I’m going to make a prediction. It might sound foolish at this stage and it’s certainly true that I’ve made predictions in the past that have turned out to be wildly long, but I’m going to make it anyways: John Kerry is going to lose this election, and lose it badly.

The first truly ominous sign for Kerry since his sudden rise after Iowa is the surprisingly strong candidacy of Ralph Nader. Given the widespread perception that Nader cost Gore the last election, and the supposed fact that Democrats are united and energized because of their “anger” towards President Bush, I would have expected Nader to poll no more than 1-2%: all hardcore leftists who weren’t going to vote for a “corporate” Democrat anyways. Yet recent polls have consistently shown Nader with five or six percent support. In other words, at the present time, he’s polling double his final score in 2000. A recent CBS/New York Times poll showed Bush beating Kerry by eight points with Nader claiming a full 7% of registered voters. And, of course, the New York Times is hardly an outfit known for generating polling data which is favourable to the GOP.

People will tell me that I’m foolish to put much stock in polls at this stage in the game. I agree in that polls at this time are useless for judging final election results. But they are strong indicators of attitudes. Many mocked me when, in November and December of last year, I said that Howard Dean’s standing in national polls of Democrats showed that he was too weak to win the nomination. Despite all of the free publicity he got, all the accolades, Dean could never climb much over 25% in national preference polls for the nomination. This, in my opinion, indicated that there was some sort of innate resistance to Dean among a majority of Democrats and that, as soon as the field of candidates shrunk, Dean would be easily defeated.

Now what I see in the polls is this: Democrats are unenthusiastic about John Kerry, are willing to bolt to a third party in potentially dangerous numbers, and are unsure as to why they ought to support him. The man looks like someone who could be President. That’s about the sum of it. He was the safe choice.

Very partisan Democrats are very angry with this President and this Administration, there’s no denying that. But those people would vote for any Democrat for President, regardless of any other factors. Kerry has their votes locked up: but where else is he going to pick up votes?

Anyone who thinks that John Kerry is going to pick up more than a handful of votes from Republicans is suffering from a severe case of Pauline Kael syndrome. “My life-long Republican aunt is voting for Kerry,” does not, in my opinion, constitute evidence of widespread support. Not a single prominent Republican is behind John Kerry. Democrats like Georgia Senator Zell Miller and former New York Mayor Ed Koch are for Bush. There are no indications of a great love for Kerry among independents. Indeed, in open primaries, John Kerry attracted far less support from independents than John Edwards.

Additionally, the presence of Nader in the race makes it much harder for Kerry to shift his positions on national security issues: something he will need to do in order to compete with Bush in the fall campaign. If Kerry moves to a more hawkish position on defense, not only will he suffer attacks for flip-flopping, but he’ll also probably lose votes to Nader. And, I might add, Howard Dean’s hard-core constituency is still floating about. While these people weren’t enough to win him any primaries, they were a sizable percentage of Democratic primary voters.

I can easily see a situation arising where, with Kerry falling in the polls under the weight of Bush’s attacks on his defense record, a shift to the right by him is met with a call by former Dean supporters to “send the Democratic Party a message” in the fall. Given that, by most accounts, Howard Dean himself feels that he was done in largely by malfeasance on the part of the party, it is easy to see him, with a wink, only tepidly denouncing such actions.

The rushed primary season has resulted in a situation where the Democratic nominee has not been properly tested under the stresses of a campaign. In retrospect, the nomination was pretty much sewn up when Howard Dean lost Iowa. Gephardt was out, Dean’s dream had been shattered, Clark’s campaign suddenly stripped of its rationale, and Joe Lieberman was a lost cause. That left just John Edwards and John Kerry. John Edwards had nothing but a smile and a demagogic stump speech which, for all the new ideas it contained, could have been stolen from Huey Long. In the end it was John Forbes Kerry by what Homer Simpson once called the, “two sweetest words in the English language”: de-fault.

One thing which has been quickly exposed by the heat of a real campaign is that Kerry is dangerously gaffe-prone. Now some Democrats will, I’m sure, quickly throw in my face examples of the President’s occasionally mangled syntax. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Democrats, for whatever reason, believe the fact that George Bush occasionally mispronounces words to be extremely damning. I don’t think that the American people agree. Frankly, I think it makes the Democrats look petty, pedantic, and irrelevant.

What I’m talking about is the fact that John Kerry seems given to saying things which are stupid in their substance, rather than their form. No experienced politician ought to call his opponents crooks and liars: that’s what surrogates are for. Kerry’s claim that foreign leaders support him, given his negatives, was simply insane. His follow-up to it was even more baffling. First he claimed that it was no one’s business which foreign leaders supported him. Then he, in essence, told a voter who asked him about it to shut up. Now his campaign has issued a statement explaining that it considers the endorsement of Kerry by foreign leaders to be undesirable. Given the attacks on him for flip-flopping, his remark the other day that, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion (for Iraqi Reconstruction) before I voted against it” was colossally stupid.

Frankly, I think that Kerry is about to be torn to shreds. Everyone has already heard every negative thing about George W. Bush that’s going to manage to stick. There’s still lots to learn about John Kerry. His treasonous behavior while he was a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (where he apparently participated in private negotiations with communist leaders and voted upon a resolution calling for the assassination of a number of US Senators) is not yet widely known. Nor, for that matter, are his positions on any number of issues. His defense votes, his position on the death penalty, his position on gay marriage: all of these are not yet widely known. Yet, if he tries to shift to the right on any of them, he’ll suffer both attacks for flip-flopping and he’ll suffer defections to Nader.

It now seems clear that having the Bush campaign lead with the charge that Kerry is prone to flip-flops (as opposed to attacking his liberalism) was a truly inspired strategy. It’s worked and the media has picked up on it. Just as it was a common theme in 2000 that Al Gore often concocted bizarre lies about himself (“I’m the basis for Love Story”, “I invented the internet”, “I discovered Love Canal”, “my mother-in-law is taking a dog’s prescription drugs”), it seems clear to me that a common theme in this campaign will be that John Kerry says anything for support. Because of this, every time he tries to shift his positions on the issues, we’ll get a little media tempest about the latest “flip-flop.” Now the attacks on Kerry’s liberalism will have a much greater effect because his range of options has narrowed.

If Kerry falls in the polls before the convention, do not be shocked to see someone try to get back into the race. I could see Howard Dean giving it a shot (“we can’t win without the new voters I brought into this race”), I can see Hillary Clinton giving it a shot, and I could see Al Gore doing it as well. There might, indeed, be others.

Even beyond that, it doesn’t strike me as inconceivable that the Democrats might, even in October, try and pull the same stunt they did in New Jersey in 2002. Imagine this. It’s the first of October and tracking polls show Bush/Cheney with 53% support, Kerry/Edwards with 37% support, and Ralph Nader with 8% of the vote. However, polls show that in a Bush versus Edwards match-up, the results are Bush 47%, Edwards 42%, and Nader 7%. This works for any Democratic running-mate who gets a wave of positive publicity. Would you put it beyond the Democrats to, with a few weeks to go, force a lagging Kerry from the top of the ticket in favor of a better-polling running mate? I sure wouldn’t.

I may turn out to be totally wrong. We’ll see. I’ve got a fair record in these things. I called the correct number of Republican Senate wins in 2002 (I got two races wrong: I thought that the GOP would win South Dakota and lose Georgia). I said that the Passion of the Christ would gross hundreds of millions ages ago, and was mocked for it. I said that Dean was going to flame out, and people laughed. I said that the Beltway Sniper was a Moslem, and people said I was crazy- everyone knew it was a white militia member. I said that the 3/11 bombing in Madrid was al-Qaeda, and people said I was crazy. Not to say I’ve always been right: but I think I’ve got a fair track record in these things.

Let’s wait and see. Or, in the words of another fellow: bring – it – on.