Go Alice, go Amos! I think Kendall was expressing support for Dean. He doesn't like Clark, and doesn't like any of the congress members, which leaves Dean, Sharpton, Mosely-Braun and maybe Kucinich (who WAS in congress but at least voted against the giveaway). Of these, to me the most plausible is Dean, and of course the others weren't being discussed in this thread.

I'm fairly sure by "giving away the store" Kendall must have meant the Iraq vote. The "store" in this case was the authority to use military force. But maybe Kendall will come back and tell us what he meant?

In US law, that authority rests ultimately with congress. By voting in advance to allow Bush to use force when and if he felt it necessary, they essentially abandoned an extremely important responsibility. Now both Kerry and Gephardt backpedal and say they wanted the authorization to show Saddam Hussein and the UN that the US was serious in the hopes of achieving more international action. But my feeling on this is, if they trusted Bush not to simply declare pre-emptive war they were wrong to do so, and we should not reward them for it.

Clark has been remarkably fluid in his response to the war question. Within about six days he announced that he probably would have voted for the resolution giving Bush authority, then that he would have done so only to put pressure on Saddam, not to start a war, then that he would never have voted for it. He also was in print, before any of this statements, praising Bush's actions in the Iraq war. It is impossible to know what the truth is here, but it seems to me he has more to gain by pretending to be anti-war than by pretending to be pro-war, so the anti-war stance is probably the fake one. In reality, though, it was a complex issue and his waffling may have had more to do with being unprepared for the question than anything else, as the six days I mentioned were the first week of his campaign.

The Iraq war is of course ony one issue out of many, but it is a bit of a sticking-point for me, more so than gun control or the retirement age.

And DougR: Really? YOU think Dean is too liberal? I am shocked, deeply shocked :-)