[Frank Sesno, Cnn Anchor:] Our political snapshot for you now: The latest CNN"USA Today"Gallup poll shows the race for the White House neck-and-neck, as it has been in recent days, Vice President Al Gore leading George W. Bush by 3 percentage points, 47-43 percent, with a margin of error of 4 percentage points. That, of course, makes it a statistical dead heat.
[Jeanne Meserve, Cnn Anchor:] The shift in the polls and reaction in the Bush camp to the tight numbers is the subject "Just in Time" today. How is the Republican candidate honing his message and how worried are his advisers? Joining us from our sister news organization is "Time" correspondent James Carney. Thanks a lot, Jay. Bush had a big lead. It's evaporated. What is he doing? How is he retooling to regain some traction?
[James Carney, "time" Correspondent:] Well, what he's doing, Jeanne, is returning to the formula he used after he was shellacked by John McCain in the New Hampshire primary, and that is to return to what he calls events with real people, what are known as town hall meetings. He's going to take questions from real people in events in key battleground states and try to sort of soften his image. His advisers feel he had sort of stepped back from that and was giving speeches set, canned speeches in front of a lectern and had sort of given up reminding voters of one of his primary selling points, which is that he's a likable, accessible candidate.
[Meserve:] And ads? What are those going to look like?
[Carney:] Oh, they'll look a lot different. The ads are going to be very negative. Contrary to some information we were hearing last week, there's no intention by the Bush campaign to give up their attacks on Al Gore's credibility. Bush has a problem. He's trying to thread a needle here. He's trying to do something that history says is very difficult, which is beat an incumbent president when times are better, perhaps, than they've ever been before. And with Gore at least putting on a pretty good show of not being a robot and achieving higher marks from the voters in the polls as to where he stands on the issues, Bush has to take Gore down a little bit. And that's what the advertising from both the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee will do. They'll go after his character and his credibility.
[Sesno:] Jay, the piece in the magazine "How Bush Lost His Edge," is the title this week a quote from a senior adviser to Bush saying," Everyone thought we were so good we were going to walk away with this thing, even we started believing it." That's an extraordinary thing.
[Carney:] Well, the Bush campaign took to even as it professed not to believe in polls, took to sending out even on its Web site poll results as they came in because they were so glowing. And remember, George W. Bush has led against Al Gore for most of the year and a half. And during the summer, especially, as the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia, that lead expanded dramatically. They were coasting and they looked like they were running a good campaign, and, in fact, Bush did run a good campaign after the primaries. But suddenly, Gore came alive and Bush came a little unglued, as we all know from some of the mistakes he's made in the last few weeks.
[Meserve:] Jay Carney, "Time" magazine, thanks so much for joining us.
[Carney:] Thanks for having me.