GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!:

Trash talk trumping policy talk (Linda Feldmann and Amanda Paulson, 9/14/04, The Christian Science Monitor)

[A]ny Democrats who are celebrating over the slew of charges against Bush might think again, analysts say. In fact, the net effect could be to hurt Senator Kerry - not because some voters may believe that his campaign is somehow behind the efforts to tar the president, but because the stories take away from the Massachusetts Democrat's ability to focus the campaign on issues.

"Kerry would like to change the dialogue to issues that favor him, and anything that's a distraction from that is to Bush's advantage," says presidential scholar George Edwards of Texas A&M University. Polls show that voters favor Kerry on most issues, such as jobs and healthcare, with terrorism the major exception.

Kerry also faces the inherent challenge of going up against an incumbent president about whom most voters already have a fixed opinion, positive or negative. With just seven weeks to go before Election Day, many voters say they still don't know Kerry well enough to judge his character, and so he is more vulnerable to unfavorable portrayals than is the president. Pollsters tend to believe that the charges raised by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of anti-Kerry Vietnam vets who have questioned his war medals, have hurt the senator's image among some voters.

Remember how Bill Clinton recommended that Senator Kerry yank his campaign out of the 70s and turn the focus to current issues? How's he doing?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2004 6:14 PM