At first, I thought it was all about breakfast sausages

So, here I am in Iowa, it's the beginning of the school year, and I'm under the insane impression that I have free time (in lieu of money) to invest in the Iowa caucuses. At that point, Clark seemed pretty appealing, but there were too many mysteries about him, including whether he was going to run or not.

In Iowa City, we have a dying downtown mall. The advantage to this is that all the campaigns take advantage of the temporary rental space, and you can go and window shop for your candidates. "Retail politics" taken to a new level, right?

So, who's got the excitement in his office, who's got a record of standing up to the Bush administration? Who had actual experience in reaching his goals, and had made tough and politically dangerous positions that didn't doom him to irrelevance? The guy whose name made me think of breakfast, Howard Dean.

Now we're getting down to the wire in Iowa. I've been told that, as soon as the results of the caucuses are announced in Des Moines, the campaigns are going to vaporize all evidence of their existence in the mall. All that will be left are the MeetUps. What a melancholy feeling.

Give 'em hell Howard!