America Conor O'Clery: Mystery surrounds, as we like to say, the timing and source of the leak this week revealing that John Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Sandy Berger, had removed copies of classified documents from the National Archives when doing research for his testimony to the 9/11 commission last October.
Most of the US media bought the theory that it was a Republican dirty trick. It seemed aimed at embarrassing the Democrats on the eve of their convention, or at least directing criticism at Clinton's former national security adviser before the 9/11 commission report on Thursday, which cast an unfavourable light on his successor, Condoleezza Rice.
The first anyone knew about the story, however, was when a lawyer for Berger issued a statement on Tuesday disclosing the Justice Department investigation of his client's action. An equally intriguing theory is that Berger told the Kerry camp only recently that he was under FBI investigation since last autumn and that the White House knew about it and could use the information any time.
The Democrats told him to get it out now, rather than risk it exploding on the day that Kerry made his big speech at the convention.
Whatever the reason, stuffing secret documents into his trouser pockets, even if only to help him master a complex issue, has probably ended any prospect of Sandy "Burglar" - as he has been dubbed - becoming secretary of state in a Kerry administration.
John Kerry does not want anything to tarnish his "coming out" at this week's Democratic convention in Boston. The latest polls show that he has not managed to pull ahead of Bush despite the setbacks suffered by the President and $80 million spent to promote himself in TV ads.
The Pew Research Centre shows him ahead of Bush by 46 per cent to 44. A Wall Street Journal poll gave Bush the lead by 47-45. This means that the race is not just a statistical dead heat. The number of undecided at 6 or 7 per cent indicates that most voters have already made their minds up.
The good news for Kerry is that despite an economic recovery, most voters sampled by the Journal felt Kerry would do a better job on the economy. Not since Ronald Reagan has a challenger to an incumbent had a lead going into a party convention, and historically Kerry can expect a boost of 10 points or so by bringing himself to the public's attention.
So the word has gone out to the main speakers. Not so much Bush-bashing. Praise the candidate.
With this in mind, Kerry has employed Hollywood director James Smoll to produce the documentary introducing him to the convention. It is the latest in a sustained effort by the entertainment world to combat George Bush.
Republicans are already worried about the corrosive effect on undecided voters of Fahrenheit 9/11, which has been playing at 2,000 cinemas in the US and is soon to come to a barn near Bush's Texas ranch where it will be screened by peace activists. A Gallup poll on July 8th-11th said 8 per cent of American adults had already seen the film in the first two weeks and 18 per cent intended to do so.
Republicans hate the documentary. When rock singer Linda Ronstadt advised concertgoers in Las Vegas on Saturday to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and praised Michael Moore as "a great American patriot", some patrons booed and walked out and she was shown the door by the Aladdin hotel-casino management.
Hollywood is tilting at the Bush administration, in big ways and small. At the end of a new slapstick movie, Anchorman, the voiceover "reveals" that the stupidest guy in the film went on to become an adviser to the Bush White House, evoking laughs and cheers in Manhattan cinemas.
Later this month the Jonathan Demme remake of The Manchurian Candidate starring Meryl Streep and Denzel Washington will convey to American audiences a nightmare image of a White House exploiting fear and patriotism to brainwash the population, with Streep's senator character behaving like a sinister John Ashcroft. Streep has denied counter-rumours that she based her performance on Hillary Clinton.
Hillary will be a star attraction at a joint party tomorrow evening in the Boston Park Plaza for Irish-American and Italian-American delegates to the Democratic Convention, along with comedian Al Franken and House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi.
The Kerry people have been soothing ruffled feathers among the Irish-Americans over the blandness of the platform's Irish policy, which amounts to little more than saying the peace process is a good thing.
The Democrats' factional differences on all issues have, however, been patched over in the anodyne 41-page platform document. The overwhelming desire to beat George Bush trumps everything else.
Even the lone anti-war Democratic holdout from the primaries, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, came on board on Thursday for the sake of party unity. Kucinich, who won 64 delegates to Kerry's 3,000, will be an asset to Kerry as a minor celebrity with far-out liberal support. He claims he persuaded the party platform to authorise the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, though Kerry's position on the war - he says troops should stay until Iraq is stable - and on the Middle East differs little from Bush's.
Kucunich can attract voters who might otherwise favour Ralph Nader. Many Democrats believe the danger from the third-party candidate, who like Kucinich campaigns against the war, free trade agreements and the erosion of civil liberties, is fading.
Most delegates to the Convention think Nader is no longer a threat, according to an AP poll.
He has been tarnished as a patsy for Republican mischief-makers by taking big bucks from Bush fund-raisers like former US ambassador to Ireland, Richard Egan.
Nader is struggling to get ballot access in many states, though his endorsement by the national Reform Party has made him a candidate in Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina and Florida, where his 2000 performance tipped the balance against Al Gore. The latest opinion polls show him at 2-3 per cent, down from a heady 6 per cent some months ago.
Doonesbury is also getting under the skin of many Republicans with its satire on Bush and the Iraq war. Garry Trudeau's comic strip, which appears in more than 1,400 papers via Universal Press Syndicate, has shown the BD character losing a leg in Iraq, and Trudeau has offered $10,000 to anyone who can prove that George Bush served in the Alabama National Guard.
The president of Continental Features in Salisbury, North Carolina, Van Wilkerson, which publishes the comic section of 38 newspapers, did a survey and found that 21 favoured dropping Doonesbury. As a result of this survey, "I feel that is time to act to seek a replacement strip for Doonesbury," he wrote in an e-mail to the papers, and offered instead a choice of comic strips such as Agnes, Getty Fuzzy, Pickles or Zits, in the spirit of "democratic principle".
Some of the papers are fighting back. Editorial page editor of the Anniston Star, Bob Davis, called it "an obviously political effort to silence a minority point of view" and promised to find a way to run it in the Sunday paper. Trudeau commented that he didn't recall Wilkerson polling editors about any other cartoons.
At a fundraising breakfast for a Republican congressman in Pennsylvania recently a priest finished saying grace by asking God to ensure the candidate got enough money to finance his campaign and enough votes to win.
The incident underlines how the Catholic Church in the United States is seen by Republicans as a natural base for votes, given Bush's opposition to abortion and gay marriages. The Republican National Committee has asked Catholic priests to provide copies of parish directories to help register Catholics to vote in the November election.
Martin Gillespie, director of Catholic Outreach at the RNC, said access to the directories "is critical as it allows us to identify and contact those Catholics who are likely to be supportive of President Bush's compassionate conservative agenda".
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has objected, saying the information in parish directories are for use among church members only.