Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The state of the race

John Podhoretz:

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The New York Times is claiming, hilariously, that the vast sums of money the Bush team spent to define John Kerry as a flip-flopper didn't make much of a dent. That's simply absurd. That money was extraordinarily well-spent. Everybody with a scintilla of political awareness in the United States now has the sense that John Kerry speaks out of both sides of his mouth on every issue.

Bush wasn't trying to buy ads to get himself in the lead. He was buying ads to change the political dynamic of the winter and spring, during which he was bashed and bashed — and offered little or no response.

He successfully put Kerry on the defensive, to the point where the Democratic nominee is far better off if he just keeps his mouth shut and lets the media, the 9/11 Commission and Richard Clarke types do his campaigning for him.

But at some point John Kerry is going to have to come out of the shadows and get to work making the case for himself — and he ain't good at it.

As things stand right now, Dubya's approval rating in most polls is back over 50 percent. He's taken the lead back from Kerry in almost every national survey in the past week. The Harris poll, which has long had a reputation for skewing liberal, shows Bush ahead by 10 points. Another left-leaning pollster, Stanley Greenberg, has the race at 49-48 in a survey done for National Public Radio.

More important than these raw numbers are some answers on specific issues. In the Greenberg poll, Bush has pulled even with Kerry when it comes to who would best handle the economy. Democrats had a 20-point margin on the economy only a few months ago — and the president's numbers can only get better with time, as the depth and breadth of the economic recovery becomes more and more evident.

Even more striking are the Greenberg poll's findings on health care. After fairly summarizing the positions of both candidates, Greenberg asked which candidate would do better on health issues. Kerry and Bush tie. Health care is a subject on which Democrats have tended to poll 15 to 20 points higher than Republicans.

There's no reason to believe that the American people have suddenly discovered that George W. Bush signed a prescription-drug benefit into law. Rather, these poll numbers suggest that the discomfort conservatives and Republicans were feeling toward Bush, which depressed his numbers a month ago, is now over with.

I think there is a portion of Bush's dissatisfaction number attributable to conservatives, who may be unhappy but they will never vote for Kerry.