Time is Howards worst enemy - and it has nothing to do with his age - more to do with the time he has been around.

We can discount all the clap trap about the economy - The economy will drive itself now - it does not need a government to tinker too much with it - it manages itself pretty much now - and it took an ALP government to get it to that stage.

Howard et al have been around long enough to tally up a series of scew ups that are rusted onto the psyche of the electorate -

it is hackneyed I know but like water dripping on a rock things like Tampa, Cornelia Rau,Vivian Alvarez, Lip sewing refugees, the early application of IR laws, Dr Haneef, the AWB, the inevitable back flip on Uranium, Iraq, WMD lies - all tweaked a bit by things like housing un affordability and escalating bankrptcies in the ranks of the once cashed up bogans aspiring for the second jet sky and plasma in every room - all gather small bits of support from different sections of the community - it aint just a small band of Howard haters - although they are in those ranks too - it is a broad cross section - who have tired of the coalition its arrogance and duplicity.

It is a widening spread of punters tired of plausible deniability unnaccountable ministers shielded by Howard seemingly buying support.

All Rudd isa doing is remebering his lines and not bumping into thefurniture - it all makes for bad government and vanilla and white bread policies - but is the beast we created and are stuck with it.

I too rather enjoyed the 'assertion' (that may have been ambiguous) ... did the author-editor write and mean that Christians are less materialistic (see Kyle above)? I read it a few times and am still unsure. A study of Reformation history and the development of Protestantism could dispel that methinks. I sense that born-again Christianity is the supermarket of materialism.

Still I enjoyed the article but think that people are simply sick of the spin and spinners. Can the opposition do it differently or is it now simply the way it is done? There is an odour of death emanating from the government and even though Costello is written as unpopular, he could provide the shot of adrenalin required. It would be a new trick. Or would it?

I was a committed Liberal for fourteen years. My support didn't ebb, it was chiselled away.

"This makes it a soft vote ... only 57 per cent [sic] wants Labor to win ... these voters haven’t so much deserted the Liberals, as that ... they’re trying to encourage the Liberals to follow after them, or give them a reason to come back."

It's more likely that the government and its erstwhile supporters have gradually parted company, that protesting has been futile and that all that remains are the formalities of separation. Perhaps a better explanation can be found in T S Eliot:
'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity'

Maybe the Liberals will have woken up to themselves by 2010 - or maybe they'll be a rabble.

"It would be relatively easy for the Liberals to craft a few messages that ... turned the tide, and relatively difficult for Labor to pull them back"

Rubbish. Howard has run out of ideas and momentum and no Liberal campaign could convince anyone otherwise, much less that it could put behind us the issues identified by sneekeepete above.

"In fact, if they vote for Howard this election he will be gone in another two years"

This isn't a "fact", any more than it was a "fact" that Howard would retire after 1.5 terms, or by age 64. What Rudd offers is the prospect of a bit of momentum for economic and social progress unencumbered by the barnacles that have slowed the Howard government to a crawl. It is unseemly and unfitting to a nation that fancies itself as dynamic to have a government that can only make excuses about coal loaders or do back-of-the-envelope calculations about water allocations in the Murray-Darling basin.

"It’s possible that this election may end up being an audition for the next."

It's possible this could be said of any election, past or future. The 1993 election set in place trends that manifested themselves in 1996, and so on. I hope this wasn't your attempt at a profound insight.

The point was made on an ABC programme a couple of weeks ago that at the last election Labor garnered about 47.5% of the national vote and this was after the Crean/Beasley leadership stouches which ended up with Latham and very few sound policies. Since then the ALP has 'come back to earth' literally (there's that word again, it's a pity when literally is taken literally) with climate change etc. Labor has added lots of popular and populist policies to it's agenda, most seem to resonate with voters and few seem to alienate voters. It could only go up. This contrasts to the Liberals who really only had lots to lose if they missed the mood of the people; and they did

Notice not a mention about Howard's sweet friendship with Bush affecting the coming election, nor the unholy mess in Iraq, except the wonderful news of Iraqi soccer and the win in the Asian Cup.

As the Yanks don't go for soccer, may be the fact they haven't converted the Iraqis to baseball or gridiron after nearly five years, and with so many non-white nations taking on soccer, might be a sign for us whities to get right out of the whole Middle East, and let the competing camraderie of the round-ball show that the non-whites are as good as us at sport any time, and proving they could solve the Middle East problem all by themselves, which is certainly the true democratic way.

It also pretty well proves it in the AFL, especially as the game has been sped-up up lately, trained non-whites seeming to have much more guile of movement as well as stamina than have us pinkies.

Cheers, BB

While the article raises some interesting points at this stage it's just another in a growing pile of analyses that fail to satisfactorily explain what's going on.

It seems to simplistic to be true, but Hugh Mackay's observation that the mood of the nation has changed is more plausible by the minute, especially given that people give so many reasons for changing their vote. It's as if they look for reasons which match their mood, rather than the other way around.

There's a growing number of comments around the blogosphere along the lines of "this has gone on too long - we know who's going to win - let's just get it over with"

At this rate, holding off the election will be another reason Lib support is slipping. It can't possibly be realistic to beat the electorate into submission via sheer exhaustion.