Four Words

Here we are on the third anniversary of September 11, 2001, and John Kerry is getting clobbered in the polls. Is anyone really surprised? Does anyone think the odds of him winning are greater than 50 percent?
Bush’s post-convention bounce seems to be sticking.
Here is the latest from Time:

Last week’s seismic voter shift to George W. Bush showed no signs of dwindling in this week’s Time Poll. Bush continues to lead Democratic challenger John Kerry among likely voters by double digits, 52% – 41%, in the three way race, with Nader at 3%, the same as last week.

Yesterday Mark Poling said in my comments section that John Kerry could easily beat George W. Bush with a platform that looked something like this:

Good war, bad occupation, but I’ll make Iraq right, and I won’t make the same mistakes with our other enemies…

Yep.
You could reduce it even further, all the way down to four words:

Good war, bad occupation.

That’s it. Done. Some people would argue with that. But independents and swing voters wouldn’t.
It amazes me that neither Kerry nor any of his highly-paid advisors could come up with these four simple words.
If you want to appeal to the middle, you have to know where the middle is. Centrists may be “wishy washy” when it comes to our two political parties. But that doesn’t mean centrists are wishy-washy on terrorism. Bush beats Kerry by a whopping and insurmountable 23 points on this issue.