Explanation for Kerry on the Quiet?

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo a short while ago:

There's an article by Ryan Lizza in the current New Republic that I strongly recommend you read. The upshot of the piece is that there's some wisdom -- and certainly a strategy behind John Kerry's relative absence from the airwaves over the last six to eight weeks.

The conventional rule of campaigning is that you don't let your opponent define you before you get a chance to define yourself.

Yet, as Ryan describes it, the Kerry plan is to do something very near the opposite. The plan is to take these punches from the Bush campaign and let Bush burn through a lot of his money. Hopefully, in the view of the Kerry campaign, Kerry comes through that without having suffered too much damage. Then Kerry fights back with hard-hitting ads through the late spring and summer with Bush having squandered his huge money advantage.

I guess we'll see if this strategy works.

What concerns me more is that Bush, Cheney, Condi, and Company keep telling us to expect a major attack before the election. Which makes me wonder, "Are they planning one?"