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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (42492)	5/6/2004 8:07:39 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793917

Andrew Sullivan - UNDER-ESTIMATING KERRY: The conventional wisdom in Washington right now is that Kerry is such an awful candidate that he is doomed in the fall. If Bush can stay even after the last three, horrendous weeks - when he has shown that his administration has no real control over even the conduct of its own servicemembers and contractors in Iraq - then Kerry is toast. I'm not so sure. My instinct is that this election will not, in fact, be close. Either Bush will convince people that he is winning the war on terror and turning the economy around and win handsomely, or he won't, and Kerry will win big. Recent history suggests that incumbent presidents either lose badly or win well. The crackhead Rasmussen tracking poll shows Kerry with a real lead again. My sense of the mood among Washington neocons is something bordering on real depression. Bush is campaigning in Ohio and Michigan as if he were in real trouble and knows it. Moreover, his approval numbers are now below 50 percent. In most critical states, the candidates are neck and neck, but Kerry keeps being nominally in the lead, as in New Hampshire, where he leads by four points. Maybe the new ads reintroducing Kerry will boost him some more (or maybe the more people see Kerry the more he will bore them to death). But he's been retooling himself for the center, as David Brooks has shrewdly noted. Kerry also tends to finish well in campaigns, and has said exactly the right things on Iraq lately, if he wants to reassure voters that he is the man to finish the job there. The Democrats are also energized. It's a long, long way to go, and I'm predicting nothing (except a massive gay-baiting campaign by Karl Rove in the summer). But I do think that Republicans who think they're a shoo-in because Kerry is such a bad candidate are deluding themselves. This election will be about Bush. GLENN ON IRAQ: Instapundit writes a cogent, sane and eloquent case for staying the course in Iraq. How does he do it? So many links and yet he also writes so well. I endorse all of it. I do feel that, in some ways, our setbacks are also opportunities - that the notion that this was all going to be perfect and easy is as foolish as the notion that it is doomed. Two recent things: the fact that the imposition of a Saddamite general on Falluja spurred the Shi'a leadership in the South to isolate al Sadr further shows how some bad things can lead to good things. Ditto the horrors at Abu Ghraib. What they reveal is something true: Americans are no better and no worse as human beings than anyone else. They can become savages as well. But our system - the open press, the internal reviews, the democratic accountability - minimizes the damage of our flawed human nature. I hope that this incident demonstrates to the Iraqi people that it's the system that we're trying to help them build. This system is not American. It is simply the best of the worst options for human government there is. They deserve it, after the terror of so long a tyranny. We need to hang in there. Through the inevitable mess and mistakes, the goal is clear and noble and essential.