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Flip Side (Noam Scheiber, 3/18/2004, TNR Online)

Kerry sympathizers will respond that this kind of analysis reads way too much into what was, after all, only one week. Would that they were right. But a simple look at some recent polling data suggests that's unlikely. Several weeks of favorable coverage during the Democratic primaries and a couple of months of White House missteps had conspired to give Kerry a statistically significant lead over Bush in most polls by late February. This week, a New York Times/CBS poll showed Kerry suffering a 10-point net reversal in his favorable/unfavorable ratings since that time. Maybe that's the kind of thing that happens even to fundamentally strong candidates when they suffer a couple of bad days. But, given the speed and size of the turnaround, the numbers seem far more likely to suggest that Kerry is settling into his natural equilibrium. Unfortunately for Democrats, that's not the one that has him winning in November.