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This is actually pretty darn interesting. And after Gary Hart’s pseudo endorsement via the Huffington Post it is also starting to look like an intentional trend.  Please allow me to explain. Last week (bored on Iowa Caucus Day) I took to spinning through Obama vs. Clinton post an Obama victory scenarios with a few friends; during which (driven by fever and cold meds) I posited a who’€™s wining wh’€™s losing metric and dubbed it “The Second Tier split.”€ It went something like this: Every drop-out endorsement for Hillary will be bad for her conversely every drop-out endorsement other than Richardson’s will tend to work against Obama. (in retrospect I’€™d like to add an or Edwards to that statement) Why? Because Washington establishment endorsements will tend to reinforce the negative narrative that haunts Clinton steps and similarly diminish the positive narrative keeping the wind at Obama’€™s back.

“The Iowa caucus results seem to support this ideal. Senator Obama is a man of principle. He is committed to restoring a sense of national community to America. He believes in restoring our security alliances through active diplomacy and engaging those who disagree with us in constructive dialogue. He restates the requirement that we all give something back to America, to become engaged in the public arena, in the national interest. And, most important, he is the walking embodiment of equality and justice.”

Bill Bradley’s endorsement fits nicely into a strategy that takes the above metric into account in a way that acknowledges the simple campaigning reality that candidates need to offer up staged events like endorsements to break up the monotony of just showing up and delivering their stump speech for the umpteenth million time, and since no candidate, not even Barack, can be in more than two places at once so campaigns need surrogates (you know to attack rivals on Hardball and such). The presence of other former insurgents in the Obama orbit  (Ted Kennedy was the establishment candidate in 76) kind of adds to my suspicion that this is actually a brand management tactic of some sort rather than mere happenstance. Of course it could just be a way of reliving their glory days at the cusp.