The Dumping

It's summer in a presidential election year and that means that ridiculously small news topics will get magnified into titanic stories on the slow weeks.  This week, the big news is gossip that President Bush is considering removing Vice-President Cheney from the Republican ticket.  It has already gone mainstream in Newsweek and The New York Times.  So far, the best conservative opinion I've seen has been Paul Weyrich, who obviously recognizes that this subject is only providing glee for Democrats.

The strange thought that occured to me today is that this type of buzz in the media might mean that it's really the Democrats who are desperate, not the Republicans. Right after the 2000 elections, the main Democratic media stories about President Bush were the disputed election result and the opinion that a Republican president with such a weak electoral majority will be forced to govern as a tepid moderate. Now it's more than three years later and the Democrats are back to suggesting that President Bush's only chance for reelection is to dump the Arch-Conservative and make a dash for the moderate middle again.  Doesn't the switch from the Fahrenheit 9/11 "stick" last week to the dump-Cheney-and-win "carrot" this week suggest a certain lack of winning confidence from the liberal media?

Alternatively, this could be a short term attack on a "target of opportunity": the assumed conservative/liberal split at the RNC convention.