Reply #20: You might have hit it on the head.

[Julien Sorel]

I was thinking along two different lines. The first is that Bush's "likeability," along with his status as being the president, made people resent Kerry's attacks more than Bush's attacks.

The second was that Bush's attacks were effective to the point that some people came to believe them, so they stopped seeing them as "unfair."

I hadn't thought about the Mary Cheney thing, but it did happen late, and the polls I saw said people pretty much overwhelmingly thought Kerry was over the line. And of course, the media couldn't let go of it, so it was out there for a week.