Inside Politics

Symptom and disease

“Are John Kerry’s chances of winning the White House imperiled by the fact that there were more frustrated-blind-quote-driven, sausage-making-process-oriented stories from inside his campaign this weekend than there have been cumulatively about the Bush campaign this entire cycle?” asks the Note, ABC’s daily political briefing (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/TheNote/TheNote.html).

“Think of that stark fact as more a symptom than a disease — although it is both,” the Note said.

“It has caused no amount of ‘how-could-that-be?’ head shaking within the tight-knit circle that runs the president’s re-election campaign that the details of Saturday’s Bill Clinton-John Kerry tutorial phone call could leak so fast and so fully.

“And as the Bush campaign just laughs and laughs and laughs behind their poker faces at how easily they have banished the economy, health care, poverty, jobs, and the chaos in Iraq from the national debate, the biggest danger for Kerry right now in the wake of the president’s Swift post-New York lead is that the left will give up on him.”

‘Dismay and panic’

“The Labor Day Bush trend (which could, by the nature of swing voting, be reversible) has Democratic politicians between dismay and panic,” New York Times columnist William Safire writes.

“As usual, they are crying foul at a veterans group’s answer to [Sen. John] Kerry’s blunder of running on his Vietnam War and anti-war record. As insiders shake up the staff, outsiders pre-emptively lay the basis for post-election excuses, positioning themselves for embittered told-you-so’s,” Mr. Safire says.

“Longtime Democratic pollsters have been calling journalists to note that the sophisticated ‘internals’ of the current polling were even more gloomy for the Kerry campaign, showing a two-to-one advantage for the president on the paramount issue of the war.”

“The gibes from his own side caused Kerry to overreact. Instead of moving away from the Vietnam issue, which has been a real toothache for his campaign, he bit down on it. Uncharacteristically, he took the low road, overtly contrasting his war duty with Dick Cheney‘sdraft deferments.

“That flailing-out was done more in anger than in calculation. Millions of Americans of draft age in the 1960s who are voters today were deferred from service by virtue of student status or fatherhood. They do not appreciate having their deferment attributed to lack of patriotism. Now Kerry has unnecessarily upset a lot of non-veteran swing voters.”

Flawed theory

“The presidential race consists of two campaigns,” Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard.

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