You (jmaroneps) have decoded it. Coop, you see the scene in the sunshine, but not in the shadows. In the shadows, the party dumped all the anti bush media recently to see how far they could move Bush's numbers. If they had moved them enough, the beast would have jumped into the race. (I guess its still up in the air, to see how vulnerable Bush is to this doom and gloom reporting.)
But the election is a year away, a year of a growing economy will reach the level where all economists say that the Bush program is working. (And people will be going back to work.) The war will be in a different place, with troops having homecomings, Iraq on the way to a constitution, and some closure on the missing chemical weapons.(They will be found and displayed on TV, even CNN will have to cover it.)
"Some may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one." The Bush team is smart enough to pull this off, and the American public is still worried about terrorists, they are going to be able to strike again, and people trust Bush more than an unnamed democratic candidate.