I agree with you a hundred percent. Around the time of Reagan's funeral it became obvious that the press was going to take the summer off and only do the usual minor Bush-bashing. I said at the time that they were certain to start the major orchestrated campaigns against Bush right after Labor Day.
Sure enough. They had a whole eight-weeks timeline laid out, with various people breaking various aspects of it as if by coincidence, and it would, as you speculate, have led up to that old charge they used in 2000, that Bush was a druggie. Maybe they would have forged a copy of that photograph they never quite managed to find and publish back then, of a drugged-out Animal-House Bush dancing naked on the top of a bar.
Too bad. The wheels are coming off their carefully designed campaign and kerry is undergoing meltdown.
"They had a whole eight-weeks timeline laid out, with various people breaking various aspects of it as if by coincidence, and it would, as you speculate, have led up to that old charge they used in 2000, that Bush was a druggie."
I believe this is exactly right. Depending on how well the smear campaign went, they would have ended with charges that GW was an unstable risk for relapse, or preferably float a story that he had been back on drugs during his term in the White House.
CBS would of course have been in the middle of it all, coming up with carefully planted stories to move the saga along at critical points.