Look, I think it is ridiculous to start speculating about doomsday scenarios, just because Kerry is starting to pull ahead of Bush in the polls. That is really too much.

The point is, Bush is looking pretty vulnerable at this point. Despite the economic business recovery, his numbers aren't going up with the supposedly 'good' economic news. The reason why is because the middle class isn't feeling prosperous. The reasons why aren't at all complex: it is the cost of goods and services the middle class is wholly dependent upon going up, and their wages remaining stagnant or going down.

Those who bought homes during the real estate bubble are now staring deflation of their property values in the face. Interest rates were phenomenally low, but the cost of their real estate purchases were ridiculously high. But they bought homes anyway. They continued to spend, spend, spend money they didn't have because the credit market was so loose, they were able to buy high end luxury consumer goods like SUVs, plasma TVs, etc they otherwise couldn't afford. But now, their middle class jobs are being downsized and outsourced overseas, at the same time that the real costs of education, health care, and transportation are skyrocketing, driving inflation in those sectors. And the interest rates on those credit cards, ARMS, etc. are getting ready to rise too.

Americans aren't always idiots, just most the time. Some sense that both inflation AND deflation are breathing down our necks. They sense the recovery is no good for workers, including middle class workers, because people aren't getting good paying jobs to replace the ones they or the people they know, have lost. If they are working at all. They see friends and relatives who once earned $50,000+ working minimum wage jobs, and their teenagers and college grads are unable to get much, if any work at all.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this was never a sustainable 'prosperity' for the working and middle class under Reagan/Bush and Clinton. But it sure has been a prosperous 205 year run for the wealthy.

When exactly the middle class is going to wake up and figure out that their prosperity isn't of concern to the Republican elite, I don't really know. It may take four more years of greed, graft, corruption, disastrous policymaking, and demonizing of government while canonizing business, etc. and the American people REALLY suffering, and not just the poor and working poor, for the US cultural conservatives to lose their grip on power.

Kerry could just as easily lose in November as win, at this point. Just because the tide is going out on Bush now, doesn't mean it won't come back in for him by November. It would take a serious liberal and progressive backlash on the scale of the conservative backlash of 1980, 1984, and 1996, to really turn the tide back towards liberal social and economic values. But it will turn, just like it did when FDR was elected after a similar run of corrupt Republican presidents.