Bush Victory Portents
Five months before the election, President Bush has been taking a pounding in the press, and his poll numbers are suffering. Scott Elliott's ElectionProjections.com--which estimates the probable 2004 results by applying a formula that adjusts each state's 2000 margin based on current national opinion polls--shows Kerry beating Bush, 337 electoral votes to 201, with a popular vote total of 52.87% to Bush's 45.3%. Elliott's formula has Kerry picking up six of 2000's red states--Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire and Ohio--along with every state Gore won.

Of course, late-spring polls don't necessarily predict the election outcome. In 1988, the last time a man named George Bush ran against a Massachusetts liberal, the latter looked a lot stronger than Kerry does today. Gallup helpfully provides trendlines for past elections. In a May 1988 Gallup poll, Michael Dukakis had a 16-point lead--54% to 38%--and Vice President Bush continued to trail until after the Republican Convention in August. Gallup's latest poll this year, conducted May 21-23, shows Kerry with a scant two-point lead, 49% to 47%. Kerry's edge narrows to a single point, 47% to 46%, when Ralph Nader is included. (Nader gets 4%.)

Meanwhile, there are other indications of strength for the incumbent. The Iowa Electronic Markets (click on "get prices") have just begun trading futures on the election outcome. As of yesterday's close, a contract paying $1 in the event of a Republican victory was selling for 55.4 cents. A Democratic contract went for just 44.9 cents.

If the New York Times is to be believed, the Bush-loathing leaders of France and Germany seem to be banking on Bush: "Officials in both countries say that their leaders have come to conclude that Senator John Kerry's campaign to defeat Mr. Bush has not caught fire and that they may have to coexist with Mr. Bush for another four years," the paper reported Monday from Paris. "So the grumbling now is done more quietly, in private. Gloating is not in."

And the Rasmussen polling firm has a fascinating analysis of a survey of 2,000 likely voters. It asked them if they would consider voting for each candidate. Bush does better than Kerry, with 54% saying they'd consider voting for him, vs. 49% for Kerry. Thirty-nine percent say they would "definitely NOT" vote for each candidate. A deeper look at the numbers suggests that Bush's base is more solid than Kerry's--which is to say, more Kerry voters than Bush voters are likely to switch:

Ninety-one percent (91%) of those who would consider voting for Kerry already plan to vote for him. Just 3% of those who would consider Kerry are currently planning to vote for Bush.

However, just 81% of those who would consider voting for Bush are planning to vote for him at this time. Another 10% of these potential supporters are currently planning to vote for Kerry.

Another Rasmussen analysis looks at "swing voters"--the 12% who said they would be willing to consider voting for either candidate. Currently this group breaks down 39% for Kerry, 36% for Bush, 6% other and 20% undecided, but several demographic characteristics bode well for Bush. Swing voters are 56% male and 44% female; 62% are investors; and 37% describe themselves as conservative, vs. just 14% liberal (and 48% moderate).

All this inclines us to think Bush remains a solid favorite for re-election. So does our evaluation of Kerry, who strikes us as pompous and overcautious. Kerry's political approach calls to mind not the idealistic Democrats of the past--FDR, Truman, JFK--so much as Warren Harding, who in his 1921 Inaugural Address famously declared, "We must strive for normalcy to reach stability." True, Harding had won in a landslide and replaced a wartime president of the opposite party--but the war was long over by November 1920.

To be sure, we claim no special talent at political prognostication, and we've certainly been wrong before. Right up until the Iowa caucuses, we thought Howard Dean would be the Democratic nominee. We wrote Kerry off for the same reasons we're inclined to discount his chances now. Our error in that case was a failure of imagination: Never having voted in a Democratic primary, we didn't understand how the mind of a Democratic primary voter works. It turns out, as the exit polls made clear, that the Democrats really, really wanted to beat President Bush, so they chose the "electable" Kerry over the passionate Dean.

By deeming Kerry electable, the Dems made a judgment about how independents and (to a lesser extent) Republicans would view him in November. If Kerry ends up losing, it will show that Democratic primary voters are as bad at anticipating the preferences of other groups as we were when we concluded he was going to lose the nomination.

The Kerry Echo Chamber
One reason Kerry appears to be doing well is that the media are generally friendly--if not to him, at least to the anti-Bush cause. Press bias is a perennial complaint of conservatives and Republicans, but it may well hurt liberals and Democrats more than it helps them, because painting an unrealistically rosy picture of their prospects breeds complacency. Today's New York Times has a wonderful example. The paper reports on an exchange at a "question-and-answer session with reporters" in Tampa, Fla.:

Asked whether politics might have heightened terror alerts last week, Mr. Kerry said that he "wouldn't want to believe that."

But he added: "The problem is for many Americans, however, they can't take it as face value. Which means something has happened about the credibility of this administration in this process. It's a question of the level of confidence Americans have in this administration, and I think that's a serious issue."

So here we have a reporter leveling an unsubstantiated charge against the Bush administration. Kerry responds by (wisely) declining to endorse the accusation directly, instead doing so tacitly by attributing it to "many Americans."

Does Kerry really believe that "many Americans" agree with the anonymous reporter's allegation? Probably he does. But most of the Americans he hears from are no doubt his own supporters--people who are naturally inclined to believe the worst of the president.

What we have here, in other words, is an echo chamber: Kerry, his supporters and journalists all saying what they would like to believe is true. No doubt it's comforting to the president's opponents to pick up the Times and read stuff like this. But if Kerry wants to wage a winning campaign, he'd be better off if he had a way of finding out what is true.

LBJ, War Hero
Several readers wrote to tell us that we should have included Lyndon B. Johnson in our item yesterday listing war-hero presidential nominees. Johnson, a Naval Reservist, received a silver star "for gallantry in action in the vicinity of Port Moresby and Salamaua, New Guinea on June 9, 1942." In addition, both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford served in the Navy and saw action in the Pacific during World War II.

In fact, every major-party presidential nominee since 1952 has served in the military in some capacity, with the exceptions of Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey and Bill Clinton. Even Silly Tank Man, the 1988 Democratic candidate, served in the Army, from 1955 through 1957.

The Press Corps' Porn Addiction
Yet more gratuitous references to Abu Ghraib:

• From an Associated Press dispatch about the Supreme Court case involving enemy combatant Jose Padilla: "Similarly, the images of prisoner abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are not part of another important case this term testing the legal rights of detainees at another U.S.-operated prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
  
  
• From a New York Times review of "The Great Game" by Frederick Hitz, a book about the CIA: "In 1982, shortly before he volunteered information to the Soviets, some bitter wag at the C.I.A. put up a poster describing the 'Six Phases of a U.S. Government Sponsored Covert Action.' They were listed as enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and praise and honor for the nonparticipants. That may well describe the response to revelations about Abu Ghraib prison and undisclosed activities carried out by the C.I.A. and Special Forces in furtherance of 'the war on terror.' " The Reuterian scare quotes around war on terror are an added fillip.
  
  
• From a Reuters dispatch about President Bush's visit with "one of his harshest critics," a certain John Paul II: "In the pope's remarks last Thursday, the pontiff did not mention Iraq but it was the first time he has spoken specifically about torture since photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison emerged last month."
  
  
• From a New York Times story on John Kerry's slogan, "Let America be America again": "The phrase has surfaced at a time of outrage over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, aides noted, and on Thursday in Seattle, Mr. Kerry used it again to articulate his differences from Mr. Bush on foreign policy."
  
  
• And from an Associated Press article on nonlethal weapons--those that aim only to immobilize the enemy: "But in an era of secret interrogations of al-Qaida suspects and revelations of U.S. abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Executive Director Doug Johnson of the Minneapolis-based Center for Torture Victims is skeptical."

Hat tip: blogger Daniel Sterman, who found all but the last of these items.

CNN's Rhetorical Arsenal
A lesson plan on the CNN Student News Web site urges teachers to make use of a speech by President Bush:

Have students define the term "rhetoric" and discus [sic] how words can be used as "weapons" and to sway political opinion. . . . Have students discuss how Bush is using words as weapons and what he hopes will be gained by his rhetoric.

Lest you think CNN is being one-sided, an earlier plan used one of President Bush's opponents to teach the same lesson:

Have students define the term "rhetoric" and discus [sic] how words can be used as "weapons" to sway political opinion. . . . Discuss how bin Laden is using words as weapons, and what he hopes will be gained by his rhetoric.

Well, you didn't think it was going to be John Kerry, did you?

Don't Know Much About History
The Washington Post published an op-ed the other day by Pakistani ruler Pervez Musharraf titled "A Plea for Enlightened Moderation." Musharraf's piece includes this whopper: "Before the anti-Soviet Afghan war, the sole cause of unrest and concern in the Muslim world was the Palestine dispute. It was this issue that led to a unity of Muslims--in favor of Palestinians and against Israel."

We guess Musharraf has never heard of the Pakistani civil war.

'Part-Black'
An Associated Press report on the decline of black enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley, includes this quote:

"Don't go there thinking, 'I'm going to be looking around for other black kids,'" says Ward Connerly, a part-black UC regent who led the fight to drop race-based admissions. "Go there and recognize that it's going to be one of the greatest experiences of your life. You're there to meet new people. You're there to learn. You're not there to engage in this racial, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall' kind of thing."

Whereas the AP refers to Connerly as "part-black," it quotes numerous supporters of racial preferences without mentioning their race, much less determining whether they're "all" or "part" anything. Oh well, at least they didn't call him a "mulatto" or a "quadroon."

Maybe He Should Try AZT Instead
"Bill Clinton Using Clout to Fight AIDS"--headline, Associated Press, June 3

Abortion Alfresco
From a Washington Post report on this week's court decision declaring the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003 unconstitutional:

The ban on the procedure that critics call "partial birth abortion" was already on hold temporarily as three courts heard legal challenges to it, but Hamilton's decision specifically prohibits the Justice Department from enforcing the law at any of Planned Parenthood's 900 clinics, which perform about half the nation's abortions. Planned Parenthood physicians who perform the procedure outside the organization's clinics also are protected.

Planned Parenthood docs perform abortions outside clinics? Where, in the alleys out back?

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Fred Danzig, Michael Segal, Scott Billeveau, Kenneth Vincent, Dennis Lund, Ellen Forshaw, Sean McPhail, Jim Campbell, Michael Nunnelley, Stuart Creque, George Shea, Randall Watsek, John Williamson, Jim Peterson, Hiawatha Bray, Joann Wiley, John Sanders and Wayne Kuhaneck. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Paul Johnson: D-Day's lessons for today's war leaders.
• Peggy Noonan: Sizing up college grads, secular Europeans, antismoking zealots and John Kerry.
• Steven Zeitchik: William Manchester is dead. How will he finish his book?