Many of us who focus on party nomination politics didn’t do very well in our early analysis of the Democratic presidential contest in 2004, for example. We dismissed Howard Dean at first, then sought to rationalize his popularity, then missed the fact that John Kerry was somehow winning the nomination. Journalists didn’t really bother to mock us for this for the simple reason that they didn’t know or care that we were talking about it.

Yeah, well ... imagine what it was like in 2000. Some of us were here discussing politics at that time.