Iowa over; it ain't so bad for us Dean supporters

It's like getting the first ding in the bumper of your new car. You know, you were on eggshells before, and extra nervous about anything going wrong.

At some point, though, you accumulate so many dings and scratches that you can fly around the parking lot now with abandon.

Most of my Iowa analysis will be at Open Source Politics in the morning (hey, whaddya know, it's up there now!). The Dean-specific spin, though, I'll mention here.

This is, believe it or not, good for us. Dean was strongest when he was the underdog. When we all believed in him against the odds. This moment will, I hope, return some of the humilty we felt when poll after poll showed Dean an asterisk, an also-ran. But it should also bring back the energy we felt when we knew we had something to prove.

Let's remember the positives. 3,500 people from everywhere showed up to the middle of nowhere for a reason, folks: This campaign. That says something. It obviously doesn't say this thing will be a cakewalk--which is what I was hoping, for a while, it would say--but it's real and meaningful.

And we still have the only truly nation-wide campaign. We now have a sense of what worked and what didn't in the first caucus state, so that we'll be able to put up the best organization and fight in NM, ND, MI, WA, ME, DC, ID, and UT, which we should own.

Think about Kerry and Edwards: Where do they go now? Kerry has got nothing beyond New Hampshire; Edwards is looking at South Carolina and then . . . nothing. Clark is now in a much weaker position, not only because he lacks that caucus experience, but because Kerry and Edwards now threaten him in NH and SC. And I predict Dean will maintain his position at first or second in every state now through Feb. 17, when he wins Wicsonsin with 65% of the vote (that's my own personal mission).

But the biggest hopeful sign about this whole thing is the turnout tonight in Iowa. As it turns out (no pun intended), when I've been saying on occasion that 125,000 is the record turnout from 1988, that's just an overreported error. 1988 featured closer to 95,000 Iowans caucusing. 2000 had only 68,000. Tonight, we saw at least 100,000 people, maybe as many 125,000, and nearly half of them were new caucusers. It's that number that should be putting the fear of Jeebus in KKKarl Rove and the gang. It shows that, despite the squabbling and the fighting and the jostling for the nomination, Democrats will not sit idly by this time around. We will take our country back, whoever heads the ticket.