White House Letter: This Time in New Hampshire, Bush Can Sit Back and Watch (NYTimes)

...Mr. Bush chose to swipe at Mr. Kerry in some off-the-record jokes in a speech on Saturday night at the Alfalfa Club dinner, an annual banquet for Washington's political upper class. The official position of Mr. Bush's advisers is that he is too busy running the country to pay attention to the campaign, but someone must have forgotten to tell the president.

"I think Kerry's position on the war in Iraq is politically brilliant," Mr. Bush told the Alfalfa Club guests at the Capitol Hilton, according to a guest who heard the remarks. "In New Hampshire yesterday, he stated he had voted for the war, adding that he was strongly opposed to it."

The line got a big laugh, the guest said, as did this one about Howard Dean's "I Have a Scream" postcaucus speech in Iowa: "Boy, that speech in Iowa was something else," the guest reported Mr. Bush as saying. "Talk about shock and awe. Saddam Hussein felt so bad for Governor Dean that he offered him his hole."

(So much for off-the-record. And so much for Bush being above all that small-minded partisan politics stuff.)

You know what? I'd like to see more scrutiny of Bush's supporters. We hear all the time about how Dean's tapping into Democrats' anger, or Kerry and Lieberman are tapping into all those Democrats who think the minority in the Senate is doing a great job by only voting for Bush's agenda half of the time.

Why isn't the question being asked of the other side?

What motivates Bush supporters? Love of the status quo? Fear of caricatured liberals? "Gore Hate"? Nostalgia for government-crippling deficits? NASCAR dads?

Why is Bush-support assumed to be the default by the media, and aberrance from it must be explained?

I think Bush supporters should be asked to justify themselves much more often, and I hope some of that will happen in the General. I certainly plan to do my part.

One last clip from the article, which gives me warm fuzzies:

For now, Bush campaign officials are playing down the Newsweek poll, and asserting that they had predicted it all along. "We've said for months that we expected this to be a close race and that at a certain point, polls would show us down by a few points," said Terry Holt, the campaign press secretary.

In fact, Bush officials said in November that they expected the race to be neck and neck in the spring, when the Democrats were likely to settle on a nominee. No one predicted it would happen this early.

They keep saying "it'll be close" because that's the best they can hope for. More likely, they'll lose big if the votes all get counted correctly.