One of Ours

...there's some wisdom -- and certainly a strategy behind John Kerry's relative absence from the airwaves over the last six to eight weeks.

The conventional rule of campaigning is that you don't let your opponent define you before you get a chance to define yourself.

Yet, as Ryan describes it, the Kerry plan is to do something very near the opposite. The plan is to take these punches from the Bush campaign and let Bush burn through a lot of his money. Hopefully, in the view of the Kerry campaign, Kerry comes through that without having suffered too much damage. Then Kerry fights back with hard-hitting ads through the late spring and summer with Bush having squandered his huge money advantage...

...This is one of those strategies that is improbably brilliant unless it turns out to be completely stupid...

On March 1, Kerry had $2.4 million in the bank and Bush had $110 million. By the end of April, a rough educated guess, based on how both candidates are raising and spending money, would put Kerry's cash on hand at about $60 million and Bush's at about $75 million.

So there's certainly a way of looking at what's happened over the last month or so and say that Bush has essentially squandered his entire financial advantage over Kerry. And the race is still neck and neck...

...Of course, if the strategy is bad, commitment to it simply ensures a bad result. And that, I suppose, would make Kerry rather like Bush, who intends to continue demonstrating leadership by adhering to an already demonstrably failed strategy until he runs the whole nation right off the cliff...