In a "closing argument" speech in Orlando Friday morning, Kerry said he's seen "crushed hopes" and "people struggling when they shouldn't be." He was talking about the economy, but he could have been talking about his own campaign -- or about George Bush's. The Democrats are anxious, but the Republicans have worries, too. Four years of presidential care and coddling later, Florida is just as close as it was when the Supreme Court called off the vote count in 2000. Victory in Ohio is elusive. New Hampshire may be turning away from the president. Arkansas is at least a theoretical risk.

Both sides say they feel confident. Neither knows for sure. And that was before bin Laden dropped a bomb -- figuratively speaking -- four days before the election.

On a call with reporters just before the tape aired Friday, Kerry spokesman Tad Devine said: "I feel very good about where we are. It's fair to say that John Kerry enters this final weekend of the campaign in many ways in stronger shape than the Democratic nominee entered the final weekend four years ago." That nominee, Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, something Devine doesn't see happening this year. He said Kerry is strong in the battleground states and that he has the resources to take both Ohio and Florida away from George W. Bush

Karl Rove has told reporters that the Republicans' private polls had put Bush, before Friday, either even or up in all but one or two of the battleground states. The truth may be somewhere in between, or not. Reporters traveling with the candidates seem to have no gut sense of where the race is headed. Political scientists are equally mystified. "Like everybody else, I'm desperately looking for [signs of] momentum, and I just don't see any," the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato said Friday morning. "Maybe the private tracking polls are showing something different, but I never believe the campaigns in the last week. They're always 'fine,' they're always 'looking good,' they're always expecting a big turnout, blah blah blah."

Sabato's equivocal prediction: "The likelihood is that we're headed for at least a close popular election, but who knows what the Electoral College will look like? You can get 20 electoral votes from winning a state by 500 votes. So who knows?"

The polls certainly don't provide an answer. Friday's Fox News poll has Bush up 50-45. Friday's Democracy Corps poll has Kerry up 49-47. And polls released Friday by Zogby and TIPP have the race tied at 45-45 and 46-46, respectively.

There are positive signs for Kerry. The national poll numbers -- irrelevant in and of themselves but important for TV talk about momentum -- seem to be trending in Kerry's direction. Kerry drew huge crowds in Wisconsin and Ohio Thursday for pitch-perfect made-for-TV rallies with Bruce Springsteen.

But the bin Laden tape is the great X factor. Until it emerged Friday virtually every recent news event with political implications had cut in Kerry's favor. Job numbers kept disappointing. The Duelfer report declared once and for all that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Fifty Iraqi cops were executed, and interim Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi said that the U.S.-led coalition forces shared part of the blame. Karl Rove was called to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame, and the FBI is investigating Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq.

And then there was Al Qaqaa. The story of the missing munitions had been something of a perfect storm in the campaign's final week. It played perfectly into Kerry's message, and it has put the White House on the defensive. It has also led, directly and indirectly, to uncharacteristic stumbles from a Rove-run campaign. Rove dispatched Rudy Giuliani to defend the president on TV, only to have him say that any blame for the lost munitions should fall on the troops in the field. The Pentagon tried to defend the president with a satellite photo of trucks parked in Al Qaqaa, but, in an error that echoed those in Colin Powell's war brief to the U.N., the picture showed the wrong bunkers. And then the Bush-Cheney campaign released a TV ad titled "Whatever It Takes," the "whatever" apparently being the digital manipulation of an image of soldiers surrounding the commander in chief.

The Bush campaign ultimately admitted to the Photoshopping, but the bumbles and stumbles kept coming. The Republicans tried to counter any momentum Kerry got out of Boston's World Series victory by announcing that Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling would campaign with Bush. Schilling backed out, allegedly on "doctor's orders." The campaign planned a big confetti conclusion for Bush's speech in New Hampshire today, but the confetti guns erupted prematurely, interrupting Bush as he paid tribute to the mother of a Sept. 11 victim.

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