You bring up an interesting point, Timbuck2. Remember how everyone was screaming how badly Dubya did at the first debate? And how, while he did MUCH better at the second one, he still let certain things go unreplied-to?
Is it possible that the always-misunderestimated Dubya has been forcing Kerry to expend all his ammo -- and now, Dubya goes into the third debate with plenty of things to shoot down Kerry with?
Um ... not really. It's like a law of a nature. Cr*p by Liberals is spewed faster than it can be rebutted. Kerry was able to pack 2 lies, 3 spinnings-of-events, 1 phony reference to a GOP hack quote, and a Bush character smear in 90 seconds.
How do you respond to that? You cant ... in fact it was probably a deliberate kerry strategy to spew so much cr*p that Bush had to respond and get off his own 'offense'.
Bush otoh, did a fantastic job responding to it.
The media have barely brought this up (!), but I think this is huge: Kerry has spent all his ammo. How many times can you repeat "The President rushed us into war" and think it's going to win you another voter who hasn't heard it before?
Just like investors say that certain pieces of news are "already priced into a stock", all Kerry's ammo is already "priced into" the polls.
W has only just started to dip into the ammo cache of Kerry's 20 year Senate record. So public knowledge of Kerry's votes on partial birth abortion, taxes, spending, etc. are barely "priced into" the polls yet.
Kerry has to rely entirely on new CIA reports that the media can misrepresent, or an October suprise of some sort, or just the general media fawning.