The following podcast contains explicit language. Hello. Hello and welcome to the Slate Political

Gab Fest, the Embers of Desire edition for the week of February 17th. I'm David Plotz, the

editor of Slate. I'm here with Emily Bazelon Slate

senior editor on my left, and even further to my left, John Dickerson, Slate's chief political

correspondent and the political director for CBS News. We are live at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca.

I know we're here. Emily, you know we're here. John, you know we're here,

but our audience at home does not know we're here. So please, please. We're going to talk

about three topics tonight and have cocktail chatter, of course, and we'll also have a Q&A at the end. So save your superb questions for that. We're going to talk about the state of the Republican race and how President Obama is doing relative to some of the Republican candidates. We're going to talk about the proposal or the idea that a third party may enter the presidential race soon.

And we're going to talk about a really interesting case involving Steve Glass,

a former journalistic colleague of some of ours,

who has an interesting legal appeal that's going on in California that we're going to talk about.

So, and then obviously

we'll chatter. So, John, we are kind of in this slightly quiet space between the first set

of primaries and caucuses and then Super Tuesday and early March and a couple of other primaries

before that.

Mitt Romney's campaign is in a weird state of struggle.

Rick Santorum has inexplicably, or perhaps explicably, as you'll explicate shortly, surged.

What is going on with these polls that suggest that Santorum is now ahead of Romney?

Well, no, we're in the extremely exciting tension-filled moment before the Michigan primary on the 28th of February.

That's the way you need to think about this.

So what's happened?

Well, since we last met, there have been a series of national polls that have Santorum ahead, but within the margin error of Mitt Romney. So the race is now turned upside down. Now, what did national polls mean? Nothing. Because, you know, the primaries are fought out in individual states.

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