I think he's stepping back and looking at the dynamics of this election.

It's all about emotional vector forces. This election, like every alternate election, is a referendum on the incumbent. This incumbent is controversial, creating a center of gravity pulling for change. On the other hand, 9/11 created a strong center of gravity pulling for caution--reluctance to switch horses in midstream during a "War on Terror". Many people are hoping that Bush will come through, and come up with good answers to all the charges against him. People are waiting, as Buck theorizes, until the last moment to render a final verdict (and the more cynical are waiting for the October Surprise). Everybody is disgusted at the shallow negativity we've seen so far, and I'd guess people are hoping that at some point the campaign will become more concrete and give them some substance to munch on. If the beef doesn't materialize by election day people will vote their guts.

I think that the gut emotion puts Bush on the defensive in this election. He'll lose by default if he can't mount a better defense than to counterattack his opponent. He has to positively convince the majority that he was positively right to attack Iraq--not right by accident or serendipity or right by creative retroactive justification adjustment. He has to make the middle class feel in their guts that his tax cuts benefited everyone and not just the wealthy--money in the pocket talks, trash statistics walk. He has to make workers feel secure about their jobs and jobseekers feel optimistic; statistics don't vote, real people with or without real jobs vote.

Above all, Bush needs to put the trust issue to rest once and for all. He's been flatout accused of lying, and Rove's response has been to create a counterfog of mistrust: "We didn't lie, somebody else lied/erred...it was Chalabi...no wait, it was the CIA...er no, it was a "systemic problem"...how about this: Everybody lied to Saddam and our intelligence guys got faked-out as collateral damage...hey, whatever, man, there's got to be somebody who's more at fault than we are". That's not a positive affirmation of trustworthiness, that's just finger-pointing. It's not reassuring that Bush never concedes a mistake and insists that he's doing God's work. The Doctrine of Papal Infallibility doesn't translate well to American politics--we've come to expect "the buck stops here" mea culpas as the measure of Presidential integrity. I think Bush's leadership vacuum is another center of gravity that creates a hunger for change.

That's how I see the big picture, and maybe it's something like how Buck is seeing it. It's an emotional election because there are strong emotional currents at play. The pattern looks to me like the default emotions will crystalize on election day into a defeat for Bush. Bush has to change the pattern to win.

I'm waiting for Kerry to go rhetorically nuclear: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Yeah, it's a low blow, a real kick in the groin, but that's the point: Subrational emotional appeals are hot this election season, and that question, asked just a couple of days before the election, is just the match that would set fire to emotional tinder that's already there in the American psyche.

Bookmark that!