Hi Seth,

Very similar to what Anna Patterson wrote a section titled "Document Annotation for Improved Ranking" in the following document:

Phrase-based indexing in an information retrieval system.

I wrote a little more about that in the comments over at Search Engine Land.

There is also a possibility that Google decreasing count of links by counting them distinct by FULL HTML text of the link (how it was copied by blogger from initiating post).
In this way links
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
will be different links which will improve count.