There was a great bit on Crossfire yesterday in which Jerry Springer, of all people, explained why this race is Kerry’s to lose :

BEGALA: Let me ask about this, the positive tone that the Kerry campaign has set down.

SPRINGER: Sure.

BEGALA: Some of it a little too prescripted for some people’s tastes. Do you think they’re making a mistake? An incumbent’s election, the first question is, should we throw out the incumbent? Are the Democrats, is my party, are they jumping over that to just sort of extol the virtues of John Kerry? Should they be putting the wood to George Bush a little more?

SPRINGER: No.

And I disagree with a lot of Democrats on this issue. I think this election is a lot like 1980. In 1980, all the polls seemed to indicate — most of the polls indicated that most Americans thought the Carter presidency wasn’t working, and yet those same polls showed that Carter and Reagan were dead-even. And then there came that first debate, like five days before the election. And people were seeing, could they really trust Ronald Reagan with the presidency or was he a crazy guy with his finger on the button?

When Reagan came across as OK, comfortable, all of a sudden, everything shifted over to Reagan and he won pretty big. I see the same thing this time. Let me just finish for a second.

SPRINGER: All the polls seem to indicate that Americans believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, and yet those same polls show Kerry and Bush dead-even. If John Kerry can make the sale Thursday night, not on bashing Bush — people already have made up their minds up George Bush. They either love him, hate him, whatever. Everyone has made up their minds.

What they’re not sure yet is, is it OK to trust the country to John Kerry? You and I strongly believe that it is. He’ll make the case Thursday night. If he does, I don’t think you’re just going to see a blip. I think what you’re going to see is a steady move towards him, as people become more comfortable with John Kerry.

CARLSON: Well, you may be right. I don’t think that’s a crazy theory that you’ve just outlined.

However, there’s one piece missing in the analogy to Reagan in ‘80. And that is the vision. Reagan of course was helped by kind of a crummy four yours under Carter, but he also had — he had a platform. He was able to tell you in nine sentences what he stood for. John Kerry doesn’t have that. He’s got the same position as Bush on Iraq. When are we going to find out his vision is?

SPRINGER: Well, Thursday night, you’re going to see it.

Those people who are close to him knows that he has that vision. And the truth is, if you put partisan politics aside and you just talk about where he stands and what he really believes in, he has that vision. Here’s the problem. With this gotcha politics we have today, you know, you take a vote of something he did a few months ago or several years ago and then, oh, he shifted there.

Here’s the difference I think between Republicans and Democrats. I think Republicans see the world in bumper sticker slogans. In other words, very clear, in one sentence, you say this is where I stand, period. That’s very attractive. But, in the real world, issues have complexities and issues come in different shades depending on circumstances. It’s always harder to explain that.

And yet the simplicity of some of the Bush positions, even though they make great slogans, like, we’re going to find them, we’re going to hunt them down, we’re going to gun them down, whatever, great slogans, but they get us into trouble. And we are in trouble because of that.

Like most elections, this is all gonna be determined by the undecideds. As this report shows, they’re leaning strongly against Bush (via MyDD) :

An axiom in politics is that undecided voters rarely end up casting their ballots for well-known, well-defined incumbents. If a well-known and established incumbent picks up one-quarter to one-third of the undecided vote, he is lucky indeed. Just a cursory look at the current pool of undecided voters suggests that Bush is unlikely to get even one-quarter of the undecided vote.
. . .
Among all registered voters, 41 percent agreed with the statement that the country was headed in the right direction, while 56 percent thought it was off on the wrong track. But among undecided voters, only 18 percent said that the country was headed in the right direction, and 75 percent said it was on the wrong track. Although undecided voters aren’t quite as pessimistic about the national direction as those already in the Kerry column, they are much closer to the attitudes of the Kerry electorate than they are to the Bush voters.

On Bush’s job-approval rating, 49 percent of those surveyed approved of the president’s overall performance, and another 49 percent disapproved. But among undecided voters, only 22 percent approved, and 69 percent disapproved.
. . .
As a general rule, undecided voters follow politics less closely than voters who have made up their minds; they read newspapers and news magazines and watch television news less than those who have chosen sides. They simply focus and decide later than others, and not all of them end up voting. It would be very unusual for these people to break for an established incumbent.

Kerry simply needs to come across as credible and acceptable to this group, which will only now be checking into this race for the first time. He has an opportunity to do that Thursday night in his acceptance speech.

Bush’s challenge is much greater. He has to convince people who do not like what’s happened for the past four years, who do not approve of his performance, and who are significantly more pessimistic about the economy than other voters to support him anyway. That is a challenge.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the middle of a convention haze, but I really think Kerry’s gonna win this thing. Kerry doesn’t have to hit a home run on Thursday night to convince the undecided voters to go with him, all he has to do is convince them that he’s a strong, confident leader who people can trust to do a better job leading this country than George Bush. With the bar set that low, my bet is that John Kerry will gain a solid, comfortable lead starting next week that’ll lead him all the way to the White House.