THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS ALWAYS WRONG:

Is Kerry Sinking? (Howard Kurtz, September 1, 2004, Washington Post)

Certainly Kerry has had a rough month. Maybe we're at a turning point in what has been a very static race. But it's too soon to tell, media hyperventilating notwithstanding.

Team Kerry was slow to respond to the swift boat attacks, but it was not unreasonable, for a few days at least, to avoid giving oxygen to a tiny group buying ads in three states. What the Kerryites misjudged was how cable could turn this into an August thunderstorm that washed away everything else.

Back in the 2000 campaign, the press spent the spring and summer writing about what a horrible candidate Gore was. Then he kissed his wife on a Los Angeles stage, shot up in the polls and Slate was declaring that "Bush is toast." He wasn't.

It was only a few weeks ago that the media were pronouncing the Democratic convention a highly disciplined success. Then Kerry got no bump in the polls and the CW gradually became that Boston was a huge missed opportunity.

So the CW which only gradually figured out that Dean couldn't win even the Democratic primaries and that Senator Kerry had blown his acceptance speech has been slow to figure out he can't win, period. Now it will slowly dawn that it's going to be a blowout and then a few weeks later that the congressional races could tilt GOP in a big way. Newsflash: by the time the coventional wisdom figures out what's going on it's history not news.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2004 3:42 PM