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Oct. 29 - Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, unshaven and looking weary, met with print journalists Thursday for one last spin session. For the record, he thinks the president will win, but he sounded so unconvincing that halfway through the hourlong lunch, a reporter said, "OK, so the race is very close and one or the other will win."
advertisement When the laughter subsided, Dowd remembered his talking points and said a bit sheepishly, "The lead is that the election is very close and President Bush is going to win."
SNIP
Defending Bush is getting harder, but that doesn’t deter the diehards. Conservative talk-show hosts were pushing the theory that Russian trucks hauled the missing explosives to Syria before the war. “And that’s the good news: that it’s not in the hands of insurgents in Iraq, it’s in the hands of terrorists in Syria,” says Wittmann, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. In an effort to throw Bush a lifeline, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the “Today” show and said what Bush had wrongly accused Kerry of saying—that failure to find and secure the weapons was the troops’ fault. “No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be with the troops that were there," said Giuliani. "Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”
It’s hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls, but my prediction is that it will break at the last minute for Kerry. With more than two thirds of the undecided voters saying the country is on the wrong track, Kerry should win. Bush got 47.9 percent of the vote in 2000, and that’s where he is stuck today. A record voter turnout is expected, and that signals change, not four more years of the status quo. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6363063/site/newsweek/
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