President Bush is ahead of Kerry in the national polls right now by an average of 3.1 percent (see Real Clear Politics.) Over the past several months, his trend line is up while Kerry’s is flat (see Stephen den Beste.)
Michael Barone explains why this is happening:
Bush’s most effective opposition this year has come not from Kerry and the Democrats but from Old Media, the New York Times and the news pages of the Washington Post, along with the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. Old Media gave very heavy coverage to stories that tended to hurt Bush?violence in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the false charges of Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, etc. And during the first eight months of the year Bush did a poor job of making his case.
Then, suddenly, that case was made with maximum effectiveness at the Republican National Convention in New York?by John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, by Zell Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger, by Laura Bush and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself. Bush was able to get his message out unmediated by Old Media. (Fox News Channel had more viewers during the Republican National Convention than any of the old-line broadcast networks.) The message was simple: We need this president to protect the nation. Bush muffed the chance to deliver that message effectively in the first debate. But he made up for it in the second and third debates.
Kerry helped confirm the Bush message in the debates?by saying American action had to pass a global test, by saying that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq both was and was not a threat, by arguing that Saddam would “not necessarily” have remained in power if Kerry’s course had been taken. He remains the man who volunteered the words “I did actually vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” So in all the polls Bush continues to score better than Kerry on handling the war on terrorism and on handling Iraq.
Sounds about right, but there’s one other thing: Kerry’s messages are very appealing to the audidences for which they’re tailored, but it takes the voters a while to figure out that he’s pandering; they’ve more or less done that by now.