the long slow fade?

I suspect, and I will be happy to be wrong about this, that Senator Kerry is not going to be elected President of the United States come November. It may be close but I don't think he has the right combination of vision, presence, aggressiveness, and charismatic charm to unseat an inexplicably popular sitting President.

Especially since he continues to campaign like he's already lost. He's constantly reacting to things thrown his way by the other side, constantly invoking the ghosts of Vietnam, and he apparently has no substantive message of his own, no firm foundation to work from. To be constantly redefining who he is and what he stands for at this late stage of the game does not inspire confidence. His best argument seems to be that we should vote for him because he's not George W. Bush (granted that's a good enough argument for me...but I'm not sure it's going to engage the moderate and left-leaning electorate enough to get out and vote with the numbers and enthusiasm it's going to take to unseat W.)

We are, as a nation, probably more polarized politically than we have been since the height of the Nixon Administration and, yes, the Vietnam War and it seems quite unlikely to change in the next four years (the President, who snuck into office in 2000...through the grace of Florida Election officials, the unbelievably wrong-headed Gore campaign, and the Supreme Court...claiming to be a "compassionate conservative" who was a "uniter not a divider" has proven to be neither of those things...quite the opposite in fact.)

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the status quo ready to rise up and storm the polls on the first Tuesday in November (and in the process make George Bush the younger a one term Chief Executive like Bush the elder.) Maybe Kerry will rise out of his plodding morass of a campaign and prove himself to be a leader one can follow with pride and conviction. Maybe the debate(s) will show the difference between the two contenders in a way that will sway the (supposedly)undecided voters.

Maybe.

But I'm not holding my breath.