The Washington Post‘s Sebastian Mallaby — a member in good standing of the more-centrist-than-thou Beltway club — thinks the Bush administration is making Al Gore look good:
Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he’d be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.
Elite opinion, which was so devastating to Gore’s 2000 campaign, seems squarely behind him this time around.
Update [2006-5-22 15:28:21 by David Roberts]: Via Kevin Drum, Margaret Carlson makes a similar point.
