Stop, read and process it first

The speed with which rival campaigns seek to "respond" to something their opponent does is getting out of hand.  I just didn’t have the juice to spell out for you what happened last week between Culver and Nussle (I took a break from the blog).  But today I’ve just consumed a "real" can of Diet Coke (the kind with the caffeine in it) and I’m ready to tell you about a ltitle Lamberti/Boswell give and take that happened today.

Lamberti had a 9:30 a.m. news conference at the Des Moines Public Library to talk about educaton.  The Democrats quickly scheduled a news conference at 10 — in the room next door — to respond.  But they didn’t have the details of what Lamberti had discussed, so they were talking in generalities.  And their final speaker — the president of College Democrats in Iowa — talked about the topic of federal financial aid for college education.  It was not a topic Lamberti addressed (so that’s why you don’t hear him on the MP3 attached to the story about these two events — it wasn’t applicable).

Then, this afternoon I received an email from Mark Daley of the Boswell team asking if I was aware that "the pilot program Lamberti wants to propose already exists."  Yes, I did.  Perhaps if Boswell’s staff and his Demoratic friends had waited until they knew the specifics of what Lamberti had said they might have been able to speak intelligently about this particular program, called Ed-Flex.  I’m sure you’ve heard of it — not.  If I walked across the street to the Quiznos and asked the folks in there about Ed-Flex, I’m sure they’d have loads to say.  The conversation may have gone something like this:  "Is Ed-Flex the cousin of BowFlex?"  "No, I think Bow is Ed’s nickname." That’s why Ed-Flex is not mentioned in detail in my story — I’m trying to give our listeners and on-line readers the jist of what Lamberti’s proposing without boring them with non-sense names.

I’ve got more to say on this tit for tat stuff, but I’ll save it for later.  Next post is about Nussle at the Fair and I’ve got to get that done before I go see Joe Biden at 4:30.