... may be closer than they appear:

Pollster John Zogby: "The Democratic race in South Carolina is reminding me now of the beginning of the old Buffalo Springfield song: "There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear."

"Obama maintains a 15-point lead, but he has dipped under 40%, losing ground, including a few points among African Americans. And nearly one in five African Americans is now undecided with just three days to go until the election. Still, his is a commanding lead with just three days to go.

"Edwards, meanwhile, has had his second good day since the Monday night CNN debate, in which he delivered a strong performance. He hit 19% support on Tuesday alone and then 27% support on Wednesday alone. And, on Wednesday alone, he pulled ahead of Clinton overall. He has pulled ahead among whites. Could he pull ahead of Clinton and finish in second place?

He's at it again.

Please fix the ticker on the front page.  It currently shows Hilary with 15 and Edwards with 14.  That is backwards.  Edwards has 15.
Thanks.

Taylor Marsh spends a good bit of her webpage whining today that John Edwards and Barack Obama should not go negative on Hillary Clinton.  I engaged.  Why should this election, alone in history, feature a putative frontrunner who goes unchallenged for the nomination?

Her position - that republicans will pick up the attacks "when" hillary becomes the nominee.  What an argument!  Republicans don't know how to engage an opponent unless John Edwards does it first.

Marsh is a hack.  Her attacks on Edwards span the gamut from laughable (such as this one) to slanderous (as when she calls him sexist and racist).  She is really hardly worth the time.

Nevertheless, I engaged, and she banned me and scrubbed several of my comments.  The offense?  The scrubbed comment was the one in which I pointed out that, in claiming that Edwards was "taking heat" on his ad, her only link was to her own post.  It wasn't the flamewar posts that I engaged in that did it.  Those are still up and you can look them up at her amateurish site.

It was where I caught her being dishonest.

The funny thing is, she bounced and scrubbed me moments after posting how brave and unafraid of the 'Edwards brigade" she was.

Well, she's a coward.  

She's a bought and paid for dishonest coward.

Crossposted at The Stinging Nettle.

I am asked why I support Edwards and not Clinton or Obama.

The first answer is I am loyal, and I know when I have made the right decision the first time.  I came to the conclusion in 2002 that he was the right man for the job.  I still believe so, and I am hopeful, indeed ecstatic, over the possibility that he can sweep to office on a wave of Democratic enthusiasm and outrage and finally, at long last, begin to enact the kind of fundamental reforms this country desperately needs.

Health Care, labor, foreign policy, the environment, the role of the Corporation in society.  These are all things John Edwards will fight to change with progressive values.  Moreover, he owes nothing --  nothing -- to the forces that will fight against those changes.

But the reasoning goes deeper than that.  Some of it isn't even reasoning.  Some of it is gut.  Follow me on my journey below the fold.

The John Edwards campaign announced tonight that John will join striking UAW workers in Buffalo tomorrow.  He will join the members of U.A.W. Local 774 in their picket of GM's Powertrain plant.

Workers are being asked to pay for bad products with their pensions and their healthcare.  Nothing crystallizes the need for John Edwards's universal health care plan more than this strike.

I remember when I used to come to MyDD for really wonky inside baseball.  Unfortunately, the commenters on this site have turned this into a truly unpleasant place to visit. And that is too bad.

Jerome, please get a hold of this problem.  Disable comments for a while, eject the worst offenders.  

The internecine childishness has got to stop.  I'm tired of campaign press releases titled as diaries.  I'm tired of the egregious violations of copyright as people post whole articles written by others, with the only original content being "OOO- BREAKING, Edwards in trouble!"