C minus 10 - the Christmas Eve Special

A Merry Christmas to everyone, and if you are reading this instead of spending quality Christmas time with your family, then step away from the computer, get yourself some egg nog (fortified or not) or another beverage of choice, and dive in there. If you are really stuck, do what we have just done - sit down with them all and watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (a tradition for us on Christmas Eve!).
While driving around on errands today, which I was glad to do since it got me out of the house, and Kath was glad for me to do for exactly the same reason, I heard adverts for Hillary a number of times. All were the same, and the theme was how marvelous she was because the Des Moines Register endorsed her. Frankly, that is lame in a major way. Fine, if you let the Register do all your thinking for you, then this endorsement means something. But most folks here in Iowa don't. The Register serves primarily as a paper for people to complain about. The advert will have done nothing to encourage undecided voters to support Hillary, and at this stage, she needs those folks pretty seriously.
And that was not the only error of hers that I learned of today. Apparently, the campaign has been handing out supporter cards with a caucus date of January 14th on them - major oops! That is an act of supreme incompetence for a campaign. If it were the only such act, that would be one thing, but the campaign has made a number of these errors of late. Why? Well, perhaps they believed their own press releases that Hillary was the inevitable candidate, and forgot to actual work at making that happen. Contributing to that may have been the media tendency to give those they favor a pass when it comes to the hard questions. That means the media favorites are not battle tested, and so in the real fight, they come up short. A similar thing may be happening to Mike Huckabee, as we get from his campaign a daily dose of bad news. The latest bad news for him, and this is I think fatal in terms of his candidacy, is that he has received significant speaking fees ($35K) from Novo Nordisk "one of the world's largest embryonic stem cell researchers." As noted in the link, the MSM seem to be burying this one, which in the long run will only serve to weaken Huckabee (just as Kerry was weakened because the press did not ask him more detailed questions about his experiences in Vietnam - had they done so, and had his campaign responded appropriately, there would have been nothing for the Swift Boat Veterans to say. But, they didn't and the rest is history).
Given all of which, a further reminder that the polls are basically rubbish for things like caucuses is served up here. The only polls that matter are the numbers that come out of the caucuses, not those going in!