Neck and neck

As if this hasn't been a maddening enough presidential campaign, with two weeks to go, a number of polls - among them this one from MSNBC - have the race completely tied. On the one hand, people's approval of Bush's performance, and their belief that the country is headed in the right direction, is dropping - bad for Bush. On the other, people now apparently believe that we will win in Iraq - Lord only knows what news source gave birth to that particular belief system - and also just don't trust Kerry all that much - bad for Kerry. So - 48 and 48.... Looking back at polls from 2000, it seems that this is actually a good thing for Kerry, because leading into the election Gore was down in 39 of 43 polls that were run the week before the election, and as we all know he won the popular election. If this same logic held - and of course there is no reason to imagine that it should, but IF it held - Kerry would have a clear margin of victory. Add to this the common wisdom that I've been reading on both conservative and liberal blogs, namely that in an election involving an incumbent whose popularity is below 50% (Bush is at 44% in the MSNBC poll) undecideds always break for the challenger at the last minute, and it could be a runaway Kerry victory.

All that said, I'm basically saving my sanity pre-election by assuming that Karl Rove is going to pull some piece of major nastiness out of his bag of dirty tricks at the last minute and smear Kerry with something with no time for Kerry to regain his balance. (I read a great quote in the New Yorker today, from an article about Mark Halperin who puts together The Note on www.abcnews.com. His father was majorly slimed by conservative Republicans during confirmation hearings when Clinton attempted to make him Assistant Secretary of Defense saying that the CIA had a "secret dossier" on him. Even though the CIA adamantly denied such a thing, the allegations stuck. He complained that "It's very hard for the truth to catch up with a lie." And slime throwers understand this inherently (and yes they exist on both sides though don't they seem to be - Hello Joe McCarthy - by and large Republican and conservative? and why is this? and why does it only seem to get worse?) .) At any rate, I'm just assuming Rove has this little pet viper or copperhead that he's keeping at the ready, ready to pull out at the last second that will kill Kerry's campaign dead, so that I don't go stark raving mad at the moment that it happens. Or, let's say nothing happens, and Bush just wins (after they've shredded off a good few thousand Democratic ballots in Florida and hacked away a few touchscreen Democratic votes in Ohio). In any case, preemptive sanity-preserving tactics - I'm just assuming Kerry is already toast.

Perhaps I'm sending bad vibes into the air. But I don't believe in that so I don't care...