Debate Prediction - Kerry's theme will be "George Bush has lost touch with reality." He first tried this line out last week. Now the Kerry rapid response team has posted this:

BUSH EVOKES FORD: “TALIBAN NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE

Evoking Gerald Ford’s 1976 comment, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” George Bush said yesterday that the “Taliban is no longer in existence,” underscoring the point that he isn’t being straight with the American people about his wrong choices in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admittedly there are still some scattered Taliban in Afghanistan but they no longer rule the country and thousands were killed or captured. The rest are in hiding along the Pakistan/Afghanistan boarder.

Kerry's web site has a lot of quotes to back up their assurtion but some of the quotes are contradictory. Most say that they are along the Pakistan boarder but one claimes that they control 90% of Afghanistan. The Kerry campaign is having a few problems with reality here also.

Anyway, Kerry is going to stress this again and again - things are terrible and Bush doesn't even realize it. You heard it here first.

The British newspaper the Guardian has a long piece on the election. The Guardian in general and this piece in particular have a far left bias but there are a few insights in it.

First, there is the insularity of the people they talked with.

'I don't know anybody who supports the war. I don't know anybody who voted for Bush [in 2000], and I certainly don't know any one who's going to vote for him this time.'

Several of them compare Bush with Nazis.

Mailer then gleefully identified the speaker, speaking at his Nuremberg trial in 1946: Hermann Goering! In Jewish Manhattan, it doesn't get more visceral than this.

'I actually don't think,' he remarked, 'that Bush is pure evil, but he responded [to 9/11] in the worst way, [and has] surrounded himself with such vile people that in a way it doesn't matter.'

Then there is the attitude toward the midwest.

One of the puzzles of America's electoral map today is the degree to which people are voting against their interests. The poorest parts of America today are not to be found in Appalachia or the Deep South, but out in Kansas and the great plains, where ranchers struggle to feed their cattle and the nation's farmers stare every day into an abyss of bankruptcy and destitution. Yet it was precisely here, where life is hardest, that in 2000 the Republicans racked up 80 per cent of the vote. What is it about the Democrats, the party of the poor and the defenceless, that does not speak to these country voters? Well, for a start, it is the Democrats' association with East- and West-Coast values. In the words of a famous TV commercial, these liberals are a 'tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show'.

Right - the culture gap is real. The Left looks down on the rest of the country but they wonder why we don't trust them to lead us.

Here's a good one:

Ford watched Bush's response to the first hostilities on American soil since the war of independence with frank dismay.

Maybe Pearl Harbor dosn't count because it was a territory and the Civil War didn't involve outsiders (except for English blockade runners). I don't expect a British writer to know about Indian wars or Mexican American wars however there was a war in which America was invaded and our capital sacked and burned. I expect a London based writer to know about that since it was the War of 1812 and we were fighting the English.

So, a British novelist talks with a cross-section of America but only finds anti-Bush people to interview. What do they think of Kerry's chances?

Packer has just met the senator at the Democratic Convention and found him 'more thoughtful and less genial' than she expected of a man courting the African-American vote. He had seemed bored by the interview. We agreed that Clinton would never have been bored meeting the voters. Once again, there was no escaping the unspoken longing for a better candidate to take on Bush.

So can Kerry pull it off? To this simple question there is, as I write, no clear answer.