Additional Amazing Audacity

The York Times for January 19 says

Washington, Jan. 18 - The winner of the Iowa caucuses on Monday night will have an unexpected competitor waiting right around the corner, and he is not one of the Democrats running for president.

The opponent is President Bush and his State of the Union address, which White House officials scheduled for Tuesday night, only 24 hours after Iowa, to draw attention from the Democratic victor, a Republican close to the Bush campaign said.

"Was it planned?" the Republican said. "Yes. The fact that the Iowa caucus was going to be held on a certain date was not unknown to people in the White House."

The sheer brazenness continues to be breathtaking. They make no secret of the fact that everything is done for the political impact, everything is manipulation. My own growing conviction is that they feel so free to acknowledge it because they're certain that the people they're trying to appeal to are just too dim to catch on.

In this particular case, whether or not they'll succeed is a different story. I suspect this was originally done in the expectation of a Howard Dean victory, providing an opening to contrast the "bold, forward-looking" Bush having his "Kennedy moment" with the "angry, pessimistic" Dean. But with Iowa so close (the results are still being gathered as I write this), attention will almost certainly switch immediately to New Hampshire; the possibility of another months-long Democratic bloodfeud being a much juicier target for the media than a "return to the Moon!" vision easily (and already) ridiculed as a foolish waste.