Back in 2006 there was a bit of an uproar from the Lieberman campaign who accused the Lamont campaign of performing a Denial of Service attack on their website. For those of you waiting for the final word, the FBI concluded that there was no concerted effort to  crash the Senator's site. Lieberman's site crashed largely because of poor work by an Internet Consultant.

The site crash occurred in the run-up to Mr. Lamont's upset victory over Mr. Lieberman in the August Democratic primary. But Mr. Lieberman managed to win re-election as an independent in November. In December, the authorities declared that the site had not been hacked, but did not confirm that it had simply been overloaded, as seemed likely.

Now it appears the culprit was indeed a badly configured site and too much e-mail traffic, according to an Oct. 25, 2006, F.B.I. e-mail message turned over to The Advocate in response to its freedom-of-information filing.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured," the e-mail memo said. "There was no evidence of (an) attack." According to the memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary, The Advocate reported.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0 4/09/fbi-lieberman-2006-crashed-its-own- site/

The final conclusion? Senator Lieberman is as incompetent at hiring competent campaign staff as he is as a US Senator.

The most recent poll which is being touted by MSNBC and others is the Suffolk University poll.

Hillary 37
Obama   25
Edwards 15

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?dia ryId=3056

The weather is supposed to be around 46 degrees and rainy.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0 108/Weather_channel.html

Obama just won Iowa. Hillary is about to start "drawing contrasts."

There are a lot of diaries to individual candidates saying what they could have done better. There are a lot of diaries saying, "I told you so." This is not one of these diaries. I wanted to take the time to look at the results for each of the top three candidates and give them credit where credit is due. Each of the candidates really did remarkably well.

His complete statement:

I would like to reiterate that I deeply regret my comments yesterday and say again that they were in no way authorized by Senator Clinton or the Clinton campaign. Senator Clinton has been running a positive campaign focused on the issues that matter to America's families. She is the best qualified to be the next President of the United States because she can lead starting on day one. I made a mistake and in light of what happened, I have made the personal decision that I will step down as the Co-Chair of the Hillary for President campaign. This election is too important and we must all get back to electing the best qualified candidate who has the record of making change happen in this country. That candidate is Hillary Clinton.

Though Politico has information up from Pew which says that Hillary would beat Giuliani in the general election not all the data supports that conclusion. The more recent Quinnipiac University study showed the opposite.

Giuliani edges Hillary in a general election match-up 45-43. Obama performs better in his general election heat with Giuliani, Obama edges Giuliani 43-42.

Further, when Hillary matches up well against Thompson winning 46-41, whereas Obama beats Thompson 45-37. They both match-up similarly against McCain and Romney.

Today Barack Obama launched a fundraising drive with an e-mail entitled "close the gap."

From Marc Ambinder:

When we got out first look at the third quarter estimates two weeks ago, it seemed that Sen. Hillary Clinton had attracted more new donors to her campaign than he did -- approximately 7,000 more.

But the final numbers give the edge to Obama in this category: he found 108,000 new donors and Clinton attracted 100,000.

That's 365,000 donors in all. 92.5% of all 550,000 donations Obama recieved have been for less than $250.00

That's campaign finance reform right there, isn't it?

I wanted to put some analysis with this but I don't know what more to say.  That is a lot of donors.  That is an amazing number of small donations.  That is amazing.

Iowa is not always about giving the best speeches and having the best advertising campaigns (though there is an argument to be made for Obama on both those fronts).  The number of voters in Iowa means that it is a state which can be won with a good old-fashioned field program.  A recent article from The Politico talked about Obama's field program and the real effort that is going into it.