Ken Layne Was Right: One of the great advantages of living three thousand miles from the Center of the Universe is that I don't get overly-influenced by the vagaries and trends of Beltway opinion-mongering. The fact that the people in my immediate circle are not obsessed with politics, and do not see every breaking story on Fox News or CNN as earthshattering, allows me to view the goings-on in politics with a greater sense of detachment. Thus, when the "Swift Boat" ads began airing in a handful of states, and the "digital Brownshirts" began parsing every detail of Kerry's stay in Southeast Asia for errors, I was able to step back, and take what seemed to be a contrarian view about this issue: the longer the focus was on Kerry's war record, the more it helped in the long run. After all, the average voter would hear the claims and counterclaims of the various participants, shrug, and say, "well, at least Kerry was in 'Nam back in the day."

Apparently, it doesn't appear to have been a particularly brutal three weeks for the Democratic nominee since those ads began airing. According to the latest Zogby polling figures in the battleground states, Kerry has gone from being ahead in 13 of the 16 states polled, to...being ahead in 14 of the 16 states, his best showing to date. If the junior Senator from Massachusetts has been hurt by the mostly-discredited attacks, it hasn't shown up yet in the polls, even anecdotally; Kerry continues to poll within the margin of error in several states not included by Zogby as "battlegrounds", such as Arizona, Virginia, and Colorado. And the fact that the whole world is starting to laugh at the Swifties (here and here) can't be making things any easier for Karl Rove.