Posted on 09/18/2004 10:17:05 PM PDT by Cableguy
Kerry and Shrum got it backward. If they'd sliced up Bush this summer, they could have used the debates to seem presidential.
After Labor Day, the political calendar goes into a time warp. Everything speeds up. With voters finally starting to pay attention, a week is about the equivalent of a normal month in political time. In late October the intensity can be so great that creative campaigns sometimes accomplish in a single day what it might once have taken three months to imprint on the minds of the voters. We don't know yet if we'll see such inventiveness this year, which means that for all of the weeping and moaning and rending of garments by despondent Democrats, we simply don't know if John Kerry is finished. We do know that his strategy so far, designed by Bob Shrum, lies in ruins, and for reasons that go far beyond the campaign's failure to respond quickly enough to the Swift Boat ads.
Shrum's grand plan wasn't complicated. He figured that with most voters believing the country is on the "wrong track," all that Kerry had to do was establish his credibility as a potential commander in chief and he would winhence the "bio" convention. No need to respond directly to Bush ads sliming him for wanting to cut the same weapons systems that Bush's father cut. No need to explain how the Iraq war had been botched. No need to discredit Bush at all, because he was already thoroughly discredited.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Of course, it's always struck me that questions on wrong track/right track have a lot of the same ambiguity as whether the war is being fought right or whether something changed your opinion of a candidate: It's perfectly possible to think the country is on the wrong track in many ways, while fervently believing Bush is at least trying to reverse it and Kerry would send it skittering further like the Gadarene swine!
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