It's the Larry Summers Memorial Thanksgiving Gab Fest.

This is the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, November 23rd, 2007.

I'm Dale Wilman.

On this week's agenda, Obama surges in Iowa, a stem cell breakthrough, and D.C.'s handgun law

goes to court. And now to introduce the discussion, here's John.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. I'm John Dickerson with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz.

We're going to start with politics again this week because I don't know how many introduction.

Hmm.

Nothing witty to say.

Nothing not a, no, that's it.

A happy Thanksgiving.

Yeah.

Belatedly.

Happy holiday weekend.

Why do you say holiday weekend?

Because it's like the long holiday weekend, just in case people listen on Friday and

happy things. But it's unnecessarily vague. Okayarily vague. It's not because the rest of the year you have to be

vague about everybody's religion. You have to say happy holidays because you don't want to step

on anybody's toes. Thanksgiving is the one you can come down firmly and say happy Thanksgiving

because everybody's celebrating it. Okay. Happy Thanksgiving. You strive for specificity at the Gab Fest. This week, in the Democratic race for president, there was some more polls in Iowa that showed that Barack Obama is on the top edge of a statistical dead heat in Iowa, the only state that seems to matter in Democratic politics right now. And what interested me about that is that two things. One, Obama has been

going negative or being critical of Clinton for three weeks and doesn't seem to pay the price.

There was a big worry that he might. Secondly, that Hillary Clinton is now engaging. And she is now,

...