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.

Iraq is a hard place (continued)

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has announced that he must suspend his campaign, now that he has been named as one of the 300 New Englanders and 5,600 American veterans to be sent to Iraq in the ongoing involuntary mobilization.

"It's a management tool," as the Pentagon spokesperson described the practice of hunting down former soldiers with the help of the IRS and forcing them to try to fit into their old uniforms, before being shipped off to Iraq.

Kerry will probably not see combat, as this could prove too embarrassing to the administration. "He'll mostly be unbagging instant potatoes for our Halliburton heroes in the KP," chortled vice-president Dick "Hawk Who Had Other Priorities During Vietnam" Cheney. But of course, all of Iraq is a hard place, the Pentagon pointed out. "Let's see what the 'foreign leaders' over there tell him," chuckled President George "Hawk Who Hid in the National Guard" Bush.

In other news(and we swear this part is true)

the CBS/New York Times poll on whether George Bush is telling the truth about Iraq:
Entire Truth 18%
Hiding Something 59%
Mostly Lying 20%

The numbers are as mind-boggling as the framing of the question.

And for the Nervous about the continuing neck-and-neck race, though this poll showed under 40% trust Kerry to run the country, he scored 20 points higher in the Gallup poll done at about the same time. Still, in this poll, 39% said they still have No Opinion on Kerry yet. In 1992, Bill Clinton got 44% No Opinion.

With such a high number of No Opinion, it stands to reason that many of those who have made up their mind have done so on the basis of Bush negative ads. Kerry has lots of room to go up.

Kerry is in the final weeks of building the substructure of the campaign: raising money (from almost nothing after the primaries, he's now in better financial shape than any challenger in history)and going directly to key constituencies in key states, where his crowds have been very good, and press coverage extensive. Conventional wisdom is that the electorate makes up its mind about the incumbent first, before they move to the challenger after the conventions. The election was Bush's to win in May and June by destroying Kerry's credibility, but he failed to do it. Beginning with July---the announcement of the vice-presidential candidate, then the convention and his acceptance speech--it becomes Kerry's to win. The debates, and events in Iraq and the economy (which we believe will falter again in the coming months)are expected to determine the final outcome---barring wild cards such as a terrorist attack in the U.S, or...Kerry being called up in the involuntary mobilization.

Independence Day?

The stealth transfer of sovereignty in a blank-walled side room of the prime minister's office, the American civilian authorities flying out within hours, without ceremony. It wasn't exactly the helicopters straining off the embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese advanced on the city, but it was uncomfortably close.

Who knows what in the world happens to Iraq now. On one extreme is civil war. On the other extreme is p.r.-perfect progress to free elections and recognizable democracy---the outcome the Bushies expected, but which is perhaps even less likely than the other extreme.

Our intuitions tell us to watch for a Saddam-like combination of carrot and stick, and an authoritarian if not dictatorial regime. Among the coming attractions could be: how will Americans react to alleged insurgents getting their hands hacked off?

But of course the real mystery that has us all in suspense...what's going to happen to Halliburton??????