Instapundit sums up the commentary . . .

on the Iowa caucuses. I think that Iowa Democrats are not as rabid against Bush as the New York and San Francisco ones. They probably all have Republican friends who have made them nervous by their anticipation of running against Dean. And they probably know that being against such a popular and successful war is a loser issue. Of course, all the candidates have been criticizing the war, but not in the way Dean does. He has come across like Dukakis when he was asked how he'd react if his wife had been raped. His anger toward Bush doesn't come with a clear sense of how he would have dealt with 9/11. When that comes up, there is no anger, only insouciance, "It doesn't matter where Saddam or bin Laden is tried."

Maybe the best Republican tack would be to roll back the clock to the days immediately after the attacks and compare Bush's statements with the Democrat candidate's, then ask which of them the viewers would have preferred for president then. Would we want someone who treated them as criminal matters or as acts of war? Instead of "Are you better off than 4 years ago?" it should be, "Would you feel safer if __________ were President, and had turned the problem over to the U.N.?"

Update: I just heard the audio of Dean's concession/seizure. People all over the place are saying he's toast, which probably means he's not. I think that the last few weeks of Dean and Clark's gaffes, the Iowans probably just decided that Kerry was the safest candidate and Edwards was the best looking. As for Edwards' speech to his supporters, I thought it was scary; another Hubert Humphrey promising to eliminate all social disparities. We're already well on the road to bankruptcy because of entitlement programs, and his answer is to step on the gas.