David Nyhan
Ten reasons why I think John Kerry will win the White House:
1. Elected incumbents who win second terms do so via landslide: FDR, Ike, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. There is no landslide in sight for W. He runs slightly behind, slightly ahead or dead even, a perilous state for an incumbent this late in the game.
2. The demographic listed as "undecided" by pollsters, as many as 25 percent of the total to some bean counters in pollster-world, vastly overstates the potential of so-called undecided voters. They've had four years to decide on this second President Bush; if they're not for him, they're not really undecided. They just haven't been convinced yet by Kerry. Kerry has more upside with these voters than Bush, whose record, unless you earn over $200,000 a year and love your tax breaks, is not one you'd prefer to run on. He can only win by frightening the voters about his opponent.
3. Kerry has a hidden vote. The vast majority of more than 40 last-minute polling surveys in 2000 predicted a Bush victory in the popular vote. It never happened, primarily because of late-deciding voters, many of them blue-collar working-class women. These people are hard to poll and tend not to show up in the pre-election surveys. They have too much on their plates to pay much attention to politics until the very end of the campaign. They're the women who, in Jesse Jackson's phrase, have to "take the early bus." They broke heavily, late, for Al Gore, winner of better than a half-million more votes than Bush. A similar tide of 11th-hour late deciders could swamp Bush and perhaps endanger his precarious grip on control of the U.S. Senate.
snip
If I had one piece of advice for Kerry, it would be to turn the president's negative campaign upside down, by running an ad saying:
"George Bush has bragged for three years that Osama bin Laden can run, but he cannot hide. Well, bin Laden ran and hid all that time � but he's not hiding in Iraq; he's said to be on the Afghan border. Now, desperate because he's on the verge of losing, Mr. Bush says of my campaign, 'He can run, but he cannot hide.' Mr. President, we were both at Yale around the same time during Vietnam. I ran to Vietnam, to the sound of the guns, and picked up an M-16. You went to Alabama and Harvard Business School, while Dick Cheney was picking up five draft deferments, his excuse being, 'I had other priorities.' So George, tell me this: Who was running? And who was hiding? I'm John Kerry, and I approved this message."
David Nyhan is a longtime Boston political commentator.
http://www.ecnnews.com/cgi-bin/04/g/gstory.pl?fn-colnyh16
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