Ridiculous though it may be, there are millions of voters who don’t make up their minds about which presidential candidate to back until the very last week of the campaign. Why they can’t choose in advance is truly beyond me, but this nevertheless happens every election season.
But in 2004, this should be yet another indication of a pending Kerry victory. If this week drives the outcome, it’ll be a landslide. After all, if a voter was waiting until now to start getting engaged, think about what that voter has seen in just the last six days…
* The Bush administration ignored warnings and allowed tons of deadly explosives to be looted from Al Qaqaa.
* His campaign’s top surrogate then went on national television to blame the troops for the mistake.
* No-bid contracts for Halliburton are now the subject of a criminal investigation.
* Speaking of Cheney, he confused everyone this week by calling the debacle in Iraq a “remarkable success story.”
* The 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians probably would disagree.
* Bush went wildly off-message by saying Americans’ safety from terrorism is “up in the air.”
* Bush’s man in Iraq, Ayad Allawi, accused foreign troops (read: Americans) of “gross negligence” in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend.
* Bush’s exciting final TV ad is exposed by a blogger of having been doctored to show pictures of troops who weren’t really there.
* The administration was embarrassed by new secret documents that noted Bush’s further abandonment of the Geneva Conventions.
* Costs for the war in Iraq are about to escalate by at least an additional $70 billion.
* Reversing a historical trend, most of the nation’s newspapers want Bush out of office.
And today’s not over yet.
As Paul Krugam noted today, this is the opposite of what BC04 had planned.
But worst of all from the right’s point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign’s media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of “global test” moments – taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that’s very bad news for Mr. Bush.
Let’s hope so; I don’t know what more it would take to convince voters.