Eight days ago I described a Democratic National Convention desperately trying for a happy medium between leftist fringe-politics and the need for any viable presidential candidate to appeal at least to American centrism. Democrats would be caught between white-hot disdain for their commander-in-chief and plastic inoffensiveness, both postures deadly in an election defined by national security and solidarity. It was to be a tightrope walk of ludicrous odds and serious consequences. It would ultimately fail to achieve the challenger poll "bounce" necessary for momentum to withstand the electorate's natural turn back to the incumbent in the fall, I said, concluding:

I predict equal chances of a tiny, four-to-six point lead that dwindles within ten days, or a drop of five or more.

My prediction was accurate on both counts.

Rasmussen Reports and Newsweek are reporting a 4-point, post-convention bounce for Kerry-Edwards. Newsweek adds that four points is the smallest jump ever recorded by the magazine.

Gallup, however, in reporting its first poll taken after John Kerry's acceptance speech, confirms the less-popular expectation of the Democratic National Convention — as well as posing for the first time the question of John Kerry's failure:

The first poll taken in its entirety after the Democratic Convention shows a significant bounce - for the Bush Cheney ticket.

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Sunday shows that among likely voters, President Bush reaped a five point bounce from the Democratic confab, and he now leads Sen. Kerry, 50 to 47 percent. The new numbers represent a sharp reversal from a July 19-21 CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey, which had Kerry leading Bush by two points, 49 to 47 percent. Even among registered voters - a group that typically trends more Democratic than likely voters - Bush picked-up a one-point bounce.

This news may well seal Kerry's fate. Every incumbent president who has lost since Gallup started polling in 1936 — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — saw his opponent with a lead of at least 16 points by late July. Carter enjoyed a 33-point lead from a 9-point bounce, Clinton a lead of 25 points from a 16-point bounce and Reagan 16 from an 8-point bounce. No challenger to an incumbent has won in this time without such a gain. Harry S. Truman, furthermore, has proved that a president can, in the midst of a war and transcontinental reconstruction whose justifications lie in abstraction, lag behind his opponent for the entire campaign and still prevail.

Kerry, it would seem now, has enjoyed something of a honeymoon: voters are fickle and don't mind entertaining the summer notion that all worries, including the war, could be made to go away. When the decision is finally put to them, however — especially given Kerry's determined silence on the topic — many voters are likely to sober up and swing to Bush. Every race, for whatever reason, tightens — but that bounce, that connection with voters, is vital. If John Kerry had achieved that 15-point bounce Bush-Cheney strategist Matthew Dowd publicized (shrewdly I might add, as the GOP knew it was impossible), an appeal for Bush in the fall would have a formidable wall of voter sentiment to batter through. But Kerry failed to even meet the expectations of his own party. What began in January as a reflection of Bush's remarkably strong incumbency ends with the disappointing measure of John Kerry's potency. Events in America and abroad will continue to shape opinions, but nothing stands in the way of Bush's appeal to the nation in August and later this fall.

BETTER: USA Today reports that Bush-Cheney leads by four, not three, points.