US President Bush has been having a difficult summer. Recent polls show a considerable decline in public approval of his conduct of the nation's business, yet in just four months voters will decide whether he or Democrat John Kerry is to be the next president. If things are going so badly for Bush, then Kerry must be doing well, right?

　　Not exactly. Americans outside Massachusetts, which Kerry represents in the Senate, seem to find it hard to relate to the Democratic candidate. His public appearances kindle little enthusiasm. His TV ads sway few viewers. As a result, Kerry supporters tend to be more anti-Bush than they are genuinely pro-Kerry.

　　Democratic strategists point out that Kerry has a pattern of coming from behind to win political races. And even though Kerry stirs little excitement, many Americans are quite eager to learn whom he will choose as his running mate. A popular vice presidential candidate could energize his campaign, especially since there is little chance that President Bush will dump the much-loathed Richard Cheney from the Republican ticket.

　　In the meantime, as conservative Paul Nowak points out in this week's cartoon, the Democrats have not been idle. Kerry remains an unknown quantity to most Americans, but better known Democrats are much in the news. Examine the publicity posters in Nowak's cartoon. In both upper corners are ads for ex-President Clinton's lengthy autobiography, MyLife("AsImaginedbyBillClinton", Nowak adds, tongue in cheek). We see from a smaller poster that Hillary Clinton's autobiography is "still in stores" -p;- if anybody is interested. These books, Democrats hope, will remind voters of the prosperity and relative peacefulness of the Clinton presidency.

　　The newspaper vending machine shows another headline of the day: former Vice President Al Gore claims that Bush has been lying -- though "my internet" is Nowak's comic reference to a notorious exaggeration of Gore's own.

　　In the centre of the cartoon is an ad for Fahrenheit9/11, Michael Moore's documentary denouncing the ties between the Bush family and the Middle Eastern oil industry. Moore is a left-wing gadfly with a working-class manner who makes films sharply critical of US society. The title of his anti-Bush film, here distorted to "Fahrenhype" ("hype" is the exaggerated blather associated with advertising) , is modeled on that of science fiction author Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit451, which describes a future of systematic censorship and government-engineered optimism and cultural shallowness. Fahrenheit9/11, now in US theatres, is unlikely to convert many Republicans to the Kerry cause, but strategists believe it will fire up Democrats with anti-Bush indignation and get them to the polls in November, no matter how lukewarm they feel towards John Kerry. (听英文53578)

　　①真可笑……所有的聒噪和新闻都是关于克林顿夫妇、戈尔或是摩尔的，好像他们想抢约翰·克里的风头。②谁是约翰？③麦克尔·摩尔这个大肥怪造出了《华氏911》，这是给智商低于83的人看的。④该影片由麦当劳和汉堡王赞助。⑤戈尔说：布什说谎，我的因特网能证明。