Maybe this is where that surge of independent voters in the Des Moines Register poll is coming from.

Dennis Kucinich is telling Iowans who caucus for him that their second choice should be Barack Obama (and here). This is a HUGE deal. The Democratic Party rules require that in any precinct where a candidate does not meet a 15% threshold, his or her supporters must organize on behalf of a second-choice candidate who does clear the threshold. Kucinich's supporters may be few, but they could be enough to tilt the result towards one of the top tier candidates if they all re-organize around the same second choice. In 2004, Kucinich asked his supporters to make John Edwards their second choice, which was a big reason why Edwards did so well that year. This time around, it looks like the beneficiary could be Obama. In a three-way race as tight as this, Kucinich's supporters could end up the king-makers.

I've started a flickr stream for those badly executed photos that have been cluttering up the site all day (and some director's cut bonus photos). I'm going to keep taking them throughout the week (and likely on to NH), but I'll try to be more selective.

The day with Romney started out with him making not-so-veiled reference to the Huckabee press conference last night, saying "he didn't fool the people of Iowa" with his negative ad headfake. I talked to a lot of people at the six Romney house parties he held today, and I think Romney is right. Huckabee did not fool the people of Iowa, because they weren't paying attention.

The "implosion" that the media cackled about yesterday may be happening, but it's not because of that press conference. Out of the dozen or so caucus-goers I spoke to today (some Romney supporters, some undecided), no one had even heard about that press conference. And I suspect, even if they did, the MSM's opinion of Mike Huckabee's performance isn't the first thing they're using to evaluate the candidate. Even more telling, considering how disciplined a candidate Romney is, he didn't bring up Huckabee's "going negative" again the rest of the day.

Again, this is not to say the implosion is not happening. A few of the people I talked to today did mention recent Huckabee remarks that had tipped their personal scale to Romney... namely, his "bad mouthing" of Bush: Even if they couldn't remember the invocation of "bunker mentality," they remembered that Huckabee had said something bad about Bush: "That was a mistake. He shouldn't have done that." Others -- far fewer, but still present -- picked out his various foreign policy slip-ups: "His comments about the situation over in Pakistan... it doesn't help if you don't know that they had already lifted martial law. You need to know that stuff."

Both of those statements also have a lot more to do with actual issues than whatever it is that happened yesterday afternoon. Is this heaven? No, but it is Iowa.

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