The extremely favorable polls just released from Harris Interactive and Pew Research might have been good news for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry if not for the Gallup Organization, America's most venerable and respected polling firm, announcing that President Bush's lead doubled from seven points to thirteen points since immediately after his convention. For nearly seventy years, for over three generations, Gallup has described an electorate within 2.2% of Election Day ballot results. It is Gallup's reports that are cited for many historical parallels, especially presidential convention bounces. This is not a poster on a telephone pole.

An article in the USA Today issue presenting Gallup's polling introduces two caveats to the president's poll surge:

Presidential candidates have won after trailing by similar margins. One was George W. Bush himself. In 2000, he was behind Al Gore by 10 points among registered voters in early October and then prevailed in the Electoral College, though he lost the popular vote.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was down 8 points in the Gallup Poll in late October but won in a landslide after doing well in the only debate held with President Carter.

Neither of these is directly applicable to the present. Governor Bush was running against a Vice President — not an incumbent, nor did he fail to win a convention bounce in August. Governor Reagan not only won an impressive convention bounce but was never more than eight points behind President Carter. Carter, too, is the only one of three defeated incumbents to move ahead more than one point in more than a single Gallup poll; both Presidents Ford and H.W. Bush fell behind their opponents to stay there (Ford, as mentioned, jumped up one right at the end). As much as Gallup can tell us from its experience with presidential elections from 1936, no challenger will win against an incumbent if he misses a mid-summer boost or his incumbent faces no significant primary challengers. The 2004 fulfilled both of those conditions. President Bush's mid-September lead of thirteen points has been bested by four of ten incumbents since 1936: President Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and President Clinton in 1996.

Another line of defense is less analytical than it is cynical, insofar as President Bush is only doing well because his opponent is John Kerry. But isn't that the point? Aren't political organizations expected to convene and choose as their nominee a candidate qualified to represent the ideology, policy and interests of both bloc and broader electorate — someone who reflects the best of the party? And if that candidate fails to impress the electorate, a sign of the party's relative lack of appeal to Americans?

Selective buyer's remorse is the refuge of adolescents.

I've already argued that the Democratic Party and its supporters on the left is an ideologically exhausted political force that is reactionary on domestic issues and completely dumbfounded in a hot war that happens not to follow the conventions of the last one (which is, incidentally, how all wars are). John Kerry is a better representative of the Democratic Party than Howard Dean ever could be, if only because he cannot but hide his core beliefs and alter his message when moving from his base to the general public, reflecting a party running on brand name strength only.

What is of particular interest is the succession of strategic and tactical mistakes made by the Democratic Party and the Kerry Campaign since their national convention in late July. Instructed by the left's flaws, these mistakes are part error in judgment but mostly transpositions of arrogance, brutish political shortsightedness and intellectual vacuity.

The Democratic National Convention was predicated far too much on the notion that an election with an incumbent is a referendum solely on his performance. Four nights were saturated with mostly unfair, often untrue attacks against the president; voters were given very few practical reasons to vote for John Kerry. A scant accounting of the past, present and future so vital to earning the support of Americans was followed by a selective biographical reliance. In an ostentatious coronation, John Kerry asked voters to judge him not on a political record but a distant, short, muddied and controversial military one. This was their first, largest and most natural error.

Such a vulnerable message was instantly seized on by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — leading Democrats to make their second strategic mistake. Many say that Kerry "didn't fight back" enough, or at all, or not in the right way. The third observation is the most accurate. Democrats responded with anger, invective, skimpy allegations of the Bush campaign's direct involvement, outright denial. And, most strikingly, the retraction of Kerry's decades-standing, politically charged claim of illegal activity in Cambodia; the removal of twenty campaign website pages referring to his command of PCF-94 during a time when Kerry was not; and the nature of enemy contact during the circumstances that led to Kerry's first Purple Heart. The group of veterans was large, diverse and therefore credible enough that the only defense was factual rebuttal, including the release of all militarily related documents — beginning with the signing of that infamous Form 180.

But the Kerry campaign did not. President Bush gave the order to release all his existing documents back in February, including the politicized "pay stubs," which effectively chopped off the spear-points of his critics. Democrats, on the other hand, questioned the motives of the veterans — a mistake, as the public interpreted evasion, only fuelling unease. And not only were voters introduced to an embellished war record but of the presidential candidate's intolerance for questioning, from legal steps to the senator's praetorian declaration at midnight of September 3rd of veteran's prerogative. A window was opened into a would-be Kerry White House and the sight was none too pleasant.

When the left decided to organize another assault on the president's Texas Air National Guard record, the Kerry campaign and Democratic National Committee made a painful tactical blunder — showing an acute inability to learn from mistakes. With a tactlessly named "Operation Fortunate Son," Democrats followed on the heels of CBS News' "memos" that were quickly struck down as fraudulent — advancing even after CBS's case began to fall apart. John Kerry had already — to no avail — castigated the president and vice president for their time spent during the Vietnam War. Incredibly, Democrats piled into a fast-sinking ship to resurrect the Michael Moore-inspired "AWOL" charge, immediately forfeiting their semblance of fair players by attacking the president's service under their own banners.

To the average voter, John Kerry's service received applause at the Republican National Convention and humble praise from the president, while President Bush was offered scorn from Boston's Fleet Center and a retro-styled smear from his opponent's own party — the latter even after Democrats complained for weeks about character assassination. Americans don't have a hard time concluding what's fair play. Meanwhile, Dan Rather captured national attention as he retreated into a Fox Mulder solipsist's purgatory, where he currently resides.

All this when John Kerry was trying to answer the question of the war on terror and the democratization of Iraq and Afghanistan with his Vietnam service. Faced with a White House friendly to Congressional spending, clever with little-big government compromises and therefore immune to the usual Democratic insults of "draconian" and "mean-spirited," it is Iraq where the senator might have been able to best the president. That opportunity has long since passed, the senator tugging a torturous wake of contradictory stances like a fifty-foot coattail. What Kerry might have been able to shrug off as partisan rhetoric he instead chose to compulsively embody, enough to suggest his obedience to polling or wildly disparate political interests from within his party. President Bush, at home on the stump, has focused on his opponent's zig-zags with light killing strokes — and succeeded. It's fatal for Kerry, says Charles Krauthammer:

Why? Because, until now, he has said everything conceivable regarding Iraq. Having taken every possible position on the war, there is nothing he can say now that is even remotely credible.

The result is a strategic and thematic disaster. Kerry's waffling has long been a staple of late-night guffawing over at Leno's and Letterman's. But when a waffle becomes a flip-flop and a flip-flop becomes a pattern of severe reversals on a decidely non-humorous matter like national security — and that funny-ha-ha senatorial jitterbug starts to resemble indecision or worse, bait-and-switch — no amount of bad news can convince a majority to choose a man who is either capricious or opportunistic, but otherwise unfit to lead a nation in wartime. Worse, in a rare fit of honesty or bravado, both the Democratic National Committee and the Democrat-frequented MoveOn political action committee have released ads only a half-second flash of DER STATUE OF LIBERTY IST KAPUT and voiceover by Mildred "Axis Sally" Gillars away from being filed in your local library as "Enemy Propaganda." Kerry's party leaders and supporters have stood up, and they want to lose Iraq. Most Americans who are fearful of the uncertainty in war will be offended, if not angered by such an affront. Against a president riding high with an appeal to hope and faith at an admirable risk to his own reelection, the ads' damage to Kerry will be unrecoverable.

With six weeks left, the only moments of direct public connection are in the presidential debates. Even then John Kerry has nothing to look forward to, dogged by stories of political facelift and late-in-life self-searches that echo Al Gore's in 2000, and obligated to defend his inconsistencies before he drives home policy points. Polling trends will probably meet slight adjustments, perhaps even in Bush's favor, so pronounced is Kerry's vulnerability to a rallying incumbent. Indeed, Bush's success may be exponential, as voters who have renewed trust inspire faltering friends and relatives to do the same. Will George W. Bush win reelection? I have been hopeful since January, confident since late July: I would be shocked if he did not. And the disarray evident in the Democratic Party, the aching wanderlust of the Green-like far left against the dawning revulsion of Jacksonians and Blue Dogs, will leave it ready to shatter as soon as 2008.