William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg took apart the Bush ads pretty well last week.

[The recession's starting date being in January 2001] is the only demonstrably untrue statement to be found in these three ads. Tellingly, it is also nearly the only statement of fact in any of them.

Josh Marshall and others have distilled Bush's theme down to "It's not my fault!", which strikes me as odd because that presumes the people are mighty unhappy, and I really don't think the Bushes truly get how unhappy people really are. Yet.

This is why I'm not panicked about the difference in the campaigns' cash-on-hand and expected fundraising - the Bush people don't seem to be very smart about their media spending...surprise. (There's still the matter of where all that non-media spending-so-far has gone, but nonetheless.)

The fundamental problem they have is, of course, that there's not that much they have to run on. Jobs growth is still nonexistent, health care is still a huge problem, the nation is demonstrably not as secure as we should be, etc. etc.

If I had $200 million dollars to spend, I could probably give a pretty thorough makeover to a rat too. But it wouldn't make the rat significantly more appealing.