Bush's Last Hurrah

(CBS)  Dotty Lynch is the Senior Political Editor for CBS News. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points

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"They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug," President Bush said this week as he headed into his second – and last – convention.

And they've seen him up and they've seen him down. In 2001, following 9/11, he had a job rating in the high eighties; this spring it went as low as 41 percent.

The president has taken a real beating in the press in the past few months. The continuing turmoil in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandals and job losses in key battleground states have all taken their toll. His job rating on Iraq is bad and his ratings on the economy are abysmal. And yet he goes into his convention even or slightly ahead of John Kerry.

"You know Democrats are pulling out their hair right now," a Democratic media consultant told me this week. "They think its 1988 all over again."

What they are losing hair and a lot of sleep over is that John Kerry's baby bounce from the Democratic convention, which put him anywhere from 2 to 5 points over President Bush, has evaporated. The CBS News/New York Times poll conducted last week had Kerry's lead shrinking to one point, and three other polls conducted this week have shown the race dead even or the president with a small lead.

Team Bush is breathing a sigh of relief. "No challenger has ever won going into the incumbent's convention behind," Matthew Dowd, senior strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign told USA Today. He cited winning challengers, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992, as evidence. Dowd is crafty enough to have spun a Bush poll deficit, but these new numbers and the perception that Kerry blew his convention by overstating his biography and underplaying his issue agenda makes Dowd's work a lot easier.

The polls also show that President Bush retains his status as a strong leader and the one who is best dealing with terrorism and taxes. But even on compassion, usually a Democratic strength, Bush only trails Kerry 48 percent to 42 percent as the person who cares most about average people.

Another Republican pollster Bill McInturff, however, told MSNBC that Bush is in a "precarious situation" with just a little more than two months to go to the election. "He is really frozen... It's a very difficult haul to get where he is on the ballot and get higher," he said. "We need a little more than a bump up to make this [something other than] a difficult race."

This may be why Matthew Dowd thinks that motivating the Republican base is the key. In an interview with Ron Brownstein from the L.A. Times, Dowd said last week that "motivating Republicans this year is as important or possibly more important than reaching the persuadable voters." His goal is to get the same number of Republicans as Democrats to vote in the general election. In 2000 Democrats outnumbered Republicans 39% to 35%.

To pull this off they have been advertising heavily on cable TV stations featuring fishing, hunting, golf, country music and NASCAR racing. While Kerry has been campaigning almost exclusively in swing areas, President Bush has been going to rock-ribbed Republican areas such as Sioux City, Iowa and the Florida Panhandle, as well as the big media markets in the battleground.

The Kerry campaign is putting on a brave face saying that they are not overly worried about their falloff in the polls or even by a bounce which Bush may get following the GOP convention. Kerry pollster Mark Mellman cites his own historical trend; he says that every incumbent who has been reelected has had a double-digit lead at this point.

Camp Kerry concedes that August did not go well for them and some inside the campaign say that they made a bad mistake not responding sooner and more aggressively to the swift boat ads and letting the Kerry get on the defensive on Iraq.

But Kerry pollster Diane Feldman points out that they were off the air in August, conserving money for the fall campaign and that soft and undecided voters tend to "drift away" when the candidate isn't visible. She believes that the undecideds are "structurally like the Democratic voters" – lower middle-income, anti-Bush and prioritizing health care and the economy. The challenge for Kerry is to break through on those issues. So far, he has not convinced these folks that he can do better on these issues than can Bush.

So President Bush starts his last convention holding his own. He has come back to New York where his advisors believe he had his finest moment as a leader and a healer. They want to portray him as a man "in the arena" who is strong and resolute. A lot of Democrats, especially New Yorkers, are going to do their best to knock down those plans and in 65 days the voters will decide which historical precedent, Dowd's or Mellman's is going to prevail.