John Kerry has some bad news days coming.
How do I know? Because he is a Democrat, and because the party that is, and has been, so united behind him is also bipolar. Good news makes its members giddy; bad news sends them into paralyzing fits of self-doubt and recrimination. So, at some point, when the news goes south again for Kerry, the sniping will resume. It will turn to concern, then to worry, and eventually to dissension. And then things will be as they should.
“You know us -- we're up and down,” confessed one Hill Democrat this week.
This is an up moment, but it was only a few weeks ago that some influential but unnamed Democrats were wringing their hands on the front page of The New York Times about how Kerry was blowing their big opportunity to win back the White House.
The list of particulars was long and varied: His campaign was stalled; this was a critical political moment, and he was not playing it right or well; he had no war room and no ground game in Ohio; George W. Bush had had the worst April of any president since Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and still Kerry lagged in the polls.
Some even said that Kerry could not pull off being an effective war hero, the major reason he's going to be the nominee in the first place. The sky was falling. One Village Voice writer called for him to be dumped. “With the air gushing out of John Kerry's balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn't have what it takes to win and has got to go,” wrote James Ridgeway in the April 27 edition.
Can't you feel the love?
Three weeks later, of course, things are much different. Bush is in so much trouble that the election is practically over. It's going to be Kerry, and it's not even going to be close. Bush's approval ratings would look great if they were scores for nine holes of golf, and gas prices are beginning to resemble bad cholesterol numbers. Newsweek's survey of registered voters puts Kerry ahead of Bush by 1 point, 43 percent to 42 percent, while Ralph Nader came in at 6 percent. Things were even better in a recent CNN/Time poll (likely as opposed to registered voters): Kerry led Bush 49 percent to 44 percent, with Nader again grabbing 6 percent.
These days, when Democrats talk about Nader, they find themselves running out of expletives. But apart from a small concern that Nader could throw the election to Bush, they are feeling pretty confident. And even Republicans are acknowledging that their guy is in trouble.
“I'm glad the election is not being held today,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told The Associated Press. “But you know what? It's not being held today … . The fact that things don't look particularly bright today tells you virtually nothing about how things will be on November 2."
Maybe, maybe not. The Bush bad news is talking to Democrats. Some are so excited that they think the coming Kerry landslide will return them to power in both the House and the Senate. The same CNN/Time poll found that in a generic measure of Democratic versus Republican support in congressional races, Democrats were leading 53 percent to 40 percent.
“This is a good day. We're ahead 13 points in the generic,” exulted Brendan Daly, who works for Nancy Pelosi. (Can you say Madame Speaker?)
Heady days, indeed. But what the polls and the news cycle giveth, they also taketh away. Bush's loss of support followed two weeks of terrible images of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The question is: How will Democrats react when those images fade and Bush begins to recover? When good economic news begins the to pierce the national consciousness? When Kerry stumbles, stutter-steps, or slumps?
“Nobody expect us to be at 13 points in the generic forever,” says Kori Bernards, communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “But I think that Democrats are unified and ready to fight this fight.”
Bernards is one of those people who had the awful job of trying to the find good news for Democrats when Bush was at 90 percent in the polls and the entire Democratic Party was on Prozac after the 2002 midterms. She says she does not expect the gloom to return even if the news gets bad.
“It's a little scary,” she says. “But there are still six months to go until this election, and I think John Kerry makes a strong case for firing George W. Bush.”
And Bernards points out that, particularly on the Hill, Democrats could use some good news.
“Democrats have had to endure a lot of bad news stories and a lot of bad poll numbers,” she says. “I'm not going to apologize for a little bit of good news for this party.”
What goes around … and all that.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
