Rounding up the Don't Panic Posse

Lest you think I'm just a voice in the wilderness, here are a few more singing in close harmony.

John McCreery at Best of the Blogs notes that we can't control the spin from the other side, but we can...

...refuse to panic, dig in our heels and work our buns off. Going into Chicken Little mode is, for sure, the way to wind up fried chicken.

While Mark Kleiman offers "More un-panic," noting that...

It's not that I don't want Kerry and his supporters angry and scared. Angry and scared is good. What I don't want to see is a replay of 2000, where the media convinced Democrats that Gore was losing, which made them think of him as a loser and start to pick him apart. The time for post-mortems is after the patient is dead. This one seems pretty healthy.

...the Carpetbagger Report calls you in from the ledge.

Admit it; I saw you looking for a window to jump out of when Newsweek and Time showed Bush jumping to an 11-point lead over Kerry. The hand-wringing done over the weekend was enough to cause a carpel tunnel epidemic...

...Well, forget it. Things just aren't as bad as you think.

...the national polls really aren't terrible; and 2) all national polls should be taken with a grain of salt because it's a state-by-state race.
And, yes, this means you can climb back in from the ledge now.

Elswhere, Kos counsels keeping your fingers off the button...

The sky isn't falling. The race is tight and will tighten. And though the national polls may be showing a small Bush lead, we still haven't seen much from the battleground states -- the only place the polls matter. So what if Bush has solidified his support in Alabama and Texas? I'll hold off on the panic button until we see numbers from Pennsylvania and Ohio.

...and Professor Krugman observes that the task ahead is as simple as telling the truth.

To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader - he only plays one on TV.

This charge has the virtue of being true. It's hard to find a nonpartisan national security analyst with a good word for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Iraq, in particular, is a slow-motion disaster brought on by wishful thinking, cronyism and epic incompetence.

Meanwhile, Digby has some of the day's best advice (again). Keep your wits about you and let Kerry be Kerry. He's actually pretty good at this, you know. Meanwhile, try to resist the temptation that so often accompanies the panic response - the insistence that unless Kerry says a particular thing, goes a particular place, strikes a particular note, all is lost. Or, as Digby himself puts it...

Kerry's biggest problem right now is too many cooks throwing fetid garbage into the soup. (If I were of any influence instead of a kibbitzer, I'd include myself as one of them.) For all that the Republicans are myopic, simplistic and overly controlled, we are the opposite. Democrats are embarrassingly undisciplined about this stuff and can't keep our mouths shut, so this all plays itself out publicly.

At this point, it's all about Kerry's political instincts. There is no consensus on the right approach going into the stretch. The race is a nail biter and he's got people all around him telling him different things. He has to sort out for himself what he thinks will work. It's up to him.

So there it is. Posse bloggers everywhere agree.

Work Hard. Fight Back. Don't Panic.