Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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It's time to pass on to Kerry Spot readers the highlights of another conversation with one of my favorite sources, a longtime GOP operative who has been around politics longer than I have been alive. (I've nicknamed him "Obi-Wan Kenobi," which brought the response, "He's not the funny looking one, is he?" I promptly assured the operative that I was not comparing his appearance to Yoda's.)

Specifically, I want to focus on two topics of the conversation. The first was on the polls.

We had been discussing certain members of the media's irrepressible desire to write the "Kerry is great closer" story, regardless of whether the facts were there to support it. We had concluded earlier that two weeks before the election, the race would have to be close, and that during the final week of the election, Kerry would have to be pulling ahead for the perfect dramatization of that "storyline."

Obi-Wan pointed out that last week, Gallup had Bush ahead by eight, ABC had Bush ahead by five, Fox had Bush ahead by seven, Time had Bush ahead by five, Battleground had Bush ahead by four, he was ahead in the ABC/Washington Post tracking poll by five points or so much of the week... "And they still wrote that the race is tied!" Obi-Wan said with a laugh. "They don't need supporting evidence to go with the storyline!"

Then he made the case that Kerry just isn't going to win on Election Night. He may or may not be proven right next Tuesday night, but for now, his confidence is tempered steel.

A paraphrase of his comments:

If Kerry wins on Election Night, what is the storyline going to be, the economy? No way. The story is going to be the war in Iraq, and the American people's reaction to terrorism. Bush has made this election a referendum on how he's combating terrorism by taking the fight to them in Iraq. The anchors are going to say, "Americans sent a message to the president that they weren't happy with Iraq. They want to get back to the world before President Bush, before 9/11, before terror alerts and security lines and Fallujah and all of this fear and stress and drama. They want a return to normalcy."

Does that sound like the America you know, Jim? In 1952, Harry Truman hadn't been aggressive enough in fighting the Korean War; the American people felt he was holding MacArthur back; and they were so angry with Truman that he didn't run. They had a choice between Adlai Stevenson or World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower. They picked Eisenhower — because they wanted to win the war — instead of the guy who could negotiate it.

In 1972, the last wartime election, Americans had a choice between the candidate of the peace movement, Mr. George "Come home, America" McGovern, and Richard Nixon. Nixon won in a landslide.

In 1984, America again had a clear choice. On one hand, there was Walter Mondale: the embodiment of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, Jimmy Carter's vice president — the man who was determined to learn how to coexist with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, they had the policies of Ronald Reagan, who was seeking to defeat the Soviets through strength. Again, they chose the fighter in a landslide.

Now, does that sound like the American people you know?

Then Obi-Wan and I discussed the American mood and sensibility after 9/11. In those first horrific and shocking days, America had the chance to react by calling for the policies of John Kerry and the Democratic party's foreign-policy establishment — multilateralism, global tests, summits, treaties, looking at the threat as an intelligence and law-enforcement problem.

But calls for that approach were few and far between. The overwhelming sentiment was to unleash hell.

One of the more interesting things Andrew Sullivan ever wrote was a critique of the pre-9/11 Right — contending that conservatives were too pessimistic about Americans' character during the Clinton years. Sure, the American people seemed materialistic, hedonistic, lazy, obsessed with making money during the dot-com boom, and uninterested in the world beyond their borders. But in a fight, when the chips are down, the essential American character shines through. Sullivan put it this way:

Perhaps the biggest conservative victim of the war has been cultural pessimism. Not long ago, leading paleoconservatives were denouncing America as a country, in Robert Bork's words, "slouching toward Gomorrah." Moral decline was almost irreparable; civil responsibility was a distant memory; pop culture was sapping any social fiber we had; and the evils of feminism, homosexuality, and Hollywood were corroding the country's ability to believe in itself or defend its shores. None of this was ever true — at least to the degree that some paleocons portrayed it. Anyone with passing acquaintance with the actual country knew that its moral collapse was greatly exaggerated...

The response of the American people to the events of September 11 surely disproved these scolds once and for all. The heroism of rescue workers, the courage of the passengers on Flight 93, the phlegmatic public response to anthrax attacks, the overwhelming support for a difficult war, the resurgence of a simple, ennobling patriotism that has rarely degenerated into jingoism — all these are signs that the central social fiber of America was and is resilient and profoundly moral.

One doesn't have to agree with every word Sullivan wrote then (or writes now) to conclude that an essential component of the American character is a refusal to walk away from a fight before it's finished.

This veteran hand at politics may not be right. But he makes a compelling case that endorsing John Kerry's foreign-policy vision — laden with the language of diplomatic nuance and with faith in the power of treaties against the homicidal — just isn't in the pugnacious American character.

Obi-Wan said, "Remember Reagan's farewell letter. He never lost faith in the American people."

I won't go quite so far as to say that I currently agree with Obi-Wan's views 100 percent. But readers ought to hear this voice, quietly making the case for the plausibility of a Bush landslide.