certainly may be subjected to intelligent questioning. But Taranto's not being critical, or clever, or counterintuitive. Rather, this is just simple-minded know-nothingism, knee-jerk stupidity intended as cheap entertainment for the laziest 10 percent of his audience.

The Great Kerry Debate. The New Republic has asked me and my former Phoenix colleague Jon Keller, of WLVI-TV (Channel 56) and Boston magazine, to debate the merits of John Kerry's candidacy. I get to go first, so have a look.

It's warmer, so we're colder. This ungodly cold winter has provided plenty of smirking material for those inclined to dispute the reality of global warming, and of the likelihood that human activity is making it worse.

So by all means read this New York Times op-ed by Harvard Medical School's Paul Epstein. Epstein observes that worldwide warming, paradoxically, will make the earth colder in some places - like Boston, for instance, or New York, where Al Gore was recently mocked for delivering a speech on global warming in the midst of a cold snap.

If you want to go deeper, this indispensable article was published six years ago in the Atlantic Monthly. According to the piece, by scientist William Calvin, the localized effects of global warming could be catastrophic. For instance, warming could halt the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, making Northern Europe as cold as Labrador.

Kick 'em when they're down. John Ellis, no fan of John Kerry, nevertheless has some sound advice for the senator at Tech Central Station.

Exchange just witnessed on CNN:

Larry King: "Do you have to win two or three states next week, logically?"

Howard Dean: "No, all we have to do is keep the grassroots support behind us."

Huh? What does that mean? Does Dean think he ever has to win a state? Is he running for president or what?

Tighter, ever tighter. Michael Goldman, who I don't think has ever missed a sunrise, sends along the last New Hampshire tracking poll from the American Research Group. It's now Kerry, 35 percent, Dean, 25 percent - an eight-point drop for Kerry since yesterday. Combined with yesterday's Zogby poll, showing a three-point spread, and it's pretty clear that predictions are futile.

Although Mickey Kaus says that the latest Zogby numbers - not up on the Web as I write this - show Kerry holding a larger lead than he did yesterday. Read down and you'll see that Zogby changed his methodology to come up with Kerry's narrow three-point lead. Is the Z-man now getting cold feet?

Caught a Dean town meeting from Phillips Exeter Academy on C-SPAN last night. He came across as relaxed and much more articulate in explaining his program than he had during the past month or so. If he loses, it may turn out that his decision to embrace the party establishment in the form of Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Tom Harkin, and the like was his undoing. The Dean on display last night could have won. Perhaps he still will, although it certainly seems like Kerry's to lose.

Have barely seen the morning papers, and now it's off to New Hampshire, for a Kerry meet-and-greet at a polling station, and perhaps for Lieberman and Clark events as well. Pat Whitley of WRKO Radio (AM 680) is broadcasting from the Manchester Union Leader today, and I'm supposed to pop up there sometime between 10 and 11 a.m.

You can bet on it: someone will win! Media Log bravely predicts that many people will vote in the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, that there will be a winner, and that there will be losers.

The tracking polls are all over the place.

The American Research Group this morning has John Kerry ahead of Howard Dean by 18 points, which seems to match up with what most other pollsters are reporting. Yet Zogby is showing a last-minute surge by Dean, who's supposedly closed within three. Zogby's reputation is for being either spectacularly right or dreadfully wrong, which doesn't exactly help in figuring out what's going on. Regardless of the final tally, Dean does seem to have recovered somewhat from his third-place finish in Iowa and The Scream, which, idiotic though it was, struck me as more of a media obsession than anything real.

Given such volatility, the best analysis you can read today is this, by David Rosenbaum in the New York Times, who shows why polls in New Hampshire are worthless.

No surprise, but it's nevertheless impressive the way Kerry was thrown on the defensive the moment he regained his long-lost front-runner status. The attacks have been flying since last week. Can we look forward to a revival of last summer's Great Cheez Whiz scandal? For my money, the Times' Todd Purdum does the best job of explaining what Kerry can look forward to if he holds his lead. The problem is that Kerry has been a senator for 19 years. It's hardly a shock that he would have cast some votes that he might wish he hadn't, and cast others that seem contradictory.

I think his votes against the Gulf War of 1991 and in favor of the war in Iraq in 2002 are going to be particularly difficult to explain in a sound bite. I mean, it can be done: the 1991 resolution was for war, right then, with no further negotiations or peace-seeking efforts; the 2002 resolution laid out a series of steps that George W. Bush was supposed to take before invading Iraq. But try making a good case for consistency when you've got Tim Russert yapping in your face. (Here is how Kerry tried to explain it in Nashua yesterday.)

For instance, at the Weekly Standard you can already read Fred Barnes's gloss on Purdum. A better headline: "Anti-Kerry Talking Points for Idiots."

Anyway, Media Log is currently in NH overload. Too much to read! Too little time! Former Boston Globe columnist John Ellis is back to blogging regularly. His anti-Kerry stuff is well worth reading, not only because he's smart, but because it may reflect what The Cousins are thinking.

And if you didn't catch it, you can watch Kerry's interview on 60 Minutes here. My verdict: presidential but cold, even with the show of emotion over Vietnam and with the presence of his wife, Teresa Heinz. Is Oprah Nation ready for a president who doesn't double as First Pal?

"Stealing" public documents. The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage today has a huge story on Republican staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who exploited a computer-security hole to steal documents from the Democratic minority. The Daily Kos is all over it. So is Josh Marshall.

This is stunningly sleazy behavior. But is it theft? Savage identifies someone named Manuel Miranda as a likely suspect. And one of the things Miranda tells Savage is this: "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document."

Whoa! That's pretty good. After all, you and I paid for those documents, Mr. Green.

In other words, it's still a scandal, but it may not be a crime.

Does the Globe hate John Kerry? Timothy Noah's latest "Chatterbox" piece in Slate is on "Kerry's Globe problem." The nut: Kerry's presidential campaign has been hurt by the fact that New England's dominant daily newspaper is out to get him.

Noah is definitely tapping into a real undercurrent, at least in terms of what the national media perceive. ABC's online political tip sheet, "The Note," isn't archived; but last fall I recall reading an observation that the Globe's coverage of Kerry was the meanest any presidential candidate had ever received from his hometown paper. Noah also notes that Kerry's former campaign manager, Jim Jordan, has called the Globe's Kerry coverage "distorted, insignificant, irrelevant, and vindictive."

But as I told Noah yesterday, I don't quite buy it. By far the nastiest local commentator on all things Kerry, for instance, is Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr. It is Carr who tagged Kerry with his most enduring nickname - "Liveshot," for his camera-seeking-missile act - and who bashes Kerry every afternoon on WRKO Radio (AM 680), where Carr hosts the afternoon drive-time talk show.

Nor can anyone at the Globe hold a candle - or perhaps I should say a flaming torch - to my former Phoenix colleague Jon Keller, the political analyst for WLVI-TV (Channel 56), who last fall hosted an entire half-hour special devoted to Kerry-bashing. Keller's column in the current issue of Boston magazine - obviously overtaken by events - examines in loving detail how it all fell apart for Kerry on the presidential campaign trail.

To be sure, Noah's Slate piece is full of "to be sures" - so many, in fact, that his Globe theory begins to fall apart. (Among the inconvenient facts Noah is forced to acknowledge is that today's Globe endorses Kerry's presidential campaign. So, for that matter, does the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald.) Out-of-town journalists such as Noah take far more notice of the Globe than they do of the Herald or Boston's local TV news stations. But in this case that has led Noah to commit a fundamental error of logic: he correctly observes that there has been a lot of mean commentary about Kerry in the Globe; therefore, he decides, it must have something to do with the Globe.

Yes, over the years the Globe has run tough pieces on Kerry - some fair, some not - by what Noah properly observes is an astonishingly large stable of columnists.

But when it come to truly inspired anti-Kerry pieces of recent vintage, the Globe's not even on the radar.

I could go through a laundry list (if you'd like to compile your own, search these incomparable archives), but I'll close with this. Without question, the meanest, most vicious Kerry-basher working in the media today is someone whose name pops up on Noah's screen every time he clicks to the Slate home page.

That would, of course, be Mickey Kaus, who actually ran a Kerry Loathsomeness Contest last year, and who recently had to suspend his Kerry Withdrawal Contest.

Actual Kaus lead-in for an item on John Edwards on Tuesday: "I'd rather be trashing Kerry ..."

The fact is that Kerry is an ambiguous figure on the Massachusetts political landscape. He's long labored in the shadows of the state's senior senator, Ted Kennedy. He is reserved and formal, which is another way of saying that he's aloof. He doesn't stroke reporters, and reporters love nothing better than to be stroked. He has a reputation for being inattentive to the needs of local officials. He is, for better or worse, a big thinker who's always had his eye on national politics.

Such a person is going to get cuffed around. It would be pretty strange if the Globe ignored that.

New in this week's Phoenix. Speaking of Kerry ... I spent Tuesday tromping around New Hampshire, chasing after Kerry and the other Democratic presidential candidates. Here's what I found.

Also, what did former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill really tell journalist Ron Suskind?

In defense of polls. There's been a lot of talk since Iowa about how the polls were supposedly all wrong. In fact, they got it exactly right. How they're used is another matter.

Six weeks ago, as we all know, John Kerry's presidential campaign was dead in the water. As Dan Aykroyd's Bob Dole would say, he knew it, we knew it, and the American people knew it. Fundraising dried up. He poured his personal money into the campaign in a desperate attempt to stave off collapse. It got so bad that in New Hampshire, which is close to a must-win state for him, the alternative to Howard Dean increasingly came to be seen not as Kerry but as Wesley Clark.

Now, what if Kerry had ignored the polls? Guess what: he'd be limping into the final week of his campaign. Instead, he shook up his campaign staff. He sharpened his stump speech. And - most important - he pulled up stakes in New Hampshire in favor of running full-time in Iowa during the last few weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

As we now know, Kerry's all-or-nothing gamble on Iowa paid off. But it's not as if no one saw it coming. Several weeks ago the media - including national papers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times - reported that Kerry appeared to be doing a much better job of connecting with ordinary voters in Iowa.

Then, about a week and a half before the caucuses, the Zogby daily tracking polls began to show movement: Kerry and John Edwards up; Dean and Dick Gephardt down. By last Wednesday, with a week to go, Kerry had taken a narrow lead. The last Zogby poll, as well as the Des Moines Register's weekend poll, foresaw the exact order of finish, although not the dramatic margin of Kerry's and Edwards's final tallies.

In other words, it appears that the polls were an accurate reflection of what was happening on any given day. The polls were immensely useful to the Kerry campaign. Where the pundits blew it was in taking those polls and using them to predict what would happen two or more months out. But even here I think it would be wrong to be too harsh. No one has ever come back from the kind of hole Kerry had dug himself into. His conflicted stance on Iraq, and his rococo speaking style, hardly seemed like the tools needed to stage one of the great political comebacks.

And by the way: according to the American Research Group's daily tracking polls in New Hampshire, Kerry's Iowa bounce is for real. The latest numbers show Dean still leading, with 26 percent; Kerry with 24 percent; and Clark at 18 percent, dropping out of the virtual tie he had been in with Kerry. Zogby has it Dean, 25; Kerry, 23; and Clark, 16.

I'm willing to bet if the primary were held today, the results would reflect those numbers. But next Tuesday? Well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Michael Dukakis, prophet of Iowa. Not much to say this morning - I'll be driving around New Hampshire all day, stalking the wily Democratic presidential candidates.

Like practically everyone, I had all but written off John Kerry as recently as two weeks ago, reporting on the "nearly impossible position" of being the former front-runner. So I'm glad I included this very smart quote from former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democrats' 1988 nominee and a Kerry backer:

The race has just begun. I don't know - and I love you all dearly - you guys in the media get so mesmerized by the polls.... John has always been a slow starter and a strong finisher. We'll see. We'll only know what's going on after we've had a series of primaries and things begin to sort themselves out. That's one grizzled veteran's take on all this.

Slate's William Saletan, per usual, has a smart take on why Kerry won. Slate's Kerry-loathing blogger, Mickey Kaus, has put his "Kerry Withdrawal Contest" on hold.

And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought Howard Dean did himself no favors when he spoke to his supporters Monday night.

Kerry-Clark '04? Why not? It makes sense, so it probably won't happen. But here's why it should. Although it may still turn out that Howard Dean's and Dick Gephardt's field organizations are too much to overcome, there is a pretty good chance that the story coming out of Iowa tonight will be John Kerry. The final Zogby Iowa tracking poll: Kerry, 25 percent; Dean, 22 percent; John Edwards, 21 percent; Gephardt, 18 percent.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Kerry's campaign - dead as recently as a week ago - has sprung to life; he's essentially tied for second with Wesley Clark (Clark, 20 percent; Kerry, 19 percent) in the American Research Group daily tracking polls. Dean still holds the lead with 28 percent. (The Boston Globe/WBZ-TV tracking poll isn't quite as good for Kerry: he's lagging with 14 percent, behind Dean's 30 percent and Clark's 23 percent).

To finish setting the table: on Sunday, the Concord Monitor endorsed Kerry, writing, "Only Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts has well-reasoned and rock-solid answers to every question, foreign or domestic. Kerry is prepared to take office tomorrow." So did the Nashua Telegraph. The Boston Globe and possibly the Boston Herald (even though it will be with George W. Bush in November) can be expected to follow suit in the next few days.

Now, then. I can't dig up the citation, but I know I saw a comment from Clark recently saying that he wouldn't have jumped into the race if Kerry had caught fire. And Kerry, after being all but written off, is finally on the move. But if Kerry and Clark split the anti-Dean vote in New Hampshire next Tuesday, then Dean could win, regain the momentum, and roll to the nomination.

Clark has run an interesting campaign, and he's a very smart guy, but huge questions remain about his lack of experience in anything other than the military. If he were to drop out, and Kerry were to take the unprecedented step of naming his fellow war hero as his running mate, the combination might be too much for Dean to overcome. And if Dean can't win in New Hampshire, he likely can't win anywhere.

Little People news. Yesterday's Providence Journal reviewed Little People. Reviewer Jeanne Nicholson writes:

He weighs the risks and rewards of bone-stretching surgery; he seeks out and interviews adult dwarfs on their home turf for insights into how Becky might attain a life of quality in spite of her difference; he attends and writes about the meetings of Little People of America, knowing his daughter will have to build a life for herself in a world with people of average height.

The field's turned upside-down. Here it is: the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll.

1. John Kerry, 26 percent
2. John Edwards, 23 percent
3. Howard Dean, 20 percent
4. Richard Gephardt, 18 percent

It's close, and Dean and Gephardt are still thought to have the superior organizations heading into Monday's caucuses. But this is quite a turnabout, no? And organization might be offset by passion. Check out this paragraph:

In another sign of strength for Kerry, he is supported by 33 percent of those definitely planning to attend the caucuses. Dean comes in second in this group with 21 percent. Edwards and Gephardt follow with 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

Of course, this raises many, many questions. If Kerry doesn't finish first now, is it worse than if he had never held the lead? If he does finish first, do New Hampshire Democrats care? Those are just for starters.

But he's still John Kerry. And he's still capable of whacking his fellow candidates for supporting the Iraq-war resolution even though he, too, supported it. Anne Kornblut and Patrick Healy report in today's Boston Globe:

Kerry yesterday launched a new attack against Gephardt and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut over their support for the 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. Kerry accused the two of siding with President Bush on the resolution, ultimately approved by Congress, instead of an earlier one that would have limited Bush's ability to go to war quickly.

"When Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt wound up down at the Rose Garden with the president signing off on some deal, they pulled the rug out from the rest of us in the United States Senate who were fighting for a different resolution," Kerry told voters in Guttenberg, Iowa. Kerry ended up voting for the resolution that passed.

For what it's worth, Kerry has also slipped backwards in Zogby's Iowa tracking polls for the first time in a while.

More on the Kerry surge. The New Republic's Michael Crowley - like Al Giordano, a former Phoenix colleague - gives the credit to Michael Whouley, who actually lives a few blocks from me. Not that he's ever home.