PoliPundit.com

“The Bush people dumped $20 million of negative ads on our heads; it’s going to have an impact.”
— Steve Elmendorf, John Kerry’s deputy campaign manager.
Or, as AP reporter Ron Fournier put it a few weeks ago:
While sticks and stones may break some bones, negative advertising will hurt you.
UPDATE: A reader makes a good point [...]

Goo-goo “reformers” like John McCain are always saying that “negative” campaigning drives down voter turnout.
I disagree. “Negative” campaigning informs voters of a candidate’s record and impresses upon them the gravity of the choice they’re making in the voting booth; so I’ve been urging the Bushies to go negative for several months now.
The latest Gallup poll [...]

The Bush ads are working. Here’s what Gallup has to say about them:
In a survey taken in mid-February, Kerry led Bush by 28 percentage points in [17 swing states where the ads are airing], 63% to 35%. Now Bush leads Kerry in them by six points, 51% to 45%.
In contrast, there has been much [...]

More on the effects of the Bush ad campaign:
A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a remarkable turnaround in 17 battleground states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close, and where the Bush campaign has aired TV ads. Those ads say Bush has provided “steady leadership in times of change” while portraying Kerry [...]

John Kerry is off the campaign trail for a few weeks:
As Sen. John Kerry prepares to go under the knife for a shoulder injury tomorrow, he got grim news from his doctor.
For a regular person, his prognosis is excellent. But for a politician in the throes of a major political campaign, it was close to [...]

What goes around comes around.

How much would John Kerry’s gas tax increases cost you? Find out with this nifty calculator.
Then watch the new Bush TV ad on this, which is the most effective one so far. The ad is funny, focuses laserlike on one issue, and features the best possible victim – you. It plays into, and solidifies, the [...]

All those Bush ads are having an effect. 41 percent of Americans now see John Kerry as “too liberal,” up from 29 percent in January. This has had an effect in the head-to-head matchup as well.
However, as I never tire of saying, there are still seven months left until the elections. In that period, there [...]

Completely off-topic. But, if you’re an Iron Chef fan like me, this news has got to warm the cockles.
And there was also news this month that a Firefly movie has been greenlighted. March has been a very satisfying month for fans of quality TV.

Remember my suggestion that negative ads feature an Average Joe making the case against Kerry? Well, check out the new Bush radio ad released today.
It’s not as well-produced as I’d like; but it’s a start. I wish the campaign would run ads that each focus laserlike on just one egregious Kerry vote/factoid. And feature [...]

Readers are complaining that 60 Minutes was much tougher on Condi Rice than they were on Richard Clarke. I wouldn’t know, since I stopped watching 60 Minutes a long time ago.
Liberal bias on 60 Minutes, and on all of CBS, is nothing new. Dan Rather’s notorious 1988 interview with Bush Sr. is a classic example [...]

“Never in the course of human events have so many been so libelled by so few.”
— John O’Neill, John Kerry’s debating opponent on a 1971 episode of the Dick Cavett show (Kerry stuck firmly to his contention that virtually every GI in Vietnam was a war criminal.)
C-SPAN’s Road to the White House broadcast [...]

Be sure to TiVo/tape today’s episode of C-SPAN’s Road to the White House. It features an anti-war appearance by John Kerry on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 and should be quite interesting.

Slate’s David Greenberg notes a surprising fact about war presidencies:
Lincoln and FDR, who led the nation through cataclysmic wars, were indeed re-elected, but not without difficulty. Presidents who waged more remote and less popular wars, such as Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, found incumbency a liability.
He goes on to note how past war [...]

There was this documentary on the Discovery-Times channel about streets named after Martin Luther King. The filmmaker, an African-American, bemoaned the fact that the streets tend to be in poverty-stricken black neighborhoods. Sprinkled between liberal shibboleths on “fighting” for “civil rights” were images of the American flag upside-down.
And that’s when it struck me just how [...]