Can Kerry Match the Comeback Kid?

[papau]

Kerry can (only?) prevail via "overkill" - "'Not being Bush is not enough."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1333-2004Sep6.html

Can Kerry Match the Comeback Kid?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, September 7, 2004; Page A23


If John Kerry loses this election, August will be seen as the time when he did. But if Kerry wins, it will be because the last month set up the circumstances for his triumph. And as Bill Clinton probably told the Democratic nominee in that pep talk from his hospital room over the weekend, the way the story turns out is, in significant measure, under John Kerry's control. Democrats outside the Kerry campaign have been in a grumpy, jumpy mood since the oxymoronically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pushed the media into a frenzy over what Kerry did and didn't do in Vietnam. The month of August was miserable for Kerry and Bush's post-convention bounce has left members of Kerry's party even more depressed.

It's always a bad sign for a campaign when the media run stories about impending campaign shakeups, usually in accounts full of disparaging quotations from (often anonymous) party leaders.

The Kerry campaign was sufficiently worried about all the bad tidings that it dispatched some of its top officials to New York last Thursday to insist that things were under control, claims usually seen as a sign that they're not. They did admit, though, to underestimating the trouble the Swift boat crowd had caused.

In fact, the anti-Kerry ads fit so neatly with the Republican Convention's goal of painting Kerry as soft on defense and not tough enough to deal with terrorism that it becomes ever harder to believe the Bush campaign's denials of any involvement with the Swift boat group.<snip>