The country is still bitterly divided.

No, the left is bitter.

I thought Kerry's speech was awful, but I guess it's bad form to pile on right now. Hope he has fun being openly mocked by his colleagues every day of the rest of his Senate career.

I thought Bush's speech was great, but I'm giddy and biased.

kerry's speech would have been better if he'd cut the whole middle part about the 11-year old campaign contributors and all . . . he started babbling in there. First three paragraphs, last three: reasonably classy.

Still divided, nonetheless.

60-40

51-48.

(says CNN...not me personally)

Yup, double-checked: 51-48...not 60-40.

Check the ballot initiatives. Check the governorships. Check the Senate. Check the House. Check the statehouses. Check polling on any social issue. It's a 60-40 country with the party registration and national vote still to catch up. But they do catch up over time.

That makes the Evan Thomas/Newsweek media bias effect worth about nine points in the presidential race, instead of the 15 Mr. Thomas was claiming back in September. Evan can probably say the Rather memo scandal caused the six-point drop in his prediction...

kerry's speech would have been better if he'd cut the whole middle part about the 11-year old campaign contributors and all . . . he started babbling in there. First three paragraphs, last three: reasonably classy.

It has to do with Kerry (who by the way Served in Vietnam) being The Intellectual. As a 160+IQ kid genius, I have the same problem when writing or speaking. Your mind is running so fast and down so many tangents and you have to put it all in, so you wind up rambling down long chains of obscure derivative/explanatory clauses tacked onto run-on sentences, and any clarity or coherence gets lost along the way.

When that's how your mind works (in overdrive), the hardest thing to learn is how to prune out all the baroque overgrowth, stay on target and on-message, and be direct and understandable. I was in my 40s before I learned how to do that with any success.

51-48. A nation (quite clearly) not far from equally divided in terms of its choice of a president. That's the reality...not a theory, not a hope. Reality.

signing off...

The reality is that we have 100% of the Presidents in America. So that, at least, is not divided.

Ray Fair said it should have been 57.7 +/- 2.7 for Bush. So I would say that the media was probably in the ball park the second time (5%), or more likely, he was right the first time (15%) but that Kerry's ineptness gave away more than half of that.

Anonymous:

The Democrats still haven't figured out that it's not just about the presidency, huh?