A few thoughts about the campaign

[shockingelk]

1. It would be good for Kerry to wait until close to election day to offer his strongest defenses against smears.
a. We see the media doing at least some of their footwork on the smears. If Kerry is saying the same thing, Limbaugh, etc will say "Pay no attention to the liberal media. They're just Kerry's mouthpieces."
b. Once properly debunked, the Bush campaign and right-wing media pundits can only respond by making more smears. If that happens now, we'll have two more months in which Kerry would have the same problem: must different smears. If new smears come out near the same time their prior smears are debunked, all Kerry has to say is "Look, that's simply a lie (insert three or four words about about the new smear). Didn't we hear this same kind of junk before?"

2. The "Huge Bush advantage" is what you'd expect to see if polls are being taken while the media is saturated with convention messages. Kerry saw similar advantages while and shortly after the convention in Boston:

a. In states that are going for Bush anyway, Bush has a much stronger advantage than Kerry does in his "safe states". This causes movement towards Bush in the popular vote to always be exaggerated towards Bush and away from Kerry. As an example, if Bush is ahead in TX and GA by 40 percentage points instead of 20, that will boost the national barometer by a full 2%, but is meaningless in terms of electoral votes.

3. At least in my opinion, the style of Bush's acceptance speech was very effective. He was absolutely cherubic. To us, it recalled the image of a big baby, to others, it looked like angelic.

He also reproduced a slow-motion effect as a break dancer would and did it very well, particularly in the beginning and afterwards during the confetti and balloons. To us, it looked reptilian, others may have been bamboozled by the psychological effect. Recall Rove's idea of people watching TV with the sound off.

This type of psychological manipulation may be the hardest thing to counter.

Maybe a slogan like "In your heart, you know he's right, in your guts, you know he's nuts," is needed.