This Josh Marshall piece, while excellent as is usually the case with his work, contains this particularly good nugget:
I've gotten a number of emails over the last few days from Republicans asking, with a genuine disbelief and incomprehension, how it is that the questions about President Bush's military service record are coming up now after they were 'dealt with' in 2000 [...]
But there is something different here. And the difference is that the Democrats have decided to go on the offensive -- and this is a version of preemption that Dems may, and should, warm to. After Clark had some stumbles with the issue, Kerry has been hitting it for a couple weeks. And the recent round of coverage on it would never have emerged had Terry McAullife not forced it into the news cycle over the weekend.
McAuliffe has tried in the past to "force" this sort of thing into the news cycle, but all the forcing in the world ain't worth squat unless our elected Democrats don't follow along. It may be a shock to many of you, but no one gives a damn what McAuliffe thinks. It's a whole different matter with Hillary, Daschle, Pelosi, Harold Ford, any of the top presidential candidates, and -- at the local level -- every Democratic congresscritter and senator.
McAuliffe wouldn't have gotten the sort of traction on this issue if Kerry, Clark, Dean and the others hadn't picked up on the issue. The problems we have faced as a party have, in most part, stemmed from elected officials to scared of their own shadow to present an effective opposition to the GOoPers.
Dean is headed for almost certain defeat (though no one will be glader than me if I'm wrong). But he did serve one critical role -- he helped the party find its voice again. It was lost. Now it's back. I cringe at what might've been had Dean not entered the race. For that, every Democrat should be grateful, even the ABD crowd.
Me, I'll sit back and enjoy this newfound feistiness from our elected Dems. Investigations abound, and we're not settling for sacrificial lambs anymore. Nothing less than indictments will suffice. The Senate hacking scandal. 9-11 commission. Iraq intelligence "failures". Plame Affair. Investigations of Cheney's Halliburton. Cheney's energy task force. And so on.
The dam is sprouting leaks, and they're scrambling to plug the holes. They will whitewash most of these investigations, but the dam won't hold for long. Something will get through and bring the whole thing down.
My money is on the Plame Affair.