If you’re a Democrat running for president, you know you’re in deep doo doo when the Village Voice starts grumping about “the air gushing out” of your campaign:


“With the air gushing out of John Kerry’s balloon,” writes the Voice’s longtime Washington correspondent Jim Ridgeway, “it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn’t have what it takes to win and has got to go. As arrogant and out of it as the Democratic political establishment is, even these pols know the party’s got to have someone to run against George Bush. They can’t exactly expect the president to self-destruct into thin air.”