Bush Eschewed the "KISS" Principle

There's nothing like a four-day weekend (augmented by a day of my four weeks' vacation time - damn, that's almost European, isn't it?) to provide time for reflection - and lots of napping.

One thing I would have liked to see in the President's acceptance speech is a greater focus on two, three, or at most four domestic agenda items rather than a whole rafter of nine or ten of them. Specifically (as you might be able to tell from my analysis of his speech), permanent tax relief, tort reform, health savings accounts, and Social Security private accounts. These directly address Bush's most pressing domestic issue needs, the economy and health care, are eminently saleable, and are much easier to cram into a single thirty-second spot than the John Moschita-like recitation I watched the other day on georgewbush.com.

As it is, Bush now has a second term issue index almost as impenetrable as Kerry's. The only advantages he's left himself are a central unifying theme (the "ownership society") and having struck first, forcing Kerry to either react to it or ignore and leave it unchallenged. And the latter will be a lot easier to do than it might have been.