"Tomworld?" I don't pull all my conclusions out of my own head without any reference to observation of reality. That's the specialty of other people here.
I would wager that most democrats are quite happy with Kerry as candidate.
They're willing to settle for him. They don't have much of a choice.
Every survey I have seen about the reasons primary voters picked Kerry put "can beat Bush" at about sixty percent or higher, with policies and other reasons way down the list. The Democrats should not have fast-tracked the primaries.
Just for fun, ask any Democrat you might know if they could magically replace Kerry with Hillary...would they?
Which campaign is running the most negative ads so far? Did you miss the latest analysis?
The analysis I'm familiar with is here. Note that things look a bit more even when organizations like Moveon.org and others--organizations specifically set up to crap all over campaign finance laws--are thrown in.
And of course, this doesn't take into account the media, most of which is pretty much anti-Bush the whole way, and doesn't cost the Kerry campaign one red cent. 60 Minutes is now the anti-Bush book club, and publications like Newsweek aren't even trying to pretend objectivity any more. Raines, former NYT editor, is offering Kerry campaign advice.
As for Al Gore, it isn't just me who thinks he's getting a bit brown and crispy around the edges.
Maureen Dowd:
John Kerry's advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don't want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party.
They would like Gore, who brought bad karma to Dean with his primary endorsement, to zip it and go away. But more and more Democrats think it is Kerry who should zip it and go away.
Kerry has made a huge $25 million ad buy in recent weeks, believing that the better voters know him, the more they'll like him. But many Democrats fear he's one of those supercilious/smarmy candidates (like Al Gore) for whom the opposite is true: the more you know him, the less you want to see him.
They wonder whether Kerry should just let the campaign be Bush vs. Bush. As the president's old running buddy, Lee Atwater, used to say, don't get in the way when your rival's busy shooting himself.
Couldn't the Democratic standard-bearer use a William McKinley front-porch strategy, talking only to those who bother to show up at his front porch? After all, Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have five front porches, stretching from Sun Valley to Nantucket and Georgetown.
Kerry, once a critic of campaign financing abuses, had toyed with the idea of not accepting the nomination at his nominating convention so he could spend even more in contributions. While he announced yesterday that he had dropped that belittled idea, maybe he just didn't take the plan far enough.
Maybe he shouldn't go down from his town house on Beacon Hill to the Fleet Center at all. The conventioneers may be more galvanized if they focus on vividly vivisecting Bush, instead of being dulled to distraction by Kerry, waving stiffly in his Oxford-cloth shirt, trying to be all things to all people all the prime time.
Oh yeah. She mentions the widespread satisfaction with Kerry, too.