Morning Diary: On the presidential trail

• Chris Dodd, or How to run an effective second tier campaign
  

Has anyone noticed how much attention Chris Dodd has gotten recently? There was his call to end the embargo against Cuba. He then got positive coverage by being the first of the candidates from the Senate to announce his opposition to any bill without a firm timetable. This allowed him to distinguish himself from the other frontrunners, and pounce on Obama and Clinton for refusing to take the same pledge. And Dodd is still being noticed: Yesterday, he started promoting the restoration of the heabeas corpus in a guess blog posting on TaylorMarsh-- talk about reaching out to the blogosphere.

This doesn't make Chris Dodd in any way likely to win the Democratic nomination, but compare the coverage he has been getting to, say, the one of Joe Biden who is talked about a lot during debates given his eloquence but then mostly diseappears from the news cycle. Dodd has understood he needs to take positions that other candidates are shying away from and present himself as a leader who is ready to take the party in new directions, and he is doing so surprisingly well.

• Bill Richardson, or How to not run a second-tier campaign

Bill Richardson is making a gaffe a week at this point, and yesterday's just about beat all of them. Addressing the convention of one of the largest unions in the country, the SEIU, he finished his speech by saying "Thank you AFSCME!"

The AFSCME is the SEIU's rival, and another crucial union that Democrats court. Richardson managed to once again prove he makes news for rookie mistakes as often as he does for his position on Iraq or his executive experience.

• Is Bush Senior supporting McCain?
  

McCain spent much of the past 3 years courting Bush's circle, hoping to become the establishment's candidate and cement his status as a frontrunner. He succeeded admirably well in recruitment many Bush supporters, but we know how that turned out for him. Now comes news that a recent McCain "No Surrender" event in South Carolina featured a video feed of George H. W. Bush quoted as saying, “I’m proud to be with you at the no surrender rally.”

Bush Senior isn't particularly popular with conservatives, but McCain certainly needs anything he can get at this point to jumpstart his moribund campaign. He has actually recovered quite nicely already from the July debacle, and recent polls have shown him back to where he was before most of his campaign staff left him. With the conversation back on Iraq and away from immigration, McCain is now on his favorite turf. He is still far from the first-tier, but it's still risky to rule him out.