Category — Ralph Nader

Nader brings as much dissonance to the Presidential race as the Bread and Puppet Circus brings to the Vermont economy.

Ralph Nader Announces Bid for President

WASHINGTON — Ralph Nader is launching a third-party campaign for president.

The consumer advocate made the announcement today on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He says most Americans are disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties, and that none of the presidential contenders are addressing ways to stem corporate crime and Pentagon waste and promote labor rights.

Disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties is no reason to look for a greater fool.

Mr. Nader also ran as a third-party candidate in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. He is still loathed by many Democrats who call him a spoiler and claim his candidacy in 2000 cost the party the election by siphoning votes away from Al Gore in a razor-thin contest in Florida.

Nader has run for the office more times than Stanton and Wilkie combined, with the same results. Still, Al Gore lost the election because he is a bigger idiot than Bush.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ralph Nader said today he will run for president as a third-party candidate, criticizing the top White House contenders as too close to big business and pledging to repeat a bid that will “shift the power from the few to the many.”

Nader, 73, said most people are disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties due to a prolonged Iraq war and a shaky economy. The consumer advocate also blamed tax and other corporate-friendly policies under the Bush administration that he said have left many lower- and middle-class people in debt.

I’m glad he ‘splained his debt theory. I labored under the illusion the debt cause came from running up huge credit card charges and self indulgence. How silly of me to listen to economists who aren’t socialists.

The ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times” is guiding this campaign.

Speaking of Mayor Bloomberg, he’s leaving the Republican Party and registering as an independent.  The move certainly heightens speculation he’ll make a 3rd party presidential run.  People who think this is a problem for Rudy Giuliani or Republicans don’t have a clue.  Mayor Mike doesn’t have a conservative bone in his body.  The only reason he ran as a Republican was because Democrats already had an anointed candidate.

Now if I were a Democrat, I might be worried.  Republicans aren’t counting on New York’s electoral votes anyway, but if Mayor Mike draws enough support, could he put the state in play?  I think it’s an intriguing possibility.  Additionally, he seems like a much more interesting candidate to the left, kind of like a wealthier Ralph Nader, and not like a Ross Perot.  If I were at the RNC, I might offer him a little seed money to get going (not like he needs it).

John Podhoretz rips apart the conventional wisdom on undecided voters:

WHAT if there are no undecided voters left?

What if the polls we’re seeing now are a precise mirror of where we’re going to be on Election Day?

In polls seven days before the vote, the Bush and Kerry numbers add up to 95 percent to 98 percent. If that holds, up, the president is probably going to win narrowly.

And it may hold.

Right now, in two major polls, President Bush leads Sen. John Kerry outside the “margin of error” among likely voters. In one of them, the Gallup released yesterday afternoon, the Bush and Kerry vote totals 97 percent.

This is a very significant fact, because the presidential vote between the two major candidates almost never adds up to 100 percent. Even in a year without a serious third-party challenger, 1 percent goes to minor candidates like the Libertarian Party’s Michael Badnarik. And this year Ralph Nader who will probably get 1 percent or so himself.

That leaves - get this - only 1 percent of the vote remaining undecided.

Under these conditions, using Gallup as the barometer, Bush will probably win. Why? Because his lead is outside the margin of error and more than a million Bush voters would have to switch over to Kerry to give the Massachusetts senator the victory.

But say the undecided number is really 2 percent, or even 4 percent. What happens then?

There’s a great deal of controversy about how undecided voters make up their minds in the final week. For years, political professionals have told us that undecided voters “break for the challenger.”

This bit of wisdom is based on a long-term trend in the Gallup poll. Since 1936, undecided voters in the last poll taken before a presidential election do seem to opt for the challenger in greater numbers.

But, as dalythoughts.com’s Gerry Daly points out, the result changes significantly if you use the second-to-last Gallup as your reference point.

Only twice since 1936 have undecideds in the second-to-last Gallup poll broken for the challenger. And it was only significant once, in 1980, when the undecided swing to Ronald Reagan helped him win a landslide against incumbent Jimmy Carter.

In the other 10 presidential elections featuring incumbents in the past 68 years, the voters from the second-to-last Gallup either broke for the incumbent or broke evenly.

And let’s be clear what “break” means. It’s not that 100 percent of undecideds go one way - it means that 60 to 65 percent do. Using yesterday’s Gallup poll as a benchmark, Kerry would need an even greater break than that to catch up to Bush - 70 to 75 percent of the undecided voters at least.

That huge margin for Kerry just doesn’t seem likely right now.

Ah, but what about all the excitement over the newly registered?

Look at the numbers here. Some people are talking about a staggering increase of 10 million voters this year. Both parties have spent vast sums looking for these new voters and registering them, and there’s reason to believe their efforts will basically cancel each other out.

But let’s assign 55 percent of them to Kerry. That’s 5.5 million voters. With those 5.5 million voters, surely then Kerry will win.

Um, no, he won’t. Because Bush will get 4.5 million new votes. This would make Kerry’s margin among new voters only 1 million votes - in an electorate of 115 million. That’s not even a single percentage point increase. Kerry can’t win that way.

Now here’s why the tiny number of undecided voters may matter even less than these numbers indicate.

You’re an undecided voter. Don’t really feel hot either way. You get up next Tuesday, and you hear on the radio or see on TV that there’s a record turnout - long lines at the polls. You may get discouraged right there, and decide not to show up the way you haven’t shown up before.

Or you do go. And there are long, long, long lines. You might have to wait half an hour.

Do you? Or do you go home?

They won’t all go home. But some will.

The perverse result of exceptionally high turnout is that the resulting problems will also keep hundreds of thousands of people from showing up.

Of course, elections are won at the state level, so maybe Kerry can use undecideds to take both Florida and Ohio, making it almost impossible for Bush to win.

But there won’t be a million new voters in Ohio. There will be a few hundred thousand at most. And again, they’ll go both to Republicans and Democrats.

Democrats who are assuming that undecided and new voters are going to carry the day for them are doing what craps players call “betting on the come.” They are hoping for a result that the odds don’t favor at this moment.

Zev Chafets gives us his reasons:

Why Bush is going to win

In 1972, The New Yorker’s movie critic, Pauline Kael, won herself a place in political lore by expressing astonishment at the Republicans’ 49-state landslide victory. “How could that be?” she demanded. “I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.”
I don’t live in such a rarified world, but most of my friends are voting for John Kerry. And I imagine that a good many will be shocked when President Bush wins in November.

It is possible that no Democrat could beat Bush this year. The President has Ralph Nader on his side, and demography. Since the 2000 election, shifts in population have added seven electoral votes to the Red Bush states and subtracted seven from Goreland.

This alone might be enough to put Bush over the top in a tight race. But despite the polls, I don’t think this election will be close, and this time the Democratic establishment won’t be able to blame the Supreme Court. If they’re fair, they’ll blame themselves. Since this is politics, they’ll blame the candidate.

John Kerry is not a bad man. He probably wouldn’t make a bad President. But he is a bad candidate in a terrible situation. He represents the wing of the Democratic Party that is imbued with a sense of its own moral, intellectual, cultural and social superiority. In short, he is the standard bearer for the unbearable.

These people don’t comprise a majority of the electorate or even Democratic voters (how could they and remain an elite?), but they have convinced themselves that they and their candidate - if packaged properly - will prove irresistibly attractive to lesser Americans.

Boston, with its flag-waving and saluting and balloon-blowing was supposed to be a commercial for this new and superior brand of politics. But Americans are expert TV watchers. A lot of them voted with their remotes. Those who did watch weren’t impressed. The Democrats’ much anticipated post-convention bump turned into a thud. George McGovern got one of those in 1972.

Kerry now has 90 days to convince voters that a Bush victory in November would be, as his wife put it in Milwaukee on Monday, “four more years of hell.”

The problem is, most Americans don’t regard their lives as “hell” or Bush as Satan. The economy, after all, is not really in a Great Depression. In fact, it’s doing pretty well. Iraq isn’t Vietnam, and won’t be unless there’s a draft. The Islamic jihad against America isn’t Bush’s fault, either. A candidate who insists otherwise is bound to strike voters as detached from reality.

Kerry ought to know this, and he may. But his party is dominated, as it was in 1972, by people who talk only to one another and who are convinced that everybody despises Bush. They will judge Kerry by how hard he goes after the Crawford Beelzebub.

Right now the polls look even. But that’s an optical illusion. The President has a Republican convention coming up and the power of incumbency to shape events between now and November. In other words, he’s way ahead.

Kerry is a weak campaigner. Barring some kind of national disaster, his best shot is the debates. Democratic true believers think he’ll kill Bush, one on one. That’s what they thought about Al Gore, too.

Calling a presidential race in August is risky, especially a race that’s supposedly close. But no guts, no glory. Bush will beat Kerry in a walk. If I’m right, you read it here first. If not, well, even Pauline Kael got it wrong once in a while.

Alexander K. McClure of PoliPundit informs us that Kerry has achieved what nobody thought possible. Coming out of the convention, Kerry failed to see a bounce and actually lost ground in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Kerry went from one point up before the convention to 4 points down.

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, Kerry trailed Bush 50%-46% among likely voters. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was at 2%.

The survey showed Kerry losing 1 percentage point and Bush gaining 4 percentage points from a poll taken the week before the Boston convention.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of +/–4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless surprising, the first time since the chaotic Democratic convention in 1972 that a candidate hasn’t gained ground during his convention.

***

But Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign, said “history doesn’t bode well” for Kerry. Since World War II, every challenger who has unseated a president has led after his convention.

When the convention first started I said “If it is a small bounce, he is toast”. Well, we better get out the butter!

All kidding aside, the election is still basically even and could go either way. But, this does not bode well for Kerry especially considering the Bush campaign is only just beginning to get serious.

Captain Ed thinks Kerry is his own worst enemy:

Why did Kerry’s numbers drop after the convention? Because Kerry is his own worst enemy, and every time he speaks to the nation as a whole, his support erodes. The only points during the entire campaign when Kerry made inroads against Bush has been when Kerry was off the campaign trail. Kerry made his prime-time pitch to America, and America yawned.

In this context, having his campaign advertising “go dark” might not just provide a financial lifeline but a strategic lifeline as well. Democrats should consider having Kerry stop campaigning altogether, as so far — despite his third “reintroduction” to American voter — he has proven to be his highest obstacle to success.

Keep in mind that the Gallup poll was of likely voters which is the most accurate type of poll. Two other polls also show trouble for Kerry. The latest Newsweek poll shows a 4 pont gain for Kerry, which is the smallest gain after a convention that Newsweek has ever polled.

Kerry’s four-point “bounce” is the smallest in the history of the NEWSWEEK poll. There are several factors that may have contributed to the limited surge, including the timing of the poll. On Thursday, Kerry had just a two-point lead over Bush (47 percent to 45 percent), suggesting that his Friday night speech had a significant impact. Additionally, Kerry’s decision to announce his vice-presidential choice of John Edwards three weeks before the convention may have blunted the gathering’s impact. And limited coverage by the three major networks also may have hurt Kerry.

The Newsweek poll is only of adults, which is the least accurate. Power Line also points out that the Newsweek poll oversampled Democrats. Here is the breakdown:

Republicans 30%
Democrats 38.5%
Independents 31.5%

So most likely Kerry had no bounce at all. The Rasmussen poll has also shown no bounce for Kerry.

The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll has good news for the Bush campaign.

A majority of voters say they know little about John F. Kerry’s positions on key issues and want the Democratic presidential candidate to detail specific plans for handling the economy, Iraq and the war on terrorism when he addresses the Democratic National Convention and a nationally televised audience on Thursday, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey suggests that the stakes for Kerry and the Democrats as they began their convention in Boston could not be higher. In barely a month, Kerry has lost ground to President Bush on every top voting issue in this year’s election.

A growing proportion of voters say Bush and not Kerry is the candidate who most closely shares their values, and four in 10 believe the Democrat is “too liberal.” Bush has even narrowed the gap on which candidate better understands their problems, an area in which Kerry has led.

The poll suggests that negative ads by the Bush-Cheney campaign that have been airing since early March, as well as attacks by Republican officials, have been increasingly successful in planting the image of Kerry as an unreliable leader who flip-flops on the issues — perceptions that Democrats will work hard to reverse at their convention.

***

The survey found that Kerry and Bush remain virtually deadlocked, with 48 percent of registered voters supporting Bush and 46 percent Kerry. Independent candidate Ralph Nader claims 3 percent of the hypothetical vote. Kerry held a four-point lead over Bush in mid-June and was tied with Bush in a Post survey two weeks ago.

***

In virtually every measure tested, Kerry’s image has eroded in recent weeks. He has lost his double-digit advantage as the candidate viewed by voters as more honest and more understanding of their problems. The president also is now seen by voters as the candidate who better reflects their values, and he has increased his advantage as better able to keep the country safe and secure. The proportion of voters who rate Kerry as “too liberal” has increased slightly, from 36 percent in June to 40 percent.

On issues, Kerry has also lost ground to Bush. By increasing margins, the president is seen as better able to deal with Iraq, the war on terrorism and taxes. On two key issues in which Kerry had an advantage as late as two weeks ago — the economy and education — the candidates are tied.

This is not good news for the Kerry campaign. His pick of Edwards for Vice President hasn’t helped him at all and may have hurt him. It also looks like voters are starting to catch on to the fact that Kerry has no solutions, only criticism of Bush. Repeating that you are a Vietnam veteran at every turn is not enough to win an election.

Also keep in mind that this poll was not limited to registered or likely voters which means it probably skews more towards the Democrats. That wouldn’t be the first time the Washington Post/ABC News poll was skewed. So in reality Bush’s numbers may be even better.

Captain Ed explains why the pick of Edwards may have hurt Kerry:

They’re right — this is the most significant presidential election in a generation, and the fact that Kerry chose a single-term politician who can’t even count on carrying his home state demonstrates Kerry’s lack of seriousness for the challenge. Serious candidates don’t select VP nominees for their pretty-boy looks and great hair. Now that Teresa has sabotaged the run-up and Andrew Stern stuck his knife in Kerry’s back, he’d better hope for a miracle to get the bounce he needs from the convention, because the way it looks now, he hit his high-water mark last month.

It will be interesting to see what kind of a bounce Kerry gets after the convention. If it is a small bounce, he is toast.

A few weeks ago Larry Sabato wrote in his Crystal Ball newsletter that this election could be similar to 1980. I did not agree at the time and in this week’s Crystal Ball, he offers five differences from 1980 that may help Bush.

Is there another way of looking at the same two election years? Is the Pope Catholic? Here with a few differences, to balance the similarities to 1980 we offered earlier:

1. Jimmy Carter would have given his right leg and left foot for the kind of sterling economy George W. Bush is presenting to the American public. A recession that likely began at the end of the Clinton administration, aggravated by the 9/11 attacks, has given way to a low-inflation, low-interest rates, job-creating, income-producing machine that is easily the equal of the one Bill Clinton claimed credit for in his reelection bid of 1996. By contrast, Carter had to defend an economic basket case of double-digit inflation, sky-high interest rates, and an ongoing recession. The American public’s sour mood on the economy should begin to lift as the positive fiscal statistics continue to mount (assuming the news media gives even half the credit to Bush that they gave to Clinton under similar circumstances in 1996.) Advantage: Bush
2. Iraq and our foreign policy generally are not current pluses for Bush, but there are genuine rays of sunlight. The June 30 handover appears to be going better than expected so far, the United Nations is joining the action once again, and our most critical allies are lightening up and even helping the United States. By contrast, Carter had an intractable mess in Iran, and little hope of resolving it before the election. Advantage: Bush
3. President Bush’s popularity has stabilized in the mid-to-upper 40s, after a dangerous period of flirting with the below-40 mark–which signals almost certain electoral doom. Bush is not yet in safe territory (above 50), but he is far from the 30s dungeon frequented by President Carter in 1980 and his own father in 1992. Advantage: Bush
4. John Anderson of Illinois, the former Republican congressman, actually rated in the mid-20s in most public opinion polls in the spring and summer of 1980, before declining, as most third party presidential candidates do in the fall, and finishing at 7 percent on Election Day. By contrast, Ralph Nader, on average, is around 5 percent or 6 percent now, and we believe he is headed for a finish below his 2.7 percent in 2000. There is no question that Nader’s relative weakness in 2004 aids John Kerry, yet the focus this year is more clearly on a straight choice of Bush or Kerry. A strong historical argument can be made that when a third-party candidate is on the rise and faring well, it signals intense dissatisfaction with the incumbent White House and the likely downfall of the incumbent president in November (Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, George Wallace in 1968, John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992, Ralph Nader in 2000). As always, the twentieth century exception was the ultimate presidential comeback kid, Harry Truman in 1948, who survived strong third-party bids by Strom Thurmond on the right and Henry Wallace on the left. (See our discussion of Bush as Truman at http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/updates_04-05-20.htm) So, to conclude, the decline of a strong third-party alternative in 2004 could actually be read as a good sign for Bush. Advantage: Bush
5. It almost goes without saying that John Kerry is no Ronald Reagan. Of course, George Bush isn’t either. We have often called “W” the most inarticulate president of our lifetime. But one could argue that it takes the special skill of a Great Communicator like Reagan (or Bill Clinton in 1992) to oust an incumbent president, given all the inherent advantages that accrue to the occupant of the White House. While Kerry partisans will no doubt insist that their man is “good in small groups” and all the rest, his presence on the big stage is, well, lacking. His face appears to crack when he smiles, and the Democrat is often a cross between a funeral director and Lurch of The Addams Family. Advantage: Bush

There, we feel much better now. The Crystal Ball’s role, at least on occasion, is to contradict conventional wisdom, not add weight to it. Also, we’ve now come down squarely on both sides of the fence, guaranteeing that we will be right (and wrong) come Nov. 2!

Senator John “Flipper” Kerry has already flip flopped on yesterday’s flip flop. (via Deborah Orin in the NY Post)

Flip-flop-flip.Democrat John Kerry yesterday did a backward somersault and retreated from his suggestion just one day earlier that he might appoint right-to-life justices to the Supreme Court as long as the majority stayed pro-choice.

“I want to make myself clear,” said a Kerry statement issued by his campaign. “I believe that a woman’s right to choose is a constitutional right. I will not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who will undo that right.”

On Wednesday, Kerry sparked a brouhaha by telling the Associated Press he might appoint an anti-abortion judge to the Supreme Court, but not if it had just a narrow 5-4 pro-choice majority.

“That doesn’t mean that if that’s not the balance of the court, I wouldn’t be prepared ultimately to appoint somebody to some court who has a different point of view. I’ve already voted for people like that. I voted for [right-to-life] Judge [Antonin] Scalia,” Kerry said.

In the Democratic primaries, Kerry vowed to have an absolute abortion litmus test and only back pro-choice justices. He also pledged to filibuster to block any Bush nominees to the high court who weren’t pro-choice.

Many pro-choice activists accepted Kerry’s clarification. “This is not a time when we’re going to pounce on John Kerry,” said Elizabeth Cavendish of the abortion-rights group NARAL, which backs Kerry.

But Gloria Feldt, head of the pro-Kerry Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said: “I’d like to hear him use language that is stronger.”

Kerry’s latest flip-flop played right into what polls show as a key weakness: Voters think he tries to straddle both sides of an issue, a point underscored in Bush campaign attacks on the “Boston Fog” of Kerry’s views.

President Bush opposes abortion and signed a ban on “partial-birth” abortions. Kerry voted against that ban, which passed the Senate by 64-34.

The flap comes as new polls show the 2004 race very close — and surprisingly close in New Jersey, where Kerry leads Bush by just 3 points. In 2000, Al Gore romped to a 14-point win in the Garden State.

In New Jersey, Kerry had 46 percent, Bush 43 and independent Ralph Nader 5 in a new Quinnipiac poll. Kerry also led by 3 in a Nader-free race.

Why so close? New Jersey is a very tax-sensitive state with higher-than-average incomes, where voters could suspect Kerry’s vow to tax the “rich” targets them, said GOP pollster Jim McLaughlin.

A new Fox News national poll found a dead heat and a growing undecided vote. Bush and Kerry had 40 percent each, Nader 3 percent, and 17 percent were undecided. But the poll gave Bush a 6-point lead in “battleground” states.

Update: A NY Post editorial adds this:

John Kerry is rapidly gaining a reputation as the Whirling Dervish of presidential politics, what with his constant position reversals on every conceivable issue.His dizzying back-and-forth (and back again, sort of) contortions on judicial appointments and abortion this week alone must have set some sort of modern campaign record.

***

It’s getting so that John Kerry is going to need to start handing out “issues maps” if voters are to have any hope of tracking his constantly detouring political positions.

The NY Times apparently felt the need to explain why it’s poll results are consistently more negative towards President Bush than other polls. Here are a couple excerpts:

Different Poll Results, but Much in Common

At least five organizations have surveyed the public this month about President Bush’s performance, the war in Iraq and the political prospects for this year, and the differences among them are typical of surveys asking different questions at different times.

Because of the statistics of polling, those differences are less than they seem on the surface — comparisons among polls of about 1,000 respondents, as these polls had, carry a sampling error of 4 percentage points.

The New York Times/CBS News Poll’s main findings were consistent with trends in some other recent polls but somewhat more negative for Mr. Bush. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted April 15 to 18 put Mr. Bush’s job approval rating at 51 percent. A poll by the Pew Research Center conducted April 21 to 25 put it at 48 percent. The current Times/CBS Poll, taken slightly later, April 23 to 27, put it at 46 percent. In statistical terms, these are virtually the same.

***

Every polling organization has different ways of wording questions and of conducting surveys, but those methods tend to remain consistent over time within an organization. For this reason, the trends within an organization’s polling are generally viewed as more relevant than the results from polls by different organizations within a short period of time.

This explanation is disingenuous at best. Nowhere in the article do they mention that they poll all adults, not just registered or likely voters. So by default about 50% of the people they poll don’t even vote. The other polls they mention in the article also poll all adults. If they really wanted to compare the results, they would have included the Gallup poll which limits responses to likely voters and the Fox News poll which limits responses to registered voters.

All that having been said, the Times poll shows some bad news for Kerry even though the Times article describing the results does it’s best to paint a bad picture for the president.

The diminished public support for the war did not translate into any significant advantage for Mr. Bush’s Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The poll showed the two men remaining in a statistical dead heat, both in a head-to-head matchup and in a three-way race that included Ralph Nader.

Support for Mr. Bush is stronger in other areas vital to his re-election, including his handling of the threat from terrorism, which won the approval of 60 percent of respondents.

***

The survey held hints of trouble for Mr. Kerry as he seeks to introduce himself to an electorate that knows relatively little about him. While 55 percent of Mr. Bush’s supporters said they strongly favored the president, only 32 percent of Mr. Kerry’s supporters strongly favored their candidate.

Sixty-one percent of voters said Mr. Kerry says what he thinks people want to hear, versus 29 percent who said he says what he believes. The Bush campaign has attacked Mr. Kerry for months on that score, portraying him as a flip-flopper with no convictions.

On the same question, 43 percent said Mr. Bush says what people want to hear and 53 percent said he says what he believes.

John Podhoretz says the conventional wisdom is wrong about the upcoming election.

The conventional wisdom is that the presidential election will be close. It’s a 50-50 country, so the CW goes, just as it was in the year 2000.

The problem is that the conventional wisdom hasn’t taken a proper accounting of John Kerry. Here’s the truth that Democrats don’t want to admit and that Republicans are fearful of speaking openly because they don’t want to jinx things:

Kerry is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate.

It’s not so much the policies he proposes, although they don’t add up to all that much. The problem is Kerry himself. He no sooner opens his mouth than he sticks first one foot and then the other right in there.

Yesterday, Kerry went on “Good Morning America” to try and clear up a controversy about the Vietnam medals and ribbons he threw over a fence in 1971 as part of an anti-war protest to “give them back” to the U.S. Congress. Instead, he only made himself look worse.

***

ABC reporter Brian Ross uncovered the 33-year-old interview. But Kerry tried to blame the controversy on George W. Bush instead: “This is a controversy that the Republicans are pushing,” he raged, “and this comes from a president and a Republican Party that can’t even answer whether or not he showed up for duty in the National Guard. I’m not going to stand for it.”

Kerry mentioned Bush’s National Guard service not once, but twice, during his five minutes with Charlie Gibson. So now we have the Democratic candidate for president himself making the accusation that the president of the United States was a deserter.

You don’t have to be a Bush fan to think this is spectacularly stupid. The issue isn’t Bush or his campaign. The issue is Kerry and a series of statements he made on the record in the media dating back more than 30 years. Trying to change the topic to Bush’s service simply smacks of cornered desperation.

And that is Kerry’s great weakness as a candidate - a weakness that will be hard for him to overcome, because it appears to be a character trait. The man who said “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it” is a man filled with the conviction that he can talk himself out of a tough situation.

Sometimes, it’s better just to be silent, take the hit and move on. But Kerry seems constitutionally incapable of doing that.

Kerry has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for two months now. Ask yourself: Aside from fund-raising success, has he had a good day? Has he come up with a winning soundbite? Has he made a policy proposal you’ve heard people talking about?

Bush has had about as bad a time as he could have had these past two months, and he’s not only still standing, but doing better than he was a month ago. And why? Because when he takes center stage, as he did in the press conference last week, he usually helps himself.

Not so for Kerry. To put it mildly.

Yes, he has time, plenty of time, six months’ worth of time. Kerry will surely get better, but that’s only because he can’t get much worse.

Here’s the conventional wisdom: The margin on Election Day will be razor-thin because only 7 percent of the electorate hasn’t made up its mind yet whom to support. So the entire campaign will be a fight over that 7 percent, and the whole business will come down to a few battleground states - Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico - where polling now suggests the race is neck-and-neck.

Every piece of information you’ve just read is true. But there’s a strong possibility the conventional wisdom is wildly wrong.

Events over the past week suggest that Bush may win a substantial victory in November, and for this reason alone: Kerry’s performance may seriously depress Democratic turnout. Or drive Democrats to vote for Ralph Nader, just as George Bush the Elder’s performance in 1992 drove millions of Republicans to vote for Ross Perot.

Guys, you should have gone with John Edwards.

The press dropped the AWOL story months ago because there was no evidence to sustain it. For Kerry and McAuliffe to bring back up this AWOL nonsense just shows how desperate they are to change the subject. Kerry brings up the subject of his Vietnam service every 15 minutes, he can’t afford to have that topic turn into a negative for him.

New USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll has bush winning with 51% of likely voters:

In a two-way matchup, Bush leads Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, 51%-47%, which is a 7 percentage-point gain in three weeks for Bush and a 5-point drop for Kerry. Three weeks ago, when Kerry was coming off a string of primary victories, Bush trailed him by 6 points.

If independent Ralph Nader is included, he gets 4%, Bush 49% and Kerry 45%.

The poll suggests that Bush campaign ads charging Kerry with a flip-flopping record in the Senate are taking a toll. Before they began, 60% rated Kerry favorably and 26% unfavorably. Now, 53% view him favorably and 36% unfavorably.

“Bush seems to be having some success in selling the idea that Kerry’s voting record in the Senate is all over the place,” says Maurice Carroll, polling director at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Bush held steady at 57% favorable, 41% unfavorable.

Now here is the headline: Poll: Bush credibility down

What media bias?

Terry McAuliffe on whether Ralph Nader will run or not:

“We can’t afford to have Ralph Nader in the race.”

For once he tells the truth.

Powerline has posted a series of comments found on the Official Dean blog. Suffice it to say, the Deaniacs are bitter. There is only one place for them to go (besides stay home):

Vote Nader in 2004

The Seattle Times reports that:

Former Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is poised to declare that he will seek the presidency again this year, this time as an independent and despite a vigorous effort by the left to dissuade him, according to friends and associates.

This may help in some of the battleground states, especially if the Deaniacs become bitter. In fact I think a Nader/Dean or Dean/Nader ticket is a great idea!

Hat Tip: Election Projection