President Bush got a big bounce in polls after the Saddam capture. And Dean’s standing in a matchup with Bush plummeted. If the vote were today, the poll found, Bush would beat him 59%-37%, vs. 53%-43% in November. Here are some more details from the poll. A different poll, CBS/NY Times, shows that most voters, including most Democrats, are largely unmoved by any of the nine Democrats who are seeking to unseat President Bush. John Kerry is throwing everything into Iowa and New Hampshire. These are the moves of a dying candidate. He’s finished. Watch for Clark to rise against Dean. Howard Dean is leading in Wisconsin, but Clark and Lieberman are tied for second. Dean is getting icreased criticism from his Democratic rivals for his contradictory statements on foreign policy and Iraq, according to the WaPo. CBS poll shows Dean leading with 23% (Clark and Lieberman with 10%), but note that Al Sharpton is beating both Kerry and Edwards!

David Brooks writes a perfect op-ed on how Howard Dean thinks about foreign policy. Here are a few precious lines: "Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren’t so unilateral."