Posted here Wednesday, October 06, 2004 at 11:24:47 PM 
This is an extraordinary article, more real, more intelligent, than almost any. Highly recommend reading it all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/arts/10rich.html?pagewanted=1&;8hpib&oref=login
In the 2004 replay the Ted Rogers of the story is, of all people, James A. Baker III, the Bush family consigliere who so cannily gamed the 2000 count in Florida, outsmarting the Gore forces at every turn. This may be the year he lost his fast ball, unless you take the Freudian view that he has an unconscious wish to prevent 43 from bettering the re-election record of his original patron, 41. Either way, the thoroughness with which Mr. Baker's offstage maneuvers set his guy up for disaster on Sept. 30 may tell us more about the state of play in the campaign than the much-dissected style and substance of the debaters' onstage performance.
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Mr. Bush could recoup by Nov. 2 for all manner of reasons, including his showing in the subsequent debates, both yet to come as I write. John F. Kerry is no John F. Kennedy. But the liberal blog Daily Kos had the big picture right: on Sept. 30, "months of meticulous image manipulation" by the Bush-Cheney forces went "down the toilet in 90 minutes."
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