By L.C. Johnson (bio/blog)

What's wrong with this picture?  Barack Obama runs as the "outsider" fighting against the "special" interests.  Barack claims:

"I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists -- and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not get a job in my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president."

-- Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA, November 10, 2007

Okay.  Then if he is the candidate of change fighting Washington, why did a majority of the Washington, DC and the government employees in the surrounding suburbs and those pesky lobbyists and their spouses and employees, vote for Barack?  You see, I believe that people act in their own interest.  So, when the folks who live inside the beltway, vote in large measure for Barack, then maybe he is not what he claims to be.

The Obama cult is a phenomenom.  A weird phenomenom.  People are enthralled with the idea of Obama and know nothing about his past, his performance, and the scandals that will bring him down.  And, smack dab in the middle of the enablers, are most of the TV and print journalists.  Very few are writing or reporting the kind of tough stories they unleash on Hillary on a regular basis.

Shoot me in the face.  Seriously.

Three years ago, it took a nasty, industrial-strength assault by Karl Rove & Co. to oust Democratic leader Tom Daschle from his Senate seat. But if Republicans thought they had seen the last of the resilient South Dakotan, they were wrong. He's back, this time behind the scenes, as a sort of secret sauce in the surging presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.

Daschle spent 30 years on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide, House member, senator and ultimately Democratic Senate leader. Now he is providing newcomer Obama with valuable endorsements, staff, fundraising lists and brotherly advice. "He brings an unrivaled mix of policy knowledge and political expertise," said Steven Hildebrand, an Obama senior campaign advisor. He ought to know: a fellow South Dakotan, he ran Daschle's last Senate campaign.

...

Interestingly - tellingly - it was Obama who reached out to Daschle. In 2004, Obama was cruising to an easy victory in the Illinois Senate race, and had a lot of unused cash on hand. He gave a lot of it - some $85,000, according to Hildebrand - to Daschle, who was under White House siege in South Dakota. Even before he was sworn in, Obama knew who he wanted for his chief of staff: Rouse. Ironically, Daschle advised Rouse, a veteran with 30 years service on the Hill, to leave the Congress and take a lucrative lobbying position. But Obama sold Rouse, and in the process began the task of wooing Rouse's boss.

In between advising his staffers to become lobbyists themselves, Tom Daschle works at a high profile law firm that was on the other side of the net neutrality fight (and has on its current client list a whole lot of lovely banks, defense contractors, aerospace, national business coalitions, credit card issuers etc).  And here's his profile at the firm.

Senator Tom Daschle is Special Policy Advisor in Alston & Bird's Washington, D.C. office and is a member of the Legislative and Public Policy Group. As a non-attorney, Senator Daschle focuses his services on advising the firm's clients on issues related to all aspects of public policy with a particular emphasis on issues related to financial services, health care, energy, telecommunications and taxes. In addition, he advises on trade and international matters.

This is the guy Howard Fineman says has 'no enemies' in the party, which should tell you something about what insiders think.  And let's be clear, the Obama/Daschle people were the sources for this story, so it's what they think too.

I'm going to take a break.  Wrong week to stop sniffing glue and all (h/t Atrios).

UPDATE: Oh no. Here's another update - the blogger I linked to updated their post to say that Obama was at a general press conference not on a Fox News show.

According to press reports, Tom Daschle will be officially endorsing Barack Obama for president in the near future.  I say officially because for the past several months, many former Daschle staff members signed on with the Obama campaign and Daschle himself has had plenty of good things to say about Obama, even having never served with him in the senate.

I don't mean to be writing so much about 2008, but the thing is that the 2008 Presidential field will be set, or close to set, far, far earlier than the 2008 Senate picture. In a very real way, what happens in the Presidential scene over the next two months will have more impact on the race than anything that happens before September of 2007. Setting the field and the primary schedule puts the pieces in the place. From that point, the game will move quite slowly for a number of months.

Anyway, with that justification in place to make me feel a little better, here is the latest 2008 news:

• Kerry has significantly delayed his decision on whether to run in 2008:
  The Massachusetts Democrat is now leaning toward waiting until late spring before declaring his intentions, even as other candidates jump into the race and begin building organizing and fund-raising teams in early-primary states. Before the joke derailed his comeback, Kerry had signaled that he would decide whether to run by the end of January.
  A delay of this extent strikes me as Kerry leaning strongly toward not running. He must be waiting to see exactly who makes up the field, and if there is any kind of opening at all. To push back a decision on whether to run by three or four months is, in the modern environment, akin to not running. I, for one, hope he stays in the Senate, thereby making those huge warchests certain ultra-safe Democratic Representatives in Massachusetts seem even more pointless than before.
  
  
• Joe Biden, never a favorite around these parts, steps in something pretty foul during a recent trip to South Carolina. Corrente and MyDD's Laurin from SC have more.
  
  I have repeated written that I am keeping an open mind on the 2008 field, and that I believe any Democratic candidate has the potential to step up and become the type of leader I would seek to follow during the campaign. However, this kind of behavior just makes me wish that Biden would drop out / decide to not formally run. Bragging that Delaware was a slave state? The guy already represents a state with only 7% of the population of Pennsylvania, yet he has power equal to any Pennsylvania Senator. Wasn't that level of injustice large enough for him already before he had to bring up memories of things like the three-fifths compromise? Will he next brag that Delaware is a wholly owned subsidiary of MBNA? The only way Biden wins the nomination is if the only voters were Sunday morning talk show hosts. Please, go away.
  
  
• The DNC is trying to institute an incentive based system to prevent frontloading in the primaries:
  In February, the whole Democratic National Committee will vote to ratify or reject the idea. The proposal, which is designed to provide an incentive for states to schedule their contests later in the process, goes like this:

  • States holding 2008 primaries between February 5 and March 31 -- known as stage 1 -- will get no bonus delegates.
    
    
  • States with contests between April 1 and April 30 -- stage 2 -- receive a 5 percent bonus for staying in that time period.
    
    
  • States with contests between May 1 and June 10 -- stage 3 -- will receive a 10 percent bonus for staying in that timeframe.
    
    
  • At the same time, if any state in stage 1 moves to stage 2, it receives a 15 percent bonus. Finally, if a stage 1 or 2 state moves into stage 3, it receives a 30 percent bonus.

  There was little dissent at the meeting today, according to party officials, but stay tuned to see if this actually prevents a free-for-all in the always-contentious primary calendar.
  While it looks like this will pass, it is hard to imagine this will dissuade too many states from holding early primary contests. I personally long for an extended primary season, mainly for the high political drama that would satiate my electoral junkie fix for years afterward. I don't really care what the arguments are for a longer or shorter primary season on either side: I want a longer primary season just because I think it would be really cool. Thus, I back this proposal.
  
  
• As I noted last night, Daschle is out, and Bayh is in. Hotline on Call looks at the makeup of Bayh's staff, if you are into that sort of inside baseball.
  
  
• Bloomberg08 I mean Unity08 seems to have their main man interested in a possible run. Atrios is just as excited as I am about this wonderful possibility of corporate centrists saving the peasants from destroying the nation. It now seems possible that, should neither the Republican nor Democratic primaries go the way LieberDems like, the 2008 Presidential election could very well be the sequel to the 2006 Connecticut Senate race. A Theocon--LieberDem--Movement Candidate three way race is not outside the realm of possibility. Thankfully, Democrats now (narrowly) control the outcome if the race is thrown into the house of Representatives (we control 26 state delegations).

Expect large fields on both the Democratic and Republican sides in 2008, given that this is the first time since 1928 that none of the sitting President, Vice-President, or Eisenhower is running. The field is, at least seemingly, wide open, just like this thread.