Don't panic about Kerry campaign

Salon has a story on why we shouldn't panic yet about Kerry's bumpy campaign.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/05/kerry/print.html

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Here's a snip ...

Premature panic
The doom-and-gloom brigade is savaging Kerry because the race is still tied after Bush's horrible April. But the campaign has barely begun.

By Tim Grieve

"May 5, 2004 | With just months to go in an election that ought to be a referendum on President Bush, the New York Times runs a front-page story: The Democrats are in serious trouble. Although Bush's approval ratings are low, the presumptive Democratic nominee can't get any traction. His campaign "continues to confront a cloud of doubts and reservations," the Times says, and voters are complaining that he hasn't offered the country a clear vision for the future.

It may sound like the Times on John Kerry in 2004. In fact, it's the Times on Bill Clinton in 1992.

The media began making funeral plans for the Kerry campaign over the weekend, and the New York Times led the way with a gloomy front-pager by Adam Nagourney. As it turns out, the predictions of Kerry's demise were more replay than revelation. It's certainly true that Kerry has problems -- his campaign lacks the money, the organizational structure, and the message discipline of the well-oiled Bush-Cheney machine -- but we've heard this before.

The Times painted an equally dour assessment of Clinton's prospects in a front-page piece in April 1992 headlined "Clinton Dogged by Voter Doubt." The Times said then that unnamed "political professionals in the Democratic Party" were troubled that Clinton hadn't made a better impression on the nation's voters. Nagourney's piece Sunday reported that "Democratic Party officials" have similar worries about Kerry.

But there's a key difference here: In April 1992, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed Clinton trailing President George H.W. Bush, 49 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows Kerry and President George W. Bush in a statistical dead heat.

Clinton beat Bush 43 percent to 37 percent in November 1992.

The Times does not stand alone in questioning the direction and momentum of the Kerry campaign. ...

But Democratic strategists have a message for the nervous: Don't panic. Yes, the Kerry campaign has been slow to organize itself, to get campaign operations up and running in could-be-crucial states like Ohio and Arizona, to define Kerry and to set him apart from Bush on the critical question of Iraq, to respond to -- or to take the high road above -- the incessant smears from the White House and its waves of surrogate attackers. But the race is young, Democratic strategists say, and this Bush is as vulnerable as the last one was. ..."