It's the Monica Lewinsky 10th anniversary Gab Fest.

This is the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, January 18th, 2008.

I'm Dale Wilman.

John is back on the phone talking with David and Emily in Washington. On the agenda this week, race in the South Carolina primary, it's the economy stupid, and Bob Johnson says he's sorry. And now to introduce the discussion, here's Emily.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. I'm Emily Bazlan. I'm here in Washington, D.C., with

David Plotz. John Dickerson is on the road as he so often seems to be these days. He's our man on

the campaign trail. Where exactly are you, John? I'm in Columbia, South Carolina, looking at the

window of my hotel at a waffle house. This hotel in Colombia is the one in which in the year 2000, Alan Keyes staged the shortest hunger strike in history. I think it was under a minute because he wasn't allowed to participate in the debate that was held at this hotel. Did he go to the Waffle House? He did. Well, no, he stayed away from the Waffle House. But when the Hustrike was over.

Yeah, after he gave up the hunger strike, I'm not sure.

I think he may have snacked on some mixed nuts at the bar.

A good, healthy protein-filled choice.

John, so you wrote a great piece on Tuesday night about the Michigan primary, which I

saw cited all over the place about how each of the Republicans, I suppose, except for Giuliani and Thompson, now has his own trophy to take home from these primaries.

So now that you're in South Carolina where there are someone, I guess maybe one of someone might end up with their second trophy how is this sort of evenly divided race playing

out down there it's great because nobody knows what's happening there two factors one polling

is just nutty here in south carolina i mean it's been nutty this whole race but it seems even

more so here huckabies ahead mccane's in second place romney's and third thompson's and fourth

but nobody really believes those numbers, in part because the second fun thing that's happening here in South Carolina,

which is that there's all of this sort of great dirty politics that seems to kind of flourish here in South Carolina,

that the windshields are filled with flyers attacking various candidates and the phone calls are going around.

The most, the biggest number of them from this 527 that's supporting Mike Huckabee calling around and doing sort of quasi push polls.

And everybody here seems to have gotten one of these calls, the blanketing the state, basically calling people and say, what's your most important

...