Two weeks in to the election campaign and it’s ex-PM Kevin Rudd dominating the headlines, including new accusations he leaks more than a faulty tap. Today Julia Gillard will announce her new “real Julia” campaign strategy, as she battles problems with Rudd, dipping polls and the constant gender issue. And Tony Abbott? Well, so far he’s just keeping quiet and not stuffing up, and his poll popularity is beginning to creep up.

But if you haven’t read Grog’s Gamut post on how this election campaign is playing out in the media, bookmark it now because it’s compulsory reading for political media junkies. It’s a fairly brutal but accurate representation of how journalists are covering this election in the mainstream media. Journos have stopped examining policy and now just examine politicians, says Grog:

“Here’s a note to all the news directors around the country: Do you want to save some money? Well then bring home your journalists following Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, because they are not doing anything of any worth except having a round-the-country twitter and booze tour.”

This campaign is a farce: “…we have a campaign in which we are treated to a procession of semi-celebrity day-trips around which banal triviality is contrived,” writes John Wanna in The Australian. Mark Day agrees: “How times have changed. Today, politics is entertainment.”

It isn’t always entertaining, but the commentariat love it. Rudd may have been hospitalised for gall-bladder surgery (cue a barrage of highly inappropriate and mildly amusing leaking bile jokes) but he still haunted Gillard’s campaign and Alexander Downer didn’t let Rudd’s illness stop him from ripping in. Downer accused Rudd of leaking critical information fed to him by the Liberal Party. “I don’t use the c-word, but I do use the f-word pretty freely, and I can tell you that Kevin Rudd is a f****** awful person,” he apparently said.

One hugely critical article by Claire Harvey in The Daily Telegraph titled ‘The Rudd we never knew‘ paints Rudd as an arrogant and ruthless bastard, quoting journalists and Liberal politicians dishing the dirt on Rudd. “They were all manifestations of a particular kind of arrogance. They were the characteristics that made Kevin Rudd successful. They also made him widely loathed,” writes Harvey.

Rudd has stolen Gillard’s spotlight. “Julia Gillard is no longer the central figure in the Labor campaign, and her legitimacy and effectiveness as party leader is constantly being brought into question,” writes Dennis Shanahan at The Oz.

Shanahan continued the theme in today: “At this point, the ALP is losing the election campaign, Gillard is losing her gloss and the advantage of removing Kevin Rudd is gone — a loss that is doubly cursed as the knifed Labor leader’s presence continues to dominate the campaign and distract the government from its message.”

Former Herald Sun and Age editor Bruce Guthrie tells the fascinating tale of a recent encounter with wounds-licking post-spill Rudd in The Sunday Age:

“On one particular night he spoke Mandarin to a group of Chinese visitors on our table; on another, he spoke Swedish to some Scandinavians. I reminded him of this at Sunshine Beach and he disarmed me completely with his response. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m not prime minister any longer,’ said Rudd.

“I seized on it immediately: ‘It can be a problem if you’re seen by the electorate to be too intelligent. It sets up a disconnect.'”

Rudd will be gone by Christmas, claims Dennis Atkins. “If Labor wins, they argue there’s no way Rudd will get a Cabinet post which would see him depart. If they lose, he’s unlikely to stick around in a morass of recrimination and back-stabbing,” he writes in The Courier-Mail.

Gillard’s knifing of Rudd the PM may not have been the best idea, says Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The Julia Gillard experiment is failing. The Gillard government has received its first political death threat. For the first time since she took the prime ministership 37 days ago, a credible national poll has Labor losing power…

“What is going so dreadfully wrong for Labor? The first words that will fall from many lips are ‘Kevin Rudd’.”

The Neilsen poll in reference has the Coalition ahead on the two-party preferred vote, 52-48. Today’s Newspoll has both parties even on 50-50 in the two-party preferred, with Gillard leading as preferred PM by 50-35.

It seems before we can go Moving Forward, we have to process the end of Rudd; “like a marriage breakdown, a political execution takes time to be closed out,” writes Imre Salusinszky in The Oz.

Whoever this rat in the ranks is, Gillard has to reveal them before they destroy her campaign, says David Burchell: “It’s time for Gillard to pull the spectre out of its attic, expose it to the light and renounce it once and for all.”

This election is turning into a tightly-fought contest. Queen Julia might still reign, but she won’t rein it in as easily as polls previously predicted. Gillard has come out swinging, saying her campaign is changing:

“It’s time for me to make sure the real Julia is well and truly on display, so I’m going to step up and take personal charge of what we do in the campaign from this point. I’m going to discard all of that campaign advice and professional or common wisdom and just go for it… I’m not Doris Day, I’m not naive about this. But I will be taking more direct control of the campaign from here.”

As Robyn Riley writes in the Herald Sun: “I’ve got a feeling this election is going to get a lot closer than many were forecasting and every step is being closely analysed. The slightest slip-up could see a leader pay a huge price.”

Labor votes are angry, says Shaun Carney in The Age: “It’s clear from the opinion polls, from reader and audience feedback in the media, and from standing in the supermarket queue that ennui, disaffection and disenchantment is prevalent across part of the electorate, especially among those who would generally be regarded as falling into the Labor column.”

“Labor has been confronted with the reality that it will lose the August 21 election without a huge change in fortunes and in the quality of its campaign,” argues Laura Tingle [paywalled]  in the Australian Financial Review.

Amazingly, Gillard’s gender is still a national political issue. All the gender/earlobes/fashion sense talks just represents a bigger issue, writes Josh Gordon in The Sunday Age: “…perhaps it is also a proxy for a bigger question: are parts of Australia uncomfortable with the idea of a woman as prime minister?”

It’s more about Gillard’s policies than anything else, says Sid Maher. “There are good reasons why no candidate from Labor’s Left in living memory has led a federal government and I expect Abbott will be listing them all the way to polling day,” he writes in The Oz.

Gillard is just the latest Labor robot, writes Paul Sheehan in the Sydney Morning Herald, a “metallic creature of the machine”.

Tony Abbott is doing a very good job in not making himself the topic of debate, says Tony Wright. “Having caused himself little damage, Abbott had been granted the luxury of watching the prime minister take all the heat,” he writes in The Age.

How far the mighty Kevin07 has fallen, since “if Labor loses on August 21, it would be the equivalent of the Liberals blowing up John Howard and Peter Costello in one term,” writes Phillip Coorey in the Herald.

Suddenly the Howard years have a rosy glow for Peter van Onselen at The Oz, too: “If the past three years have taught us anything it is that if voters had their time again they would have re-elected the Howard government for a fifth term.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Grattan draws a nice comparision in The Age about the two leaders’ closet advisers: John Faulkner to Gillard and Nick Minchin to Abbott:

“Faulkner and Minchin are the reality checks of their travelling parties.When things are going well, the candidate’s feet must be kept on the ground. Hubris has to be held at bay — it’s a bad look; it may lead to a serious lapse of discipline, and anyway, it may not be justified. On the other hand, when it is all going to hell in a hand basket, an old hand’s job is to know how to react and to sustain flagging spirits. Just now, Faulkner is having his work cut out.”

Apart from the Abbott vs. Gillard battle, there is one other politician looking genuine, promising policies and keeping appearances out of it, says Michelle Grattan in The Age:

“If you want ‘authentic’, Bob Brown is certainly it. He hasn’t been in the Australian Women’s Weekly — though he recalls having a photo he took of sheep published there in 1973. There’s no ‘glam’. And he’s saying now pretty much what he’s said in past years on most key issues.”