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John Edwards is in. And it looks like the Lower 9th is going to be the site for his official announcement. Well done, sir.

Meanwhile, Sen. Evan Bayh is out. You can chalk that one up to Obama.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, meanwhile, is up in NH talking like a man on the verge of running:

MANCHESTER, N.H. --New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Saturday that the administration should set a date to withdraw American troops from Iraq in 2007 and criticized Sen. John McCain's call for boosting troop levels there.

"It makes no sense," the potential Democratic presidential candidate said at St. Anselm College. "There is no military solution. There's got to be a political solution."

Richardson said McCain, seen as a front-runner among potential Republican presidential hopefuls, would only foment sectarian violence with his call for an additional 30,000 troops.
America must reinvigorate its diplomacy in the Middle East by starting with Iraq, Richardson said in an address at the New Hampshire Democratic Party's winter meeting.

"This is not cut and run," he said. "What I'm proposing is something that I believe will work. A fixed withdrawal date. You redeploy those troops."

A withdrawal should be coupled with a political solution and a reconciliation conference with ethnic groups in Iraq, he said. He said it would allow the Pentagon to redeploy forces to Afghanistan and bolster efforts to combat international terrorism.

More from National Journal:

“The leading advocate for escalating the war is Senator John McCain. I have served with John in Congress and I respect him. But John McCain is wrong, dead wrong to think that we can solve Iraq’s political crisis through military escalation.”

“There are no quick or easy answers to the crisis in Iraq. Our choices are between bad options and worse ones. Some prefer military escalation. Some choose staying the course. These options are illusions. The only realistic choice we have is to stand down militarily and let the Iraqis stand up and face the political crisis which only they can resolve.”

“I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I worked in this region...we should harbor no illusions. This withdrawal will not be pretty. People will die. But fewer will die than if we stay. There are no guarantees that our departure will end the civil war, but it is sure to continue so long as we stay. The Iraqis might, or might not, resolve their political crisis. It is up to them. They distrust and fear one another, and this makes it very tough. But they share one goal – they don’t want to destroy their own country. To save it, they need to stop killing each other and start compromising. And we need to get out of the way.”

Something tells me we'll be hearing a lot more about "escalation" in 2007. Something tells me that won't be good for Republicans in 2008.

And Obama? One step closer...

On the cusp of a historic decision over whether to run for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday that he believed he would be a "viable candidate" for president who could move the nation beyond the generational politics that have defined the last 40 years.

"I wouldn't run if I didn't think I could win," Obama (D-Ill.) said in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with the Tribune editorial board in which the senator articulated a rationale for his potential candidacy, confidence in his ability to win and an assessment of potential opponents--both Democratic and Republican[...]

"Do I have something that is sufficiently unique to offer to the country that it is worth putting my family through a presidential campaign?" he said. "Politically, I think I would be a viable candidate. So that's a threshold question and I wouldn't run if I didn't think I could win."

[...]Asked how he would address the issue of his relative lack of experience, Obama said he thought that the campaign itself--how he managed it, his position on issues and his framing of a vision for the country--would answer the question. "That experience question would be answered at the end of the campaign," he said.

"The test of leadership in my mind is not going to be what's on a paper resume," Obama said. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "had the best resume on paper of any foreign policy team and the result has been what I consider to be one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in our history," he said[...]

2007 is going to be one hell of a year....