I said a couple days ago that a <$Ad$>briefing of sorts that I heard last week gave me the sense that the White House political operation was in serious denial about the state of their political fortunes.
My point wasn’t that the president is heading to certain defeat. Far from it. With all the bad news the president has had so far in 2004 he’s still barely running outside the margin of error against Kerry in most polls.
But when you’re in denial about what might be manageable problems that can be the same as having problems which are in fact unmanageable.
As I wrote in the second post ever to appear on TPM, one of the most dangerous things you can do in politics is to fall for your own spin. And the Bush political operation, as I noted in that post from November 2000, has a history of doing just that.
In any case, Bob Novak has a column today which doesn’t say the same thing as I’ve said above. But I think it’s consistent with that read of where the White House is right now.
