The Midnight Gambit

Kerry waited all of 41 minutes to respond to President Bush's disingenuous, wrap-me-in-the-flag speech last night. So much for his failure to respond. And it was strong stuff, too, with lines like "I will not have my commitment to defending this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they had a chance and who misled this nation into war in Iraq," and questioning Dick Cheney's 5 deferments during Vietnam.

And today's speech was maybe even stronger:

NEWARK, Ohio (Reuters) - Democrat John Kerry on Friday dismissed the Republican convention as "bitter and insulting" and promised to be a president who would tell Americans the truth.

"Every time they open their mouths they can't tell the truth," Kerry said at a rally. "It's time for us to have a president of the United States who can look you in the eye and when he does, you know you're being told the truth."

(snip)

"There seems to be such a great gap, it's as big as the Grand Canyon, bigger, between the kind of things they talk about and the problems that are represented in people's lives," he said.

Kerry ridiculed the Bush administration's "celebration" of the August job numbers released on Friday that showed the unemployment rate had dropped from 5.5 percent to 5.4 percent with the creation of 144,000 new jobs.

"At the rate that this administration is creating jobs, you're not going to have a net plus-one job in the state of Ohio until the year 2011," he said. "I don't think this is something to celebrate. I think it's something to get to work on."

Say what you will about the Kerry campaign, but his midnight in Ohio gambit was fucking brilliant, and it has Joe Lockhart written all over it. Instead of having surrogates do his rapid response, he did it himself. Also, by releasing excerpts of the response before Bush's speech, it ended up being part of the story of last night. You couldn't write a story about Bush's speech without also mentioning Kerry's midnight gambit. Despite an outlier Timepoll (trumpeted hard by CNN today) showing Bush with an 11-point lead, I think Kerry's fight will bounce this RNC bounce right back.

There's no letup until November. It behooves every single one of us to do whatever we can to help the effort. I've given money to Kerry and plan to give more to the DNC. Despite being in a safe blue state, I'll be volunteering somewhere to help out. I'm part of MoveOn's "Leave No Voter Behind" project, which you can find at their website.

No time to rest, we've got 60 days to get this thing done.