Dole=Kerry

[Dooby]

OK, everybody knows I have been saying the Kerry campaign looks like the 1996 Dole campaign for a couple of weeks, right? Well, I have been seeing the damn parallels being alluded to all over the place in the last couple of days.

Here is an example:

'I'M TELLING YOU, DOLE COULD STILL WIN THIS THING," I SAID [09/28 11:21 AM]

So how many Kerry Spot readers were pulling for Bob Dole in 1996? More than a few, I bet. At the National Review party at Kate's house a week or so back, there was some discussions of parallels between Dole that year and Kerry this year. Longtime member of the Senate, party loyalist, war record, has his own idiosyncratic style that doesn’t quite hit the right note with the voters. The base doesn’t quite love him, but they see him as vastly better than the incumbent. He beats a weird assortment of weaker rivals in the primary.

And, as Jay Nordlinger pointed out, Clinton “absolutely shellacked our guy.” (While the margin was only 49 to 41 with about 10 percent going to Perot, there just were not many moments that people thought Dole was going to suddenly surge and pull off the upset.)

But I ask readers to recall Dole to think of their own farfetched scenarios that they concocted in 1996, keeping hope alive that somehow, Bob Dole was going to shock the world and win the presidency. I had wondered at the time if the Electoral College vote might be much closer than anyone expected. (Clinton won 379 to 159, to show you how far off my thoughts were at the time.)

Another one of the big hopes of the Republicans that year was that there was a big, silent wave of Republican voters who weren’t answering their phones, who weren’t showing up in the opinion polls, but who were going to turn out in Election Day.

Anyway, I thought of all that as I read the headline to today’s edition of ABC News The Note: “Faith in the Ground Game is the Last Refuge of the (Still) Optimistic Democrat.”

They have a decent analysis of which swing states are still in play. Short version: With each passing week, Kerry has less room for error, and more and more of the surprisingly-shaky blue states look like “must-wins.” But I don’t think the Colorado ballot initiative to split the state’s electoral votes will be the big deal that the Noters think it will.

I am way ahead of the curve, people. Ouch! I think I broke my shoulder patting myself on the back.