I heard this morning that Dean made a speech over the weekend in which

he said he plans to make Schiavo a big campaign issue in the next two

cycles. If he’s serious, THAT’s a bonehead move. The seemingly

pro-death polls on Schiavo were dependent on two things (a)

misinformation spawned by the media about basic facts of the case, and

(b) the high emotion of the days prior to Terri’s death. A campaign

that scrutinizes what happened in Florida is most likely to correct the

misinformation — and may even swing things in the other direction

(given that the pro-life forces correctly predicted worse cases like the

one down in Georgia, and that all the legislative movement at the state

level seems to be in the direction of tightening laws to prevent someone

like Terri from being killed by someone like her husband under ambiguous

circumstances). Plus, how is Dean ever gonna sell that a bandwagon

Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson leaped on with both feet is somehow a

right-wing assault on civil liberties?