An extraordinarily inside baseball piece in Monday’s NYT, exposing the fact that the Hillary campaign sometimes releases minor scoops to Matt Drudge. Shock horror.

The only news here is that a Democrat finally has as good a press team as the Republicans have for the past few cycles. And yet, the Dems are still less, well, shady. It’s …

Pre-game: This is Huckabee’s opportunity to do something with the “moral victory” of the Value Voters straw poll. If he can pull out another technical knock out in the debate, people who previously had discounted him as unable to win may reconsider. Also look for sparks to fly among McCain, Rudy, and Romney (something that could help …

Politico reports this:

The two groups agreed on one thing: Hillary Clinton was voted “least acceptable” candidate both overall (4,141 votes, or 72 percent) and in on-site voting (733 votes, or 77 percent). In total voting, Giuliani was the runner-up as least-acceptable, ahead of all the Democrats on the ballot. On-site, that honor

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From today’s White House Pool Report #2:

Before discussing the executive order he would soon sign, the president pointed out to the crowd of fishing enthusiasts, journalists, bystanders and girl scouts that First Lady Laura Bush had skipped the event and had headed to the St. Micheal’s weekend home of Vice President Dick Cheney ahead

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… But that’s not the news. It’s this:

Second — Mike Huckabee

Then there’s:

Third — Ron Paul

Fourth — Fred Thompson

A total 5, 576 voters were cast.

The margin by which Romney won: 30 votes (1595 over 1565), and that close second will likely be the headline for most news orgs. My sense from talking to people who were there was …

Towards the end of Rudy’s somewhat tepidly received speech for the FRC’s Values Voters summit, he began his familiar line, “I will increase adoptions and” — he usually says, “decrease abortions.” But he instead started to say, “increase abortions.”

The audience tittered, a little uncomfortably.

Senator Dodd’s campaign communications director Hari Sevugan tells me that $150,000 in small contributions have poured into Dodd’s campaign in the past 24 hours, since his announcement that he will put a hold on–and may even filibuster–a foreign intelligence surveillance bill approved yesterday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. …

First it’s Drudge, with the frightening Asian hordes.

Then — as Jay points out — it’s Rudy, bringing her on as the boogeyman to scare folks away from Mitt Romney.

A few hours ago, Edwards piled on. In a noon conference call, Edwards staffers and supporters made their most passionate argument yet that Clinton on the top of the ticket …

It should be said — and I’m saying it here — that the Giuliani campaign’s blistering press release comparing Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton (see post below) was issued today in response to a leaked section of the speech Romney is scheduled to deliver tonight at the Values Voters summit in Washington. In it, Romney is the one doing the …

There was a time when comparing your opponent in a Republican presidential primary to a Clinton was considered so below-the-belt that it would backfire. That’s what happened to John McCain in South Carolina back in 2000, when he went on the air with an ad accusing then-Gov. George W. Bush, not unreasonably, of twisting the truth “like …