THE REACTIONARY:

Slogan Points Kerry in 'New Direction' (Michael Finnegan, September 20, 2004, LA Times)

After months of struggling to find a theme to capture the essence of his candidacy, Sen. John F. Kerry has settled on one: The election, he says, boils down to a decision between four more years of "wrong choices" or a "new direction."

Since Labor Day, the Democratic presidential nominee has stuck to that theme relentlessly, using it to shape arguments on Iraq, the economy and nearly all other topics he broaches.

To some Democrats unnerved by President Bush's recent surge in the polls, Kerry's adoption of a clearly defined theme to draw contrasts with the Republican incumbent offers a measure of hope. The question for Kerry is whether this new approach to framing the election comes too late to matter.

They don't really have any other option, given that the only poll number that doesn't overwhelmingly favor the President these days is the Right Track/Wrong Track question. But that number is notoriously ambiguous--which may make it the perfect basis of a Kerry campaign, but is a pretty thin reed upon which to base your message. What, after all, does a respondent mean if they say we're on the wrong track in the War on Terror: that we should stop fighting it or that we should nuke the whole Middle East? The numbers are probably rather evenly split.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 20, 2004 8:37 AM