It’s amazing to how many things have gone wrong for Bush since the first presidential debate just last Friday:
- Poland announces troop withdrawals right after Bush makes a big deal about us not forgetting Poland
- Fox News has truth problems on foxnews.com, effectively silencing the anti-Rather campaign
- Bremer drops the big one right before the VP debate
- Then Cheney goes up against Edwards and manages to pull defeat from the mouth of ever-so-slight-victory — confirming our worse fears about him (that he can lie with a straightface) in the process.
- No WMDs surface in Iraq, and the Bush campaign uses that to argue the war was justified, playing right to Kerry’s strongest critique — that this is an administration that won’t face the truth.
- Horrible attacks hit yesterday in both Iraq and Egypt.
- And then this morning, when everyone expected strong job numbers to give Bush a lift, a paltry figure (92K) trickles down instead, ending his administration’s job cycle not with a bang, but with a whimper.
It’s starting to seem like all Kerry has to do tonight is run through the week’s headlines. Of course, momentum can swing back to Bush just as quickly as it’s swung over to Kerry. But for right now, the pressure’s all on the President. And a smooth, just-folks style won’t be enough to counter this flood of grim news.
He has to show us he’s the one to solve these problems. And before he can do that, he has to convince us that he has a clue what these problems are.
It’s bizarre really — after all his efforts to avoid repeating the mistakes of the father, he’s ended up with a different version of the same dilemma.
Will two George Bushes lose reelection by seeming unacceptably out of touch with reality?