Interesting stuff coming out on the bush (not Bush) telegraph. Kerry was using push-polling in Iowa, where his staff would call people and ask questions like "Do you think it's all right that Howard Dean's wife doesn't even support him enough to come to Iowa? Do you think Judy Dean is really First Lady Material?"

There is currently anti-Dean push-polling going on in Texas, too. People are being asked "would you vote for Howard Dean if you knew that he sent Vermont's nuclear waste to West Texas, which has a large Hispanic population?" Of course, the area of West Texas in question does not have a large population of any kind, and of course there are only a few sites where Dean COULD send nuclear waste and ALL of them are near poor people, not rich people. Dean had no choice but to send the waste to a certified disposal site, of which there are none in Vermont. So while it may technically be true, it's a dirty trick. It's probably Kerry doing it, though it could be Edwards or even Clark.

Although this is a dirty trick, Kerry has not apparently stooped to the lowest form of push-polling, where you suggest but do not state something that is entirely untrue. Bush push-polled against McCain in 2000, asking, "Would you be likely to vote for McCain if you knew that he had fathered an illegitimate non-white child?" This was insidious, because it never claimed McCain DID have such a child, it simply asked whether the voter would still vote for McCain in the hypothetical situation that the voter knew this hypothetical fact about McCain. In fact, McCain and his wife had adopted a daughter who is not white, so when voters received the push-poll, then saw McCain traveling with his family, they were left with the strong impression that McCain had had a child out of wedlock!

One big score for Dean against Kerry tonight. At every debate, in attack ads and in every campaign speech, Kerry has pummeled Dean by saying that Dean wants to raise middle class taxes by eliminating the Bush tax cuts. When Dean is there (at debates), he points out that the middle class did not get a tax cut because Bush's cuts to services, especially No Child Left Behind, health care, special ed, and higher ed, have raised property taxes, payroll taxes, insurance premiums and college tuitions so that the average family pays far more than before the Bush cuts. Kerry then puts on his mock outrage and says, "come on, what are you thinking?" Or he says something like, "not according to Hector Garcia, a mechanic from Dubuque who saved 1800 dollars this year!" Or, he mocks Dean, by saying, "the middle class tax cut, which Howard somehow doesn't realize people ever got..."

Well, today in Daschle's post-State of the Union speech, he took a paragraph almost word-for word out of Dean's stump speech, pointing out that the middle class did not get a tax cut for all the reasons stated above. In the next debate, if Kerry tries his BS routine, Dean can just say "your own leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle, said it himself last week. It's really not that hard to understand, John!"