Krugman: “A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage. That doesn’t mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn’t a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.”
The only way to follow the Iowa caucuses: BloggerStorm. It’s a weblog aggregator put together by the Dean team but it isn’t restricted to Dean supporters. Thrilling stuff.
Here’s Jim Moore explaining how it came about: “This afternoon Matt Gross and I were brainstorming in the conference room, at DFA headquarters in Burlington. Matt came up with the idea to put up an aggregator with feeds from folks who are participating in the Dean ‘Perfect Storm’ volunteer campaign in Iowa. Matt was inspired by the Feedster site that ran during BloggerCon. We jumped around the corner to the webteam area, and recruited Joe Rospars into the conversation. We soon had specd out a sort of instant Feedster site, Joe got ahold of two volunteers in the DeanSpace community, and later in the day we had BloggerStorm up and running.”
When I was in Australia in November, I came across a reference to what the writer said was one of the great sports novels ever, The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones.
It’s a fictional account of the first UK tour by New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team in 1905. You don’t have to like rugby (I don’t) to be utterly swept away by the vivid, moving account of a long lost, innocent world. The prose is wonderfully poetic. A truly memorable book.
But it’s a pain to get hold of. Penguin New Zealand are the publishers. Neither Amazon UK nor Amazon.com stock it. I ordered it through the Australian bookshop Dymocks and it took two months to arrive. And it was worth the wait.