I have seen and heard as many theories for who is digging up the dirt on ALL the Demcratic candidates, and I have seen nothing that nails it down to any one source. Check out this shot at Kerry. In Iowa, that smarts. I expect the media could find out sources if they were interested enough, but sometimes it just takes an e-mail to Matt Drudge from a library somewhere.

As for Dean being specially targeted, the guy in front of the pack is going to get the most arrows in his back, so that kind of goes with the territory. If someone else gets up front, pretty soon his opponents will be shooting mud at him.

The disadvantage of approaching the presidential race through a hard-fought primary against an incumbent is that your fellow party members running against you will do a lot of the dirty work for the other party come election time. Whoever ends up running against Bush will find a lot of quotes from the other seven Democratic candidates in the Republican election ads. Works against Republicans, too. "Voodoo economics" was not coined by Democrats.