It's Labor Day in America when everyone takes a day off - everyone, that is, except the spinners in the rival presidential camps. They are haunted by the legend that he who is ahead in the polls on Labor Day always wins the White House, so with the candidates neck and neck the tempo has accelerated sharply.
To paraphrase Harold Wilson, 24 hours is a long time in the lavishly financed presidential politics of the internet era. Keeping track on just one day is like watching Agassi and Clement.
On August 31, Bush serves at 8.30am with proposals on higher education. Half an hour later, he challenges Gore to detail his education budget. At 9.30am on CNN, he widens the assault, with an online, on air attack on Gore for doing nothing about Medicare while vice president. Forty love.
At 10am Gore comes back with his detailed plan for Medicare, and at 10.15am volleys the Bush ball on what he did as vice president by citing the administration's success in prolonging the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund from 1999 to 2025. A federal judge in Texas jumps into centre court, finding in a civil suit that Bush has not done enough in the state to care for poor children receiving Medicaid benefits. Deuce.
At 10.30am Gore highlights that morning's Bush admission on CNN that he has no plan to eliminate the national debt, then follows up at 1.30pm, citing new figures that Texas is doing less well in educational tests.
Set one for Gore, maybe, but that is only for starters. It goes on like that throughout the day. When the rest of us are thinking of bed, at 11.50pm, Gore is on web and wire comparing education budgets.
The exchanges represented a reversal for Bush. He had planned to spend the second of a two-week tour entirely on education. Instead, he has had to stage impromptu press conferences to cope with a growing unease about how he would honour all the promissory notes he has been issuing in open-handed Texas style.
In the flurry of the primaries and the spectacle of the conventions, few in press or public bothered about the small print; indeed, the commentators and the chat show jokers kept complaining that Al "Bore" should lighten up instead of worrying so much about the polar ice cap and the wisest way to handle the projected $4 trillion federal surplus. They were more concerned with the earth tones of his suits than the cogency of his arguments. The carefully plotted happy talk campaign that won Bush a second term as governor of Texas seemed to be working on the national stage with a double-digit lead for Bush after his fine performance in the vacuous nominating convention in Philadelphia.
A study by the Pew Research Center found that the press had been "far more likely to convey that Bush is a different kind of Republican, a compassionate conservative, a reformer, bipartisan than to discuss Al Gore's experience, knowledge or readiness for office". Fully 40% of the assertions about Bush proclaimed that he was a different kind of politician, one of Bush's key campaign themes. In contrast, only 14% of the time did the press assert the message that Gore wanted to convey about his experience and competence.
Yet despite the partiality of a generally sour press, a parallel study by Pew finds that the public seems now to have discerned Gore's solid qualities. And according to Gallup, Gore's improvement on 19 issues and personal characteristics is "part of a more generally positive reassessment of the vice president".
Now, with only two months to go, even the conservative press is fretful that Bush has not done his arithmetic. He cannot explain how he would save Social Security and Medicare, spend more on defence and finance prescription drugs for the elderly, while also enacting a $1.6 trillion across the board tax cut. Stumbling responses from Bush, with the usual malapropisms, are a striking contrast to Gore's explicit explanations of programmes targeted to appeal to the working middle class.
Bush is rattled. His managers expected Gore to enjoy a post-convention bounce, but the very latest poll gives Gore a 10-point lead - more than they bargained for. The Bush campaign has panicked. At the end of the week, he approved millions of dollars for 30-second commercials in 16 states - not to explain his policies more thoroughly but to defame Gore. Bush has made it an insistent theme that he renounces the "petty politics of personal destruction", yet that is precisely what he will attempt with sarcastic commercials that mock Gore's character and truthfulness.
It will remind the crucial independent voters that personal nastiness was the Bush way when he had his back to the wall against McCain. It might even provoke the question: Is GW fit to be president?