"I voted to support the president and he fucked it up"

The new Shorter Kerry line -- "I voted to support the president and he fucked it up."
Ah, yes -- and there's the line for all of America.
They tried so hard to support Bush after 9/11, they needed a leader so badly that they made up a leader-myth mirage and cloaked it around Bush.
How easy would it have been for him to win this election? Just a reasonable modicum of competence, that's all the American people wanted -- some focused funding for education and health care, a little effort at job creation, some restraint on greedy tax cuts, maintaining a reasonable level of environmental protection, supporting a few upgraded benefits for the troops, and a foreign policy that worked earnestly and seriously, even if ineffectively, to resolve the Israel-Palestinian mess.
The media has given the republicans this inflated reputation as being super-competent, precision, shock-and-awe campaigners.
But their campaign so far is a joke -- low-turnout events clumsily staged and scripted, cobbled-together "announcements" that do not amount to anything (like the "bringing the troops home" announcement, but not from where people are shooting at them, and its not happening for years, anyway).
Cheney is supposed to be this big-time "attack dog" but his attacks are junior-high juvenile (ooh, ooh, teach -- he said "Sensitive"!) and Bush is supposed to be this "great communicator" but just babbles on and on and uses the same tired jokes over and over (and he doesn't know what "sovereignty" means). And the Swift Boat ads have surpassed even the Willie Horton ads for dishonesty, leaving Bush with no cover for the cowardice of hiw own so-called military career and for his 9/11 freeze frame.
Coming in the fall will be a series of ads showing why republicans are switching to Kerry -- the trickle will, I think, become a deluge.