For this is not really a race between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Instead it's a race against time to see if scores of millions of dollars in Republican propaganda will destroy all public confidence in John Kerry before the news flow of real world events devours George W. Bush (barring his own self-destruction in the final debate). Kerry has provided virtually no reason to back him other than that he is a more rational replacement for the incumbent. The incumbent, for his part, is quickly losing any rationale for re-election. Just to rehearse the obvious: We now have his own Iraq Study Group reporting that not only was Saddam bereft of WMD, but he had a declining rather than "gathering" capacity to produce them. Former occupation proconsul L. Paul Bremer admits that the U.S. needed more troops to prevent chaos in post-invasion Iraq. And on the domestic front, Bush officially became the first president in seven decades on whose watch there was a net loss of jobs -- somewhere between a half-million and a million and a half, depending on how you cut the numbers. This in spite of his radical intervention in the economy, having imposed the most sweeping redistribution of wealth upward in the history of the U.S. But instead of producing the 2 million to 5 million promised jobs, these tax gifts to the richest among us helped produce the opposite effect. [more
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