Electoral College Map Swings Toward Kerry

John Kerry may have gotten a “dead cat bounce” in the national polls, but in the last few days the Electoral College has taken a drastic shift in his direction. My reading of state-by-state polls last weekend showed Bush ahead 200-197 with the remainder as tossups; as of today, that score has, well, “lurched” to Kerry 260-186, with the biggest tipper being Florida, where American Research Group has Brah-man up seven points. Meanwhile other battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which had been either within the margin of error or leaning slightly toward Kerry, have plunged his direction by double-digit margins.

Maybe it’s just a blip that will be reversed over the next few weeks, culminating in the GOP convention. And I’m unashamedly partisan enough to say I sure as heck hope so.

But it may be that the President has been so adversely defined by the ten months in which he allowed the Democrats to defame him unopposed that subliminal public doubts they succeeded in planting have caused too much damage to his credibility for him to mount a comeback.

And apart from that, it may be that Bush the son, like Bush the father, simply is not temperamentally equipped to engage in the sort of tactics necessary to beat back and defeat adversaries of the gutturally extreme nature of the ones he’s facing.

I hope I’m wrong; but sometimes it’s difficult not to wonder.