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Smooth sailing for the president

TIME magazine released its newest presidential election poll numbers on Friday, and they did not look pretty for the Kerry campaign. The poll shows likely voters choosing Bush by an 11-point margin, 52 percent to Kerry's 41 percent, a shocking widening of what was heretofore a close race.

The TIME figures are not an aberration. Of the nine polls that look at likely voters tracked by PollingReport.com in the last 14 days, Bush is ahead in all nine of them, and, when aggregated together, Bush leads by 4.4 points.

As evidenced by recent reshuffling and bringing in of old Clinton campaign consultants James Carville and Paul Begala, the Kerry campaign is in disarray, caught somewhere between responding back to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and going on the offensive on domestic affairs. Given this situation, it is fair to say that this is now Bush's election to lose.

The Republican National Convention clearly played a part in sparking Bush's rise, in sharp contrast to Kerry's flat post-convention state. Not only was it great political theater, but it also served as a perfect way to cap off a month of solid gains.

In contrast to Kerry at his convention, Bush delivered a speech that laid out a case for his election that eschewed too many overbroad statements. He outlined specific policy initiatives to bring about an "ownership society," specifically in the health care and retirement policy areas. With respect to foreign policy, he spoke with candor to his view of Iraq as a noble cause at the time of our entry into the country and still today.

Others helped at the convention as well. With John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger (three men with enormous national popularity of their own) speaking eloquently and passionately on his behalf at the convention, Bush surely enjoyed a halo effect from the popularity of these other political luminaries.

Beyond the horse race, other numbers show that people trust Bush more than Kerry on the issues that are framing the political discourse this cycle. On the economy, TIME respondents trust Bush over Kerry by 6 points. On Iraq, they trusted Bush over Kerry by a whopping 20 points, whereas that figure was 2 points just a month ago. The war on terror issue similarly goes to Bush by a ridiculous margin of 23 points.

These three things are not issues Kerry can afford to avoid talking about, yet when he does talk about them it appears that the American people would wish he'd stop.

Of course, it depends on which John Kerry the American people are listening to. Last week, he again illustrated that he hasn't heard a position on the Iraq war he didn't like, calling it "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time." As Robert Kagan and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard point out, this is exactly the same position that Howard Dean took in the Democratic primaries, and that Kerry stood against at the time. As demonstrated by the Bush polling numbers, Americans appear to want a principled leader, a trait which Kerry's constant flipping and flopping do not project.

Of course, all of this relies on the assumption that the war on terror remains stable through the election. As Bush does well when events on the ground in Iraq go well or simply stay quiet, he can do poorly should things deteriorate.

Nevertheless, no incumbent candidate with the polling numbers Bush is currently pulling has lost an election. And the current indicators seem to show that the trend will continue.

Jim Prosser's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jprosser@cavalierdaily.com.

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