Base playing

At the moment both John Kerry and GW Bush are playing to their electoral bases. It's in the rhythm of the campaign for Kerry to be doing this: solidying support and sparking enthusiasm among Democrats for the upcoming convention. So there's a big ad buy for Latino markets, a conspicuous appearance at the NAACP convention where Bushies fear to tread, etc.

For Bush to be playing so loudly to his base at this point however is not the usual rhythm. It seems desperate. It's desperately loud, too. With the gay-bashing amendment in the Senate, he's trying to appease restless members of the Rabid Right, as his ads distort a Kerry vote, in a kind of Willie Horton move but this time Willie is a Scott who preys on pregnant Lacis.

In pushing the gay-bashing amendment while dissing the NAACP, Bush is desperate enough to risk sacrificing moderate and independents, while announcing that since he is unlikely to get many black or gay votes anyway, he'd damn well better make sure to solidify his hold on white racists and homophobes.

He's just as bald-faced in embracing his corporate base, for example in suddenly opening up protected land in national forests to logging and mining interests. Here's a Seattle take on this:

Proposal would drop forestland protections

Otherwise, two new polls show Kerry ahead by 5 and 6 points among likely voters, despite the revelations in a very troubling study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that Bush has been getting most of the media coverage, but even though the tone on Bush's character has been negative by a 3 to 1 margin, the media's judgment on Kerry has been negative by a 5 to 1--yes that's FIVE TO ONE margin.

The study also found that "journalists were almost as likely as the campaigns to be the source asserting these character traits about the candidates" and that "more than four in ten character assertions were made with no evidence cited to back them up."
Here's a link to the full study:
Journalism.org - Reports & Surveys - Campaign 2004 - Character and the Campaign