I can't help but think "what took you so long?" for one, but then I ask "what has caused the change?" And I can only conclude that the public has shifted away from Bush only when the media has begun concentrating attention on opponents of Bush, as exemplified by the candidates in the Democratic nomination race.

But it's not like there has been much of anything new raised by the candidates covered in the campaign coverage, to be honest. It's just that the message of Bush's failure as president is getting out to the public because the media is now reporting on positions other than just those the Bush administration approves, that is, the positions of people who believe the Bush administration to be an ongoing catastrophe for our country.

In the recent past, an opposition point of view was nowhere to be found in the major media outlets, but now, just because the national media are covering the Democratic candidates, the opposition message is getting play on nearly every newscast. And, shock of shocks, public opinion on Bush has shifted drastically away from the heights it climbed to after the capture of Saddam in December.

It takes so little, it seems to me, to make a huge difference, even in the face of hugely positive events for the administration. And it all comes down to the judgment of the news media about what is worthy of coverage and what is not.

For me, this is a terribly sobering thought, as such easy gains are far too easy to lose.

But more sobering still is the thought that this irresponsible pack of incompetent journalists who populate our national media have so much power to shape the course of public opinion.

In May, Massachussetts will have gay marriage, and several other states already have some form of civil unions (though Vermont's is the strongest and most similar to full marriage rights). Over time, I forecast that more and more of the socially liberal states (probably the same ones that legalized abortion first) will gradually offer civil recognition of gay partnerships (either civil unions or full-fledged marriage), until there is a divide between states that have strong public policy against it and states that allow it, just as there was in 1973 when the Supreme Court took up the issue. When there are 16 or more states with gay marriage, there will start to be a problem, as we will be as a nation, once again, a house divided, with the rights of some people being significantly limited in some parts of the country, and equal in others. At some point, the issue will have to come before the courts and the US Congress. And, eventually, maybe by 2030, the issue will be settled in favor of gay marriage.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that the issues are identical, for there are significant differences. For one, illegal abortions were quite widespread before the laws began to be liberalized. Marriage is not something that can be entered into "illegally," as it is in essence a legal construct in the first place, not an act. So, there's no flouting of existing laws for pragmatists to point to as the basis for making legal what people are going to do anyway. Second, the constituency for liberalized abortion laws was very large, for unwanted pregnancy was something that affected a large majority of the population. Gay marriage has no such built-in majority constituency.

Nonetheless, I still think there's an important parallel: attitudes on the subject are widely divided in the country, and the states are beginning to institutionalize that difference in law, in both directions, just as happened in the decade before Roe vs. Wade, when the Supreme Court stepped in and completely revamped the whole issue by finding a right to privacy in the Constitution that severe restrictions and prohibitions on abortion impinged.

I honestly do not wish for the Supreme Court's interference, at least not until several decades in the future when it's become clear from experience that gay marriage does not in any way endanger any thread of the fabric of society (this should be clear already, but some people are slow on the uptake). But I do think the swing has already begun, and might very well occur very quickly (though surely not as quickly as happened with abortion). I would expect 10 years from now that gay marriage will be common in the socially liberal states and that in 20 years, it will seem perfectly ordinary in all but the most conservative parts of the country (say, Utah), and 30 years from now, will be legal nationwide. And I also expect that, along with that, full equal rights will by that time have been accorded gay citizens since I can't imagine gay marriage being sanctioned without it.

And then we will finally be able to say "Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we're free at last!"

What is interesting about all of this is what the Washington Post did with the question of Dean's "gaffes" in a Jan. 23rd editorial. I only heard about this editorial as it was quoted by media whore Tim Russert in his lengthy Feb. 1st interview with Howard Dean on NBC's Meet the Press. The transcript is available (for the relevant passage, search the transcript for the word "Quayle"), and from it, we find that Russert placed this question, depending on the words of the Washington Post editorial to do the heavy lifting:

MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post had a very interesting editorial and it tried to put it in context, and let me share it with you and our viewers and talk about it. "Defending the Rant: The speech has caused such big trouble for Mr. Dean because it so graphically evoked already-present worries about the candidate's temperament. This is a common political phenomenon. Thus, Mr. Quayle's misspelling of potato was a big deal"--"of underlying doubts doubts about the vice president's intellect. President George"--Herbert Walker--"Bush's supposed fascination with a supermarket scanner resonated because of the perception of the president as out of touch with ordinary folk. Likewise, the grief that Vice President"--"Gore took over his alleged boasts to have discovered pollution problems at Love Canal, invented the Internet"--"inspired a character in `Love Story' was the product of his reputation for self- serving puffery. In each of these cases, the importance of an episode, real or imagined, was inflated because of the pre-existing political condition."

Do you agree with that?

Where to begin? Dan Quayle's spelling, George Bush the elder's supermarket scanner, and Gore's Internet, Love Story and Love Canal "fabrications" all contrasted with Dean's "anger."

They're all there.

Every last one of them.

Any journalist interested in truth would see that the real conclusion from all of these is that political journalists are incompetent, since every one of these stories except for the Dan Quayle "potato" story is an clear misrepresentation of fact. The Bush scanner incident was created out of whole cloth by the New York Times, and everyone has long known that all three of the Gore stories are false (as well as all the others not mentioned here in this shorthand version of the "Gore is a liar" meme). But the Washington Post editorial board sees each of these little stories as having power only because they are emblematic of certain essential characteristics of each of the candidates involved. But surely, the problem is with these little stories themselves, since they are false (with the exception of the Quayle story), and the real issue is how journalists repeat such false and misrepresented stories. Indeed, it's not entirely clear that the Washington Post has not mistaken the chicken for the egg, failing to consider that these stories may not be so much emblematic as they are transformative of existing images, that these fabrications have their power not because they are seen as particularly good representations of existing known truths, but because they are such good stories that they completely alter the story by becoming the only stories that get told.

The only valid conclusion from the examples cited in the editorial is that journalists who came up with the Dean anger stories are just as incompetent and untrustworthy as the ones who trafficked in these falsehoods about Gore and Bush senior.

But no, that's never the lesson that journalists take away from these facts. It's never their problem, but instead it's the problem of the candidate.

How can the Howard Dean's of the world ever succeed in revolutionizing our political system when the media outlets are all staffed by journalists who do not understand that their first responsibility is to truth?

In regard to special interest money, there is simply no comparison between Kerry and Dean. Dean really does have an argument here, in that his top 10 donors are an order of magnitude smaller in comparison to Kerry. Of course, it's not really fair to compare the small candidates who haven't raised much, and Clark's numbers don't really mean anything as he hadn't actually started his campaign during the period covered there.

But between Kerry and Dean, there's a pretty clear difference.

And between Kerry and Bush, there's no difference.

That is the point Dean has been making, and it's a good one.

The right-hand part of the table, from OpenSecrets.org, shows PAC money related to the whole. Overall, in all cases, these are relatively small percentages, but this is because the numbers for individual contributions are not directly comparable. PACs can't donate more than $5K. Corporations can't, either. How, then were the previous numbers arrived at? Well, what the PublicIntegrity.org survey does is look at the employers of individual donors, because most companies coordinate donations by their employees to particular candidates. This is how the numbers for the top 10 donors could be so much higher than the numbers for the PACs, because those top 10 numbers represent aggregation of multiple donations from individuals who work for those organizations.

So, it's important to realize that the numbers for individual contributions, while in the high 90th percentile of the total, actually can hide large contributions from organizations.

Notice that the PAC numbers for Bush/Cheney are only a bit less than 1/3 of the percentage of contributions from the top 10 contributors. That means that PAC money is still a significant amount.

And the story for Dean is still that he is an order of magnitude below Kerry (though Kerry is also an order of magnitude lower than Bush/Cheney). Interestingly, Edwards has reported receiving no PAC money at all (according to his website, he does not accept money from either lobbyists of PACs), but he's also the viable candidate with the highest percentage of his total contributions coming from his top 10 donors.

The point is that there really are significant differences here, seen within the political system these candidates are working within. One can complain about the political system itself, but I don't know that it's fair to condemn all of them for the rules imposed upon them. Given that it's quite clear that there's a wide range of approaches to raising money within that political system, the fact that everyone accepts money from so-called special interests does not mean that the special interests control the actions of the candidates to the same degree.

Indeed, there are clearly very large differences between the candidates in exactly how beholden they are to organizations that donate large amounts of money.

And that was Howard Dean's point about Kerry -- he's vulnerable to charges of the same kind of corruption by money that we see in the Bush administration.

• 78 percent of Mr. Bush's electoral votes came from Taker states.
• 76 percent of Mr. Gore's electoral votes came from Giver states.
• Of the 33 Taker states, Mr. Bush carried 25.
• Of the 16 Giver states, Mr. Gore carried 12.

The wonderful hypocrisy of this is that on tax policy, the Republican party wants to end progressive taxation (where the rich pay a higher rate than the poor) because they don't like wealth redistribution as a concept. But here they are with all their strength being in states that get from the government more than they pay. If the Republicans are really against wealth distribution, they would want to give back as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible the amount of taxes paid by a state.

But, naturally, they don't, because they aren't really against wealth redistribution at all. They are against the money of their constituents going to those who aren't their constituents. As long as their constituents (the rich) are benefitting from the wealth redistribution, and as long as the people benefitting from the wealth redistribution continue to vote for them, they really don't care about the principle at all. They only care about politics.

Why anyone with half the intelligence of a gently-stewed rhubarb stalk would ever vote for a Republican, I don't know.