April 16

John Kerry has been pounding away at the college circuit recently, tapping into a sense that President Bush has been steadily losing ground among potential student voters.

The Washington Post recaps a Kerry speech at a Democratic fundraiser in New Jersey by showing him attacking the President for resorting to the terror argument as a way of evading tough questioning.

"Ask him a question and he's going to go to terror," Kerry said."

"And everything he did in Iraq, he's going to try to persuade people it has to do with terror, even though everybody here knows that it has nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda and everything to do with an agenda that they had preset, determined. That's where they're going to go."

But the GOP's response was just as predictable, with Marc Racicot retorting: "On a day when Osama bin Laden again threatened the United States and our allies, it is disturbing to realize that John Kerry neither recognizes nor understands the murderous ideology of our enemies and the threat that they pose to our nation."

As the Kerry camp gears up for a new ad campaign concentrating on portraying the candidate as an ordinary guy, pressure from Republican quarters seems to be growing for John Kerry's wife, heiress Theresa Heinz Kerry to release her tax records.

With the intention, presumably, of showing that no matter how "ordinary" he might claim to be, proximity to that much money inevitably makes you anything but.

Kerry himself is due to appear on Meet The Press this Sunday.

April 11

Talking of polls, a new University of Pennsylvania poll reported in the Washington Post shows President Bush besting John Kerry "on such traits as "strong leader," "steady," "easy to like as a person" and "has a clear vision of where he wants to lead the country."

As the situation in Iraq pauses for breath with a ceasefire in Falluja, however, it's important that the White House does something to retake the initiative, other than just have the President say the US forces "are taking care of business".

The declassified PDB memo of August 6th, 2001, however, continues to complicate the White House's strategy.

With British prime minister Tony Blair preparing for his visit to Washington this week, which should bolster Bush's standing, Blair is under pressure from his own party to be more forceful with President Bush over UN involvement.

Finally; signs that Joe Lieberman was never going to be a good candidate after all... turns out his director of communications is named ... Matt Gobush.