Posted 10:23 PM by Robert

Excuse Me, It Was An Effective Speech

At least it was effective in getting Peggy Noonan so upset that she's taking a leave of absence from the Wall Street Journal to help the Republicans in this election.

Of course, that speech is also reported to have caused Bush to gain eight points in the Gallup poll. Talk about effective!

On a related point, I just noticed John Kerry himself on television offering an entirely new reason why his failure to obtain any bounce from his Convention doesn't matter: Senator Kerry says that he was already at such a high level in the polls going into the Convention that there was just nowhere "up" to go.

Funny that neither he, nor his people, nor Terry McAuliffe, nor the mainstream media thought that to be true before the Convention. As Adam Nagourney put it in the New York Times:

For all of the Kerry aides' efforts to play down expectations, Democrats were looking for him to break through the long deadlock and allay concerns that voters were reluctant to embrace Mr. Kerry, even if they were unhappy with Mr. Bush. Going into the convention, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, predicted that Mr. Kerry would enjoy an eight-point gain in support after the convention.

Why didn't Senator Kerry have his people and the DNC tell everyone to calm down and not expect a bounce?

Of course, if, as the Senator argues, Kerry-Edwards was (and is) already up so high that there was no place to go, doesn't it follow that Bush-Cheney will be down so much going into their convention that there's no place to go but up? In other words, doesn't the Senator's argument imply that there's lots of room for a Bush-Cheney post-Convention bounce?