According to the polls, he may need to lose a lot more before November.

I wonder whom all these pollsters are polling, however. I hardly meet anyone who likes what the president has done the last four years, or is happy with what he hasn’t done.

Do you know anyone who’s been called by a pollster? What are they doing, just calling people who made the mistake of voting for Bush the first time around?

What has the president done to warrant a return vote?

Well, he invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 planners. In the process he toppled the government, which was harboring al-Qaida and thus supported terrorism.

It was the shot heard ’round the world in a new War on Terrorism. He had the support of most people and nations worldwide for the fight. But it didn’t work out the way it was supposed to.

Where’s Osama? He escaped or was blown to bits in an eastern Afghan cave. Either way, there’s no body. Does the government have it on ice for convenient use right before the election? Who knows.

Then the president was diverted from the War on Terror by his obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Without any credible evidence that Iraq was involved in terrorism or had weapons of mass destruction to use against us or anyone else, the president lied and used bogus intelligence to justify an invasion and annexation.

He toppled Saddam, but more than 1,000 Americans have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in the process. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have perished. And there’s no end in sight to a war that the president declared over more than 16 months ago.

The Iraq war is sucking most resources and attention from the legitimate War on Terrorism and in effect likely helped al-Qaida attract new members. Because of Iraq, terrorism has as strong a foothold today as it did before 9/11.

The issue of Iraq in itself should be enough to turn voters from the president’s camp. Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry voted to authorize the Iraq attack, but later said he was duped like most Americans by the administration’s faulty and deceitful intelligence claims.

Kerry lately has been hammering the Iraq issue, saying the invasion was a mistake and the occupation even more so.

But the polls, if you can believe them, still show a tight race.

How stupid of me; maybe it’s the economy. Statistics indicate more people are working in recent months, though wages for those jobs are low. Many people apparently have enough money to keep buying gas-guzzling SUVs, bigger televisions, more-powerful computers and Wal-Mart junk even as the poverty rate continues to climb.

People are happy, it seems, if the system delivers the goods.

And health care, which many thought would be the major issue in this election, continues to receive little attention because no one has an easy answer for the skyrocketing costs and the 16 million people without insurance.

After four years, the president certainly hasn’t addressed the problem, except to come up with a Medicare prescription-drug plan that lines the pockets of his supporters who lead the major pharmaceutical companies.

The other day at the pharmacy I saw an elderly woman who was getting a prescription that cost $272. She said she didn’t have the money but would be getting her Social Security and teacher retirement checks next week. She tearfully asked if she could post-date a check. The answer was no.

If we can spend billions of dollars on Iraq, we ought to be able to take care of our senior citizens better than that. Further, everyone should have access to health care. Kerry is proposing single-payer national health insurance. Bush is promising tax credits and flex accounts to help people save money for their needs. Right, just like he wanted to let them invest their Social Security payments.

Let’s face it: Bush has been worse than any of us feared back in 2000 when the Supreme Court declared him president. But we can try to get the nation on track — focused on improving the lives of Americans — in November.

The pollsters aren’t done yet. Nov. 2, 2004, can still be the end of an error.

Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at cary@thedailystar.com or (607) 441-7217.