It looks like the ranks are getting restless and the reserves and National Guard members are fed up. For an election that is supposed to be tight, he's sure alientating chunks of voters that supported him in 2000.
"My overall encapsulation is that the public will be overwhelmingly surprised at how many people coming back from Iraq will not vote for George W. Bush."
The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major movement against the war is in reserve families."
Reservists, used to serving a weekend a month, are being called up for a year at a time, over and over. They leave homes to serve in jobs for which they feel unprepared, attached to commanders and units they don't know. "We are the stepchildren, here to be abused," says Michael Ray Gibbins [Texas National Guard].
Jean Prewitt's son was with the 3rd Infantry Division and was killed three weeks into war. But she swears that has nothing to do with her opposition to the war. She's just been reading the papers, she says, and can't fight the sense that "we find out more and more each day how we were lied to. We went there for no good reason. It's just so big and tragic and horrible."
She's a former postal worker and a lifelong conservative. But the war has changed her. "It just frustrates me, how they won't admit they made a mistake."
