No Bounce for Kerry! Why Did This Happen?
by Jay Bryant
Thursday, August 05, 2004
When I was a kid, I had a beagle named Bounce.
Even before that, there was a hit record by Benny Goodman called ''Jersey Bounce,'' a name which I have always assumed had a scatological subtext, especially since at the time, the peak of feminine pulchritude was encapsulated in the phrase ''sweater girl.''
Bounce is a laundry product you can put in your dryer to make your clothes soft; it also has several non-standard uses, such as rolling the little sheets up and stuffing them into your sneakers to keep them smelling fresh. No, not while you're actually wearing the sneakers.
When a basketball player bounces a ball, it's called dribbling. When a football player bounces a ball, it's called a fumble. When a baseball player bounces a ball, it's called an error.
In political parlance, a bounce is a quick upswing in the polls occasioned by some particular event or cause, such as your party's national convention. Convention bounces don't necessarily last, but they almost always happen. Michael Dukakis had a convention bounce of something like fifteen points in 1988.
After the convention, Dukakis did his tank-suit thing and his bounce tanked. John Kerry did his NASA bunny suit thing before his convention. Whatever else you can say about the bunny suit photo, it's bad staff work. In the post-Dukakis era, no advance man worth his walkie-talkie would have allowed it. Whoever did should be, and perhaps has been, fired. Bunnies do bounce, though, although the phrase ''hippity-hop'' is more generally used. (Kerry's attempt to cozy up to the Hip Hop crowd at the convention went over like a lead balloon when he couldn't name any Hip Hop artists. Let the record show that I'm with him on this one.) Anyway, it's unlikely the silly bunny suit photo was the cause of Kerry's failure to get any bounce at all from last week's Boston ''D'' party.
No bounce at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. Within the margin of error in all the polls. Up two-to-four in the Newsweek poll. Margin of error. Down four in the CNN-USA Today poll. Also margin of error, but seriously, down four? A negative bounce is when your lead balloons crash through the floor of the Fleet Center and land in the basement.
Why, oh why, did this happen?
One theory is that voters this year are so rigidly set in their ways, filled with venom and hatred for whichever side they're against that there are literally no undecideds--no one to bounce, so to speak. This is a very logical hypothesis, and may well be true. Like any useful hypothesis, it is testable. If President Bush gets no bounce from the Republican convention later this month, the two conventions taken together will be a pretty good demonstration of the my-mind-is-made-up-so-I-don't-care-what-you-say explanation of 2004 bouncelessness.
And it will mean that all polls in this election, including the big one scheduled for November 2, will be within the margin of error. If this was a 50-50 race in March, April, May, June, July and August, there's not much reason to expect change in September or October, either. If I were Jim Baker or Warren Christopher, I'd be thinking about spending December in Florida again.
A second, party-neutral explanation is the ''what convention?'' thesis. Since the major networks gave the convention less coverage than any other since Lucy and Desi were an item, it was left to the cable news networks and C-SPAN to report on the happenings to the nation. This is a vastly smaller audience, only about a tenth of the Big Three. Moreover, the people who do watch C-SPAN, Fox News, CNN, and the others are, almost by definition, political junkies and hence unbouncable partisans.
If either of these factors accounts for the lack of a Kerry bounce, then Bush won't get one either.
On the other hand, maybe the fault lies with the Democratic Convention itself. Maybe there are voters out there who are willing to be bounced, but all Kerry and Friends did in Boston was dribble, fumble, and make errors.
The much ballyhooed vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, was by all accounts a dud at the platform--his speech memorable for, well, nothing. Kerry's own appearance had one and only one memorable moment, that opening ''reporting for duty'' salute. But however memorable it was, nothing about it was vote-switching. Let's compare it to Al Gore's big moment at his convention, when he tongue-tattooed Tipper. ''The kiss'' worked for Gore in 2000. Why? Because it violated our previous preconceptions of Gore as a soulless, emotionless android.
But given the ceaseless, overblown, ''for God's sake will you talk about something else'' nature of Kerry's Vietnam story, ''the salute'' offered us nothing new. It was just another silly gimmick pushing the same old theme.
Look at it this way: Kerry's salute is not comparable to Gore's kiss, but it would be roughly comparable to the effect a similar on-podium kiss by Bill Clinton would have had--particularly if the kissee were a woman other than Mrs. C. ''So it's that again, is it?''
Speaking of women, one who absolutely did not come away from Boston with her reputation enhanced is Teresa Kerry, who is well on her way to becoming the biggest drag on the ticket of any aspiring first lady since Rachel Jackson in 1832.
But of course, without her billions, her hubby probably wouldn't even have been in the running. So you take the good with the bad. Bounce, bounce.
chronwatch.com |
