Poll Heartburn

So Time and Newsweek both have Bush up 10 points after the GOP convention. In totally unrelated news Former President Clinton's heart is on the fritz. No need to panic, a bunch of very soft voters got the message of the GOP: Vote for Kerry and you will kill us all. Kerry will come back. Now I must note that even the modest hopes of the protesters to step on Bush's message did not happen. Protests just don't seem to get it done. By the way, remind me to keep writing stuff like "Protests are futile" it really seems to rile up the readers. 100,000 extra voters will do so much more that 100,000 people in the streets. Look, a lot of you folks have jobs. There are two kinds of problems at work: the kind that could get you fired and all the other kinds of problems. Protesters are the second kind of problem for Bush.

Bush lives in a hermetically sealed bubble into which no criticism can enter. As our masterful UK correspondent points out to me in an e-mail that Bush events are completely stage-managed events with a pre-screened audience that give him softball questions to answer. I have mixed feelings about how effective this tactic is. On the one hand he never looks bad, but on the other hand he never talks to anyone but the choir. The Kerry campaign, on the other hand, does not screen it's events and goes into places that are not a lock for Kerry. The result is that Kerry draws some massive crowds to his events and is able to talk to people in the middle. The downside is that he gets heckled, which can get really interesting when Teresa talks back.

Hecklers - "Four More Years!"
Teresa Kerry - "They want four more years of Hell!"