Lowered expectations. Near the end of his appearance on the Daily Show, Kerry said this:

Well, that's the test of debates. I mean, look, the President has won every debate he's ever had. People need to understand that. He beat Ann Richards. He beat Al Gore. So he's a good debater. And debates are sort of formulaic.

I know that it has been months since Iowa and New Hampshire but still... Kerry won those states on three points:

1. I'm a Viet Nam war hero.
2. Wouldn't you love seeing me debate George Bush?
3. Bring it on!

That was it, the sum of his early campaign. Now he is warning us that Bush will win the debate. What happened?

Funny how two people can look at the same data and come up with different conclusions. Eric Alterman looks at a site called the Slant-O-meter sees that Fox has more critical coverage of Kerry than Bush and sees evidence of a right-wing slime-machine. I look at the rest of the chart which shows that the big three networks are far more critical of Bush than Kerry and I see evidence that the mainstream media is biased against Bush. NBC is especially bad about it, much more pronounced than Fox.