Outlook:
In what has long been considered an evenly split race and a tight presidential contest, there is no question but that President George W. Bush (R.) today owns a commanding lead in both popular and electoral votes over Sen. John Kerry (D.). Nobody expects that to last for long, but Kerry has a lot of ground to make up.
1) What has happened to build the big lead for the President is no secret. The clich???? © is that Kerry had a miserable month of August, but actually his poor performance slipped into nearly three weeks of September. At the same time, Bush has maintained a steady if unspectacular pace, while breaking free from the steady attacks from outside the political arena during the year's first six months.
2) It is generally agreed in both parties that Kerry has had it all wrong with two big blunders. First, thinking he was a clear front-runner, he decided to hold back on criticism of Bush. Second, he stressed domestic issues on grounds that he could never challenge Bush on his strong suit of being a war and an anti-terror President. As recently as last Friday, even close advisers of Kerry were in a state of dismay.
3) A new party of advisers and strategists has boarded the Kerry campaign ship, some with a clear Clinton label. Ex-Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart is playing a key role. The impact has been two-fold. First, the tone of the campaign is strictly anti-Bush. Second, after furious internal debate, the focus of the campaign is on Iraq.
4) The previous absent-minded quality of the Kerry campaign was shown last week when it devoted two days to whacking Bush over failure to extend the assault weapons ban. That put Kerry on the side of gun control-an issue that just about everybody feels is a loser for the Democrats.
5) Kerry's Monday speech at New York University not only reflected the new strategy but also was the best speech he has made in memory (in delivery as well as coherence and poignancy of message), certainly far superior to his acceptance speech in Boston. The questions that raises: Can he sustain that performance? Will it really resonate with that thin sliver of undecided voters in battleground states? Have his nine months of flip-flopping made it impossible for him to be heard on the issue?
6) One problem for the Democrats was that Kerry's good speech was rivaled on Monday's news by Dan Rather's and CBS's mea culpa. That is an outgrowth of the dubious decision by Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe to hit the Bush-National Guard story heavily. Is McAuliffe off on his own, or is this coordinated with Kerry?
7) Bush's agreement to three debates, came as a surprise to everybody-Democrats included. Bush liked neither giving Kerry a chance to do damage in three debates nor the town meeting format of the St. Louis debate. However, Bush did not want to launch a debate on debates and did not want to get headlines in the battleground state of Missouri saying that Bush had vetoed the debate that St. Louis had been preparing for.
Electoral College:
With six weeks to go, our main focus is on the same four states it has been on all along: Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia. If Bush wins those four (and he would today), he is nearly guaranteed the White House.
If Kerry wins either of the two big ones (Florida or Ohio) or both of the small ones, everything opens up again.
The Bush bounce, however, has brought some new states into focus, mainly Pennsylvania, where Bush would win were the election held today. Bush 305, Kerry 233.
