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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 19th.

I'm Emily Bazelon.

I am here in Washington, yay, with John Dickerson, who's just back from Iowa, and I'm hosting

so that we can interrogate him more successfully.

And we have a special honored guest today.

David Leonhardt is joining us from from New York Times, and we're so

glad that you're here with us. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's another David, but a David

who actually has opinions grounded in reporting in fact and knowledge. Yeah, some of our

Facebook fans made that point as well today. We miss our friend plots, so it shouldn't be making fun of him.

But anyway.

So how was Iowa?

Tell us your impressions.

You've been following Rick Perry around.

He wowed you.

You're ready to go.

I don't know the way.

Well, he wound me because, you know, this race has been so kind of plotting and boring.

And suddenly between Thursday night's debate in Ames and Saturday afternoon, you had one new candidate in Rick Perry.

You had Palente dropping out.

He dropped out Sunday morning.

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