AMERICA/Conor O'Clery: Howard Dean was in a van in Iowa last week when he got a call on his mobile phone from Al Gore, who was in Tokyo. The two had been in regular contact for months, with Dean seeking the advice of the candidate on campaign issues.
For 45 minutes they talked about amendments to a draft foreign policy speech that the former Vermont governor had sent to Gore for suggestions. Then the former vice-president said casually: "I've decided I want to endorse you."
It was a stunning move, making Dean almost unbeatable in the primaries and transforming Gore from "beaten docket" into Democratic Party kingmaker.
No one was more shocked by Gore's endorsement of Dean than Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic Party. McAuliffe was meeting Governor John Baldacci in Augusta, Georgia, on Monday when an assistant gave him a note saying that Gore had anointed Dean.
"It was clearly a very significant event for Governor Dean," McAuliffe told me. "I would remind everybody, however, that endorsements are only so important. We haven't had a first vote cast yet."
McAuliffe has changed the Democratic primary calendar for the first time in 24 years so that the candidate will definitely be known by March 10th, he said, and will have a full eight months to go head to head with George Bush.
After Iowa and New Hampshire in January there will be 17 contests in February and then a slew of big states on March 2nd and 9th, by which time 80 per cent of convention delegates will have been chosen. Runners-up have to quit then because, McAuliffe said, "at some point they just plain run out of money".
The nominee himself will be broke, having spent everything to win the primaries. McAuliffe recalled that in 2000 Al Gore won the nomination on March 7th and was "dark" to June 10th, meaning he had no money left to pay for television ads.
This year would be different, however, said the Democratic Party chairman, who sees the defeat of Bush as his defining goal. In 2001 he took over a party that was $18 million in debt but now has $10 million in the bank and is moving to new, highly computerised headquarters in Washington this week.
He will have to match through individual donations an estimated $200 million Bush campaign war chest, but said he can do it, partly because of the marketability of the anti-Bush sentiment in the US.
"There is a visceral dislike of the President and his policies," McAuliffe said, and there wasn't a majority to re-elect Bush in any one of the key 20 states the party will target.
McAuliffe played down reports of factionalism among Democrats that place him and the Clintons in one camp and Dean plus Gore in another.
What were the chances that there might be an inconclusive outcome to the primaries, with Hillary Clinton emerging as a compromise candidate?
"Zero! The press have been all over this idea of some kind of a brokered convention. We've never had a brokered convention in modern history. Clearly it's not going to happen this year with a new calendar. Theoretically yes, practically no."
The Gore bombshell set off all sorts of speculation about the political landscape after a possible Dean victory in the nomination process. Might Dean heal party wounds by inviting Hillary to be his running mate? Intriguing but unlikely: asked by a reporter if she agreed with the former vice-president's action this week, Hillary replied with a frosty "No".
Much more likely is the possibility that Gore will be offered a major post in a Dean administration. If he is advising Dean on foreign policy now, that can only mean he is thinking in terms of Al Gore, Secretary of State, in 2005.
Part of the reluctance of the Democratic Party establishment to back Dean has been the fear that he is another George McGovern, popular with the grass roots but unable to defeat a sitting Republican President.
The latest poll in New Hampshire underlines the danger. It shows that President Bush would beat the former Vermont governor by nearly 2-1 in that state, even though Dean has a huge lead over Democratic rivals for the January 27th primary.
Another cloud on the horizon appeared this week in the shape of Ralph Nader, the 69-year-old consumer advocate who in 2000 got 3 per cent of the popular vote and is blamed by some Democrats for Al Gore's defeat, especially in Florida. Nader says there is a "high probability" he will run again in 2004, perhaps as a green party candidate.
When Democratic candidates were asked during a debate last month about their first-lady-in-waiting, the twice-divorced outsider, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio commented that he fantasised about his first lady and would be interested in an "outspoken" partner.
This prompted a New Hampshire website, PoliticsNH.com, to sponsor a contest "Who Wants To Be a First Lady?" The winner was Gina Marie Santore of New Jersey. Kucinich will get her vote apparently, but not much more. Ms Santore confessed that she already had a live-in "first man".