More good news: the latest WaPo/ABC News Poll shows the President leading The Crimson Chin by 9 points among likely voters, and 6 points among all registered voters. The Post describes the poll thusly:
President Bush emerged from his New York convention with a solid lead over Democratic challenger John F. Kerry, strengthening his position on virtually every important issue in the campaign and opening up a clear advantage over his rival on many of the personal characteristics that influence voters in presidential elections, according to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll.
The President is leading in the battleground states as well, though not by quite as much. I don't understand this sentence, though:
What won't be known for another few weeks is whether Bush's gains are transitory, as Kerry's were in the immediate aftermath of his convention.
Kerry didn't get a bounce, even a transitory one, in the wake of the DNC. In fact, the President bounced then, too.
UPDATE: From the keen analytical mind of Charles Krauthammer springs forth a typically excellent piece on why the Republicans have bounced and the Democrats have not: Kerry is a cipher. Money quote:
At their convention, the Republicans had something to say. It was simple and clear: There is a war on, and we are tough enough to deal with it. Not because of what we did 35 years ago but because of how we have dealt with our various enemies for the past three years.Now, some people will weigh the results of these three years and approve. Others will not. But at least this is a case -- a plausible claim that bears scrutiny and debate.
John McCain gave a serious and sober defense of the Iraq war on grounds of "realism" -- the prudential grounds that with the sanctions on Saddam Hussein collapsing, the choice was not between war and some imagined peaceful status quo but between war and a hugely unstable and gathering threat.
Three nights later President Bush gave the other grounds, the "idealist" rationale for war. In an argument of a length and coherence exceedingly rare in a convention speech, he gave an elaborate defense of democratization as the only serious answer to the nihilism festering in a repressed and oppressed Middle East -- a nihilism that exploded upon us on Sept. 11.
You can take that argument or leave it. You can take McCain's argument or leave it. But these are arguments, ideas that inform policy. "I was a war hero" is a non sequitur that only a party plagued with pacifism for the past 30 years could imagine is a convincing rationale for leadership.
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