Roger Simon gets some inside scoops from the Dean campaign:

U.S. News: Howard Dean isn't afraid of the president, so why are Democrats afraid of Dean? (8/11/03)

Kasey, a West Highland white terrier and the official campaign dog, lives to do her official campaign trick. "Kasey?" Joe Trippi, Kasey's owner and Dean's campaign manager, asks. "Would you rather work for George Bush or be dead?" Kasey immediately flops onto her side and extends her front and hind legs in a reasonable imitation of rigor mortis. Kasey will get a dog biscuit for this and the staff always gets a laugh, but the trick is significant in one respect: Trippi used to ask Kasey if she would rather work for John Kerry, one of Dean's Democratic opponents, or be dead (Kasey's response was the same), but now the Dean campaign has moved way beyond John Kerry.

"Dean is a real and enormous threat [to the other candidates]," says one highly respected Democratic leader who is not aligned with any campaign. "He won't fold, and he won't do something stupid and peak in August. He has only growth potential. If he wins Iowa and he wins New Hampshire, who is going to stop him? Nobody. But Karl Rove and his crowd are dying to face Dean. It is going to be pretty tough for an antiwar candidate to win in 2004."

Trippi ... says the argument that Dean would be weaker against Bush than a noninsurgent is wrong. "We started out with seven people and $157,000 ... and nobody ever heard of us. Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, Lieberman, they had millions in the bank, access to the best staffs, and massive name ID. So if we can get this far against them, what makes anybody think Karl Rove couldn't run circles around them? It is great that Karl Rove wants us, because we want George Bush. We are just afraid that at the last minute, the Republicans are going to switch him out for a moderate."

I still don't get why people take the Rove quote at face value; do they think he didn't expect his quote to be printed and therefore accidentally told the truth?

Thirteen-year-olds understand reverse psychology. Why don't adult Democrats?

(...and who's this 'non-aligned highly respected Democratic leader', anyway? A Clinton? Hart? Podesta?)