csua.org/u/8y4 -> www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/politics/campaign/07stretch.html?ex=1252209600&en=694592da0cc428e1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Mr Bush seems to have hit his political stride at the very moment that Mr Kerry is facing fundamental questions about his candidacy. Yet if history is any guide, the contest is far from settled. For all of Mr Bush's success at his convention in New York last week, the underlying dynamics that have made Republicans view him as an endangered incumbent for much of this year remain very much in place: the nation's unease about its future, the deaths in Iraq and the unsteady economy. Though Mr Kerry, the Democratic challenger, has yet to come up with an overarching theme for his campaign even at this late date - an absence that came into sharp relief after Mr Bush's disciplined convention built on a message of security - he is a politician who has always seemed to run best when he is on the verge of defeat. Even on Labor Day, the traditional start of the general election campaign, when voter opinions are beginning to set, he still has 57 days to make his case. "I don't think either party is where they want to be going into the last 60 days," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democratic Network, a group of moderate Democrats. If there is any lesson about this election, conducted in a supercharged atmosphere created by 24-hour news cycles and the chaotic power of the Internet, it is that dynamics and public opinion change fast. Who in December would have predicted that Mr Kerry would defeat Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination or that he would have gone on to raise almost as much money as Mr Bush? Only a month ago, more than a few Democrats and even some Republicans were measuring the curtains for a Kerry White House. Underlying that fleeting expectation were voters' pessimism about the direction the nation was heading and disapproval of Mr Bush's job performance, two measures that have almost always spelled defeat for an incumbent and that do not appear to have changed sharply. The state of play on Labor Day tends to signal what will happen on Election Day. "Typically, it's hard to overturn a Labor Day decision - 75 percent of the time, whoever is ahead on Labor Day stays ahead," said Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster who is not affiliated with Mr Kerry's campaign. At this point in 1996, the incumbent president, Bill Clinton, was comfortably ahead of Bob Dole; In 1992, President Bush's father was struggling against a candidate who recognized, before he did, the hunger for change among the American electorate. But it is proving difficult to measure the state of play accurately this Labor Day, mainly because of the White House decision to schedule the Republican convention a week before the holiday. Polls taken right after a convention offer an inflated sense of a candidate's standing. In this case, getting reliable results may be trickier because much of the polling was done over the Labor Day weekend, when many people are away. Aides in both campaigns said the most accurate measure of the race would not come until sometime this week, when voters return from their Labor Day vacations and memories of the Republican convention start to fade. "I would be very surprised if a week from now, the dynamics don't show us in a very tight race," Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser, said. "We look at this race as the president having his high-water mark the last night of this convention." Which is not to say that Mr Kerry should be particularly happy about where he is. Three polls taken since the convention show Mr Bush with a lead. While some Democrats dismissed those polls as unreliable, others said they were worried that the polls had registered lasting damage for Mr Kerry because of attacks over the past month on his record as a Vietnam veteran and as a protester against the Vietnam War. Beyond that, the staff changes in his campaign have provided an unwanted distraction for Mr Kerry at the very moment the public is presumably tuning in to this campaign. And, finally, many Democrats argue that Mr Kerry is in a precarious position because even though he has offered proposals intended to draw distinctions with Mr Bush, including a broad health care plan, he has yet to settle on an overarching campaign theme. "There'll be a tendency to say, 'Well, let's wait for the debates,' but if Kerry doesn't gain any momentum, the debates will be too late," said David R Gergen, a veteran adviser of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton White Houses. If Mr Bush is in a stronger position after his convention, he still has problems ahead. In the next few weeks, the nation is likely to mark the thousandth death of an American soldier in Iraq, a moment that will probably bring a reappraisal of the war that Mr Bush advocated. He also faces either two or three debates with Mr Kerry. Although he proved himself to be an engaging and personal debater against Al Gore in 2000, this time he will be defending a record that even Republicans say is ripe for attack Republicans and Democrats say the biggest problem for Mr Bush is the sense among Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction. While history has shown that presidents do not survive electoral storms like that, this is a contest that has proved again and again that the lessons of the past do not necessarily apply. Mr Bush and his allies, acutely aware of that history, have sought to rewrite it with a monthlong campaign intended to convince those voters unhappy with the president and the country's direction that the challenger is an even more objectionable choice. The biggest concern for Mr Kerry's advisers this Labor Day weekend is that Mr Bush might have accomplished that.
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