Of all the Clinton era advisors, it's Reich I'd most like to still be influencing policy direction and where better than in the Cabinet? HHS sounds like a good place to have him.

I'm surprised, Glenn, that your final line misses the most important target:

These "character" issues end up mattering largely because Democrats, in election after election, allow wars over "character" to be waged in a largely one-sided fashion.

No, as vital as it is for Democrats, it is far more crucially the MSM who "allow wars over 'character' to be waged..." Frankly, as much as it drives me nuts when Democrats don't rebut all the crap flung at them, I do understand their skittishness at times which is ENTIRELY the fault of the MSM. How many times in recent years have brave Democrats stuck their head up out of the sand to fight back only to have the MSM then turn on them, too often mocking them and at the very least giving the GOP "equal" rebuttal time and presenting both sides as if it were merely he-said-she-said when in fact the GOP is spinning strawperson arguments (The entire GOP platform of speakers was running, not against "Democrats" but against "liberals" painted as standing for utterly demonized positions made up out of wholecloth and the MSM doesn't deconstruct a damn one of them. Sarah Palin's speech should have been "reality-checked" line by line yesterday - there was no truth underlying her characterization of either Obama or McCain. Similarly with McCain and definitely with all the other attack dogs I heard spewing venom through the airwaves.)

This morning's NYT headline is "McCain seizes theme of change" -- spoonfeeding GOP myth. It little matters what the NYT says on the editorial page if front page headlines editorialize with verbs and adjectives amok. Why didn't their other main headline "McCain vows to end 'partisan rancor' instead or in addition headline "while he and Palin do their own partisan rancor' ??? The entire GOP convention including McCain belied any such vow he claimed. But the MSM just laps it up and puts it out there to serve their ends.

It's the same problem this nation has faced now for 15 years. The rightwing has got the MSM so petrified of the label "liberal media" that they do ANYTHING to bend over backwards toward their right hip to a) join the GOP in the mockery machine making fun of Democrats, and b) giving "equal time" to GOP claims that fly in the face of facts as if they were of co-equal merit with those of Democrats. It's pervasive, and it's the MSM that is dooming this nation to mediocrity because they have utterly forgotten how to do reality-checking and to stop just funneling out whatever garbage is uttered without immediate deconstruction.

Glenn,

You could still extend your example from yesterday about Edwards, but I'm willing to bet not one single MSM reporter will care to even notice this, much less point it out:

Edwards remains "on the rise" in a way synchronous with the national polling data that you presented yesterday. Yes, it was disappointing to Edwards' supporters that he didn't do better than he did with 17% but that sentence should say "even better" in light of his own progress among New Hampshire voters.

He received nearly twice as many votes as he did in New Hampshire in 2004, going from 26,000 to 48,000, which, given the overall increase in voters meant going from 12% to 17%. That too is significant, although given the agenda of the MSM, it will, I bet, never show up at all, so "lost" in the obsession over this being a Clinton-Obama race, period.

I think it's safe to say that Southerners have tended to have an extra hurdle to mount in NH primaries. In 1992, the very time when placing 2nd made Bill Clinton the "comeback kid," Clinton received 41,540 votes (compared to Tsongas' 55,000). That 1992 Bill Clinton vote count is 6,500 FEWER votes than Edwards received there yesterday.

It all depends on what the media choose to focus on. If they single-mindedly focus only on horse-race results and do not see under the first-place finishes what other data are there to mine which may stand in some contradiction to the more simplistic storyline, then that too is part of the problem. Sure, Hillary is lead story today, but is her new "comeback kid" story the ONLY story out of NH?

Why can't the media just as easily be saying, Wow, Edwards finished 2nd in Iowa over Clinton despite being vastly outspent, now he nearly doubled his numbers in New Hampshire over his previous election, if he can repeat his victory of 2004 in South Carolina (despite the media bandwagon for his opponents), he's just as much in this race as anyone.

Full public financing. (And the mandated free broadcast-media equal time to go with it.)