Bush has slipped behind Kerry in most polls.
No matter what you think of Bush as a person or as President, you must admit he is a good politician (well, you should anyway – OK, OK… let’s use it as a premise, at least).
Can he regain the lead in the race by saying something like, “OK we won; now we can go home,” or will it take a major stumble of Kerry’s part (oh, I don’t know, appointing a child rapist as VP)?
In other words how do you see the upcoming four or five months?
TV
**Will Bush be able to regain is lead in the polls? **
I don’t know about the polls, but (IMO) Bush will win at least 46 states. Kerry, besides being a weak leader at best, he is sooo freaking boring.
I really hope not. I fail to see how anyone could have a more messed up foreign policy than Bush…and his anti-science policies make me fuming mad.
He’s already said that we won…informed he is not. He can’t see the result of any decision that he makes. I think he uses a magic 8=ball myself.
Yeah…Bush is exciting… with his exhilarating policy of starting useless wars and all. :rolleyes: Give me boring any day.
That depends on Kerry. His major challanges are yet to come, and 5 & 1/2 months remain.
Stay tuned.
Bush is not a “good politician” - he is a “polarizing politician” - there is a difference. Bill Clinton, may he rot in the ground, was a good politician. Bush is not.
This plot of Bush’s polling trend shows a consistant, strong negative slope, punctuated by catastrophic rises in popularity. Each rise, 9/11, the Iraq war, and the capture of Saddam is smaller than the preceding rise, so with numbers this low now, Bush is going to have to come up with a spectacular surprise in October in order to get himself elected. Still, the timely capture of Osama might not be enough to save him.
Because we all know the only criteria of a good President is how exciting his speeches sound. :rolleyes:
We all know that polls are a lot more volatile than that. They will be all over the place between now and election.
I’ll always trust people who have money at stake to get to the truth: Tradesports takes decent volume betting and has George Bush to win is still at 56%.
Yes, he will be able to regain a lead. Whether he can maintain one is another question.
“You’ve got your plutocrarcy in my oligarchy!”
“You’ve got your oligarchy in my plutocracy!”
♪Two great tastes that go great together, Bush-and-Kerrey Cups!♪
Here we go again, “The Lesser of Two Evils Rag.” Kerry is the lesser. He’s no great shakes, he does indeed look like Lurch, and he’s about as inspiring as a bottle of Heinz ketchup. :o
The polls, however, mean dick. Bush may win by a landslide, thus empowering him to destroy the nation completely. For all I know, Dick Cheney may one day be President. At this point, nothing can surprise me. The nation is mad.
Regain his lead? Maybe but only slightly.
There’s the June 30 turnover of sovereignty in Iraq - whatever that entails. It could go relatively smoothly (up) or there could be another spasm of violence and/or trotting out of horrific images and scandal (down).
The 9/11 commission is supposed to release their report sometime in July. Depending on how quickly it’s vetted by the White House (that could be a whole issue in itself), it will have a neutral to negative impact on Bush’s poll numbers.
An upsurge will occur after the GOP convention at the beginning of September.
If Rumsfeld’s culpability in the Iraq prison debacle is proven and Bush refuses to fire him, his numbers will go down. If Bush was indeed informed about the interrogation policy and he plays dumb, this will affect his poll numbers as well, but that will be the least of his worries.
Then there’s gas prices, the economy, the inevitable surprises (capturing bin laden or his #2 guy; sanity breaking out in Iraq).
News coverage is being overwhelmed by Iraq, which generally hurts Bush and at least keeps Kerry on an even keel.
I’m sure Bush will regain his lead. But it’s not a good sign for him. Kerry hasn’t even picked a running mate yet or been officially nominated.
And Bush hasn’t unleashed a full advertising barrage yet, either. If you want to talk about what the candidates haven’t done.
The incumbent usually doesn’t look very strong right after the primaries have wrapped up because the challenger is the media darling.
You won’t get a real clear picture until after the conventions. And even then, up October most analysis is just based on throwing darts.
I’m guessing most people here haven’t really paid attention during most election seasons in their lives. No predictions made this far out ever mean anything. Up until the last week of the 1980 election Jimmy Carter and Reagan were in a dead heat, right before polls opened the White House’s own pollster discovered a huge shift in votes towards Reagan. Reagan’s pollsters were a bit worried at the exact same time, not even close to being sure they were going to beat Carter.
It was a case of tons of polls up through the last week of the election not adequately reporting who was going to win the election just a week later. It happens, I think the election is going to be very close, and I’m not near a big enough fool to guess as to who will win. The campaigns haven’t even really started yet.
I don’t consider it campaign season until every other ad on TV is a political campaign :).
Bush hasn’t been officially nominated either ;).
I thought Bush already has has a “full advertising barrage” going on for weeks now!
I am a Democrat, but I have seen Bush in action as governor for six years as well. I think he is a solid campaigner in person. He does much better out in the “field” than in Washington.
And I agree, this probably won’t fall one way or another until October.
Well, you guys may think me crazy, but I’m going to Vegas to put a whole bunch of swag on the Democrats for 2004.
Bush has already squandered several huge political advantages in terms of money, press, war and ruthlessness and it’s only going to get worse.
Frustrated by their inability to bring down Clinton, an almost insanely hostile press repreatedly smeared Gore in 2000 with all kinds of weird, inaccurate stories about him being a weird, lying exaggerater while ignoring Bush’s abysmal track record in the integrity department. This blue-blooded scion, who had gone to Andover, Yale and Harvard, was a member of Skull and Bones and then was carried from one flaming business failure after another by his humongously rich cronies, was presented to us as a straight-talking man of the people as opposed to that other creep from Washington. Then the press ignored the immense illegal shennanigans that deprived 90,000 legally-registered, mostly Democratic Florida voters of their right to go to the polls. What this means is that Bush is, in a very important sense, the news media’s boy. Therefore, if Bush fails it’s going to reflect very badly on them. But, in case you haven’t noticed, reporters are starting to see the big picture which is that Bush is a huge, incredibly dishonest fuck-up. Even Tim Russert is no longer the overly-polite (compared to his treatment of Democrats, anyway) interlocutor he once was. And just look at what’s coming down the pike:
The Valerie Plame investigation results
The 9/11 commission report
The Presidential debates in which Bush’s inability to master more than six or seven talking points and that’s it, isn’t going to seem quite so cute anymore especially when facing ex-prosecutor John Kerry who, of course, will have an AWFUL lot to work with.
The debut of Michael Moore’s “Faregnheit 911”
I mean, exactly what is Bush going to run on? The arrest of Ahmad Chalabi?
I’m telling you, he’s toast.
You underestimate the power of partisan politics. Join me, together, we can overthrow the Emperor and - no, wait, that was something else.
In any case, Bush is hardly “toast.” In about… 17 minutes and 36 seconds we’ll start seeing the “Anybody But Kerry” campaign kicking into high gear (it has been sneaking slowly on to SDMB for a while). The economy, they say, is picking up due to Bush’s direct brilliance, and nothing else. People expect to be lied to, they accept it, so that won’t undo him. He’s hardly a dead horse.
I’d like to expand on this. The position of a lot of people seems to be partisan, as I implied above. It hardly has to do with who the figurehead is, they believe that their “causes” are above anything else, and believe in choosing the person who will most likely represent their causes. In short, some people are Republicans, some people are Democrats, and nothing will change that. This is why Bush can take such a beating politically - he is a dunce, he fails, his cronies fail, corruption is rampant, scandals happen literally every other day, he destroys any international clout we had, and he could probably get a BJ from an intern, and not much has or will change.
The reason is that Bush himself is the frontman. I firmly believe that the man, George Bush, is honest, and truly believes what he says. He wouldn’t be part of a conspiracy, because it would be against his way of thinking.
The unfortunate thing is that Bush himself is the frontman. While he himself may be honest, the people he surrounds himself with, the people who give him his information, the people who formulate his policy, the people who execute his orders - they are all horribly corrupt (and blindly inept) imps from the depths of hell.
Bush may have to replace a few cabinet members and such, but he can do that and come out smelling like roses - actually, smelling better than he went in, since he proactively tracked down and corrected corruption etc.
Bill Clinton was teflon. He used skill and expertise to dodge and weave and let nothing stick to him. Bush is more like cast iron. You can stand there beating it all day long, but at the end of the day, it is still just standing there like the hunk of inert metal it is, and all you are is tired.
I wonder what would happen if Bill Clinton collided with George Bush. Would the universe implode? Did we avoid apocalypse by a scant 4 years?
I dunno where you’re at, but here in Missouri, I have seen a full ad barrage. And it’s annoying as hell to know that while you’re watching the second political ad in this commercial break, that you probably have at least one more political ad to sit through before anything that might pass for normal programming comes back.
And worse even that that: it’s only May.
And after watching the blitz over the last few months, and knowing that Bush’s numbers have decreased, I feel good. Of course, if Osama (remember him?) is found, well, things just might get interesting. Of course, even if that happens, the Iraqle comes out smelling like a rose, everyone up and down the food chain goes down for Abu Ghraib and Bush begins speaking english, I still think that backing Kerry is a good idea.
Waste