It's Kerry Time

It's July, and it's Kerry time. The stage is set: all the polls show Bush severly weakened and usually weakening in all the key areas of perception, from job approval, trust, credibility to direction and specific issues: Iraq, terror, economy. The electorate signals its dissatisfaction and dismay; they'd rather not rehire the guy. Now Kerry has to give them ample reason to hire him.

Kerry time begins with his announcement of a vice presidential candidate, probably next week. Our instincts (and druthers) tell us it's down to Edwards, Gephardt or Surprise! We assume it's a difficult choice between Edwards and Gephardt. Edwards offers instant excitement, a charisma injection at the right moment (though the staying power of his charisma is a troubling open question)especially because Kerry and Edwards look good together, just as Clinton and Gore did in '92. Gephardt offers the experience and depth that Kerry could be more confident would translate to the presidency; he's politically experienced with solid constituencies in the midwest and among organized labor. Gephardt is a more finished person, with depths reflected in the equanimity of his smile and the force of his words. He just doesn't have the media electricity of Edwards. It's too bad these two guys can't be combined.

Surprises for vp are more the rule than the exception but maybe not this year---there is too much riding on media image, and though somebody out of the blue will get a lot of initial attention, if it is a relative unknown,how he or she will perform after that is a crapshoot. Somebody thoroughly vetted by the media like Gephardt, or to a somewhat lesser extent like Edwards, with a media track record, is the wave of the vp future.

With the vp selection and the following days of campaigning together, the media attention turns to Kerry. Then comes the convention, and there has never been a more consequential one, though not for its actual workings. Only two things are important, but they are very important: the convention has to go smoothly (and if anything bad happens, Kerry has to take charge and handle it well) and Kerry's acceptance speech must resonate.

Kerry should come out of the convention with a central theme, something the media and the voters will grasp and hold onto. Then Kerry has to do well in the debates. (His vulnerability is the same as the one that sunk Gore: overconfidence in debating GW. But Kerry is better and more experienced at big stakes debates than Gore was.)

If he does well,all this should get him enough of the undecideds, independents and the leaning towards the devil we know voters. Kerry is not going to lose his base, which is virilently anti-Bush. Bush is vulnerable to losing some of his base at the margins, and maybe more.

There's also Kerry's reputation as a closer, somebody who gets sharper and communicates more of himself as the decision day gets closer.

In the coming days, weeks, maybe hours, our crack team of Dash brothers will provide the kind of wisdom and reccommendations on theme and speech content that the Kerry campaign will be sure to take into consideration, as soon as one of us wins the lottery and buys CNN, or another ten hours are added to each day before the election and the Kerry people get really really bored. Or some major contributor out there among our readers buttonholes one of their Internet watchers and forces them to read us.

Well, for the entertainment value alone, stay tuned.

We'll offer this preview, though: the conventional wisdom is that events in the coming months will determine the election's outcome. Not necessarily, not completely. As we surmised, the trumpeted economic boom is showing signs it's overblown,even phony, and the news will be mixed at best going into fall. Even if Iraq quiets down, it doesn't mean much for Bush in and of itself. People are not happy about what's already happened---about taking us to war on false pretenses, and about the prison abuses and other excesses of an extremist administration that furthermore couldn't shoot straight. If Kerry can provide a solid alternative, and if he can tap into this discontent while being positive, a calmer Iraq might even be to his advantage.

The real wild card is a terrorist attack in the U.S. We hope somebody in the Kerry inner circle is thinking about how to respond to that.