The metaphors were all there for the taking, but nothing seemed to take. Kerry won three debates. The news had all broken his way. The Bush campaign was bumbling. Why wasn't Kerry walking away with this thing? "This country is so polarized, and there's so much money being spent, this race was never going to be a big blowout win for anybody," said Paul Maslin, who helped run Howard Dean's campaign. "It was never in the cards for this thing to bust loose."

Friday morning, Maslin said he still thought Kerry would pull it out, that Kerry would win by taking Ohio and the upper Midwest, maybe New Mexico, maybe New Hampshire, maybe even Florida. "This thing is poised," he said. "For Bush to win at this stage of the game, it's got to defy everything I've learned about politics all my life. Undecideds don't break toward incumbents, there's been a host of bad news, and on and on and on. It's set up right now for people to take a chance on Kerry."

"Take a chance" isn't the language the Kerry campaign would use, of course, particularly with the bin Laden tape's heavy rotation on CNN. After the bin Laden tape release, Maslin told Salon it was too soon to tell what the impact would be on the campaign. "It could piss people off at bin Laden or it could piss people off at Bush because bin Laden is still alive," he said.

Typically, it's true that undecided voters typically break for the challenger, but this isn't a typical year. The nation is scarred from Sept. 11 and mired in a war in Iraq. There's a cultural divide so wide that people can't talk across it and don't understand each other when they do. Americans can't agree on the way out of the nation's problems or even what they are. The idea of staying the course has a powerful pull on many Americans. As McCurry said Friday morning in Orlando, Americans who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 may have a hard time looking back now and saying they were wrong. The bin Laden tape could make it easier, or it could make it harder.

Kerry stepped into the epicenter of the 2000 election Friday afternoon, holding an outdoor rally in West Palm Beach. The wounds from four years ago are still fresh here, but the crowd that greeted Kerry was so small that reporters walking into the event literally stopped and stared, looking around for the rest of the people who must have been there somewhere. Even worse: As Kerry rambled off into a series of statistics about healthcare costs and the like, more than a few of the people in the crowd wandered off. The glory days of that Springsteen rally in Madison seemed a very long way away, and with bin Laden on TV, Springsteen himself seemed irrelevant.

There will be ups and downs in these final days -- McCurry was dancing with Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter in Ohio Thursday night, then glum-faced and serious in Orlando Friday morning. The candidate was serious Friday, too, unveiling a final-stretch stump speech that ignores the news of the day and focuses hard on what Kerry calls a fundamental choice between George W. Bush's record of failure and his own hopeful plan for a better future. "It is time for America to put the politics of polarization behind us," Kerry said Friday morning in Orlando. "It is time to appeal to the best instincts of Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. It is time for America to renew the faith that there is something for every single one of us to do -- and challenges for each of us to try."

Again and again in Florida Friday, Kerry said: "You can choose a fresh start. And when I'm president, that's what you'll get." Although Kerry sounded optimistic, he knew that it's still an if, not a when. And if he didn't know that when he spoke, he certainly knows it now.

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