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Bush Really Ahead?
Polls as Wacky as Your Girlfriend's Moods
I didn't know what to think when Gallup rolled out its recent poll showing George Bush 13 points ahead of John Kerry among likely voters. The Pew poll said Bush and Kerry were pretty much tied, as did some other poll I am now too lazy to look up.
To me, Gallup's result seemed especially weird because I was under the impression, from watching the 2000 election, that Gallup was one of those organizations that always skewed results to the left.
Now CBS and The New York Times, of all organizations, show Bush nine points up. That makes two polling organizations which I consider to be pro-left, predicting a victory for Bush and Cheney. At this point, I am inclined to think they're right. Simply because their results usually favor the left.
I think George Bush is going to win, and I'll tell you why. I call it "the Compressed Spring Theory."
George Bush has been the subject of idiotic, baseless, dishonest attacks since before he left Texas. Ann Richards went after him. Then Gore's drones went after him, with the help of the liberal establishment press. They said he was stupid. They said Gore, who failed out of divinity school and washed out of law school, was an intellectual. They told us Bush was in favor of tying black men to trucks and dragging them to death.
Even Republicans bought into the stupidity myth. Even now, Republicans talk about the genius of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Bush's "handlers," as if he were a monkey in a Clint Eastwood movie.
After Bush was elected, we heard one ridiculous insinuation after another. Bush was AWOL (disproven). Bush lied about yellowcake (disproven). Bush attacked Iraq so Halliburton could get control of the oil (disproven). Leftist buttheads got so used to calling Bush "Hitler" they actually came up with a standard contraction: "Bushitler." They got so used to calling him a corporate puppet, they came up with "BushCo."
We saw George Bush portrayed as a deranged Greek god, eating a baby. We saw silly ads featuring Nazi symbols and footage from Nazi rallies.
And whatever effect these attacks had, they had. Bush's popularity was squeezed down to as low a level as possible, barring a pedophilia scandal. The people who could be convinced to hate Bush were convinced, and the rest were not. Americans were effectively separated, like cells in a centrifuge.
In my opinion, it is now extremely difficult to hurt Bush's image, because people are so used to the attacks. What effect can one more attack have? And the attacks are all rehashes of old muck. There is no new news; the left expended its ammunition already.
So the left has compressed Bush's popularity like a spring, and now its natural tendency is to expand. There are people who bought the left's nonsense for a while, but they're coming out of their comas, and you can't put them back under with the same medicine to which they've already developed resistance. People who are tired of the AWOL myth, for example, are not going to have their animosity to Bush restored by that myth's repetition. And the left has run out of new myths. That's why Dan Rather and Bill Burkett are trying to gin up a fresh supply by forging and airing ridiculous memos.
I'm sure there will be an October Surprise. A fastball to the groin, pitched from the gutter. Like the DUI story from 2000. The only question is, will it be old news or fake news? There is no third choice.
Meanwhile, poor old Ralph Nader just got himself on the ballot in Florida, and Kerry has hired Bob Shrum, a campaign adviser famous for leading seven Democrat candidates to defeat. I wonder if Terry McAuliffe is preparing a retirement speech.
I think the polls favoring Bush are more accurate than the other polls, and I don't think there's a whole lot the Democrats can do to fix it now.
Posted by Nancy Pelosi's Giant Mudflaps Earlobes at 01:27 PM
