Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

The Bush-Cheney campaign's aptly named advertising team, Maverick Media, understands that this year's presidential election is much different than the previous one: "The environment in 2000 was peace and prosperity. Everything was going fine and the question was what to do next. This time there are challenges in the economy and we have challenges because of the war on terror and Iraq and everything associated," said Matthew Dowd, Maverick's media and statistics guru in 2000 and the Bush-Cheney campaign's current director of strategy (Karl Rove's old position). The optimistic Mr. Dowd also "noted that the controversy over Sept. 11 images in Mr. Bush's campaign ads resulted in $6 million in free air time for the ads and 40 million people seeing the spots who otherwise would not have seen them."