The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

David Broder of the Washington Post is no conservative. Following Kerry's speech at the Boston Botox Party last Thursday night, Broder wrote this column, which appeared in the Sunday Post, where he basically gave Kerry a passing grade for his efforts:

Students of political rhetoric generally agree on the elements that make for a successful convention acceptance speech. Over the years, the best of them have had some or all of these ingredients: a fresh and powerful personal narrative, strong ideas, memorable phrases and a rhythm that builds to an emotional climax.

John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night fell short in all these respects.

And yet preliminary indications are that it worked well, not just inside FleetCenter and here in his hometown but with many in the national television audience. The first feedback I heard was almost uniformly positive.

Plenty of other media pundits gave Kerry even stronger marks. But after a nearly a week of weak polling showing no discernible bounce, Broder may have been overstating Kerry's uninspring performance. He seems to say so here:

This week, polls showed Kerry and the convention apparently had failed to move the dial on this election very far. The Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Kerry leading President Bush by 2 points among those most likely to vote. "By historical standards," said Washington Post polling director Richard Morin, "Kerry's post-convention bounce is modest, at best."

And Tad Devine, Kerry's media adviser, declared, "We never expected great movement in the polls." Of course not. That's why they scripted every moment of the four-night convention, including most especially Kerry's own speech.

As one of the distinct minority of journalists who was not blown away by Kerry's performance, I was not surprised at the apparent lack of progress by the Democratic challenger. I thought it was pretty clear that Kerry had not bombed but also that he had not hit a home run — and I said exactly that on PBS' "Washington Week" on Friday evening and in a column written in the predawn hours on Friday for Sunday papers around the country.

What strikes me now is that many of my colleagues — and perhaps the Kerry campaign itself — are missing the significance of Kerry's lost opportunity.

Broder goes on to point out that Kerry failed to define himself in any meanigful way, other than saying he served in Vietnam. He also chose to challenge the President on his strongest issues -- his leadership in the War on Terror and his values. Kerry basically wants voters to believe that he is a stronger leader and his values are more in tune with theirs. Yet he provides no specifics as to what he would do differently from Bush as a leader, and offers only platitutdes about his values.

In short, Kerry accomplished little to nothing at the Democratic Convention (other than turning Barack Obama into a national star), despite having stage-managed everything exactly as he wished. Perhaps Bush will accomplish little more in New York in three weeks; in fact, incumbents generally get a much lower bounce than the challenger. But Kerry hasn't set the bar very high. As Broder notes, Kerry doesn't get a chance to reach most voters again before the debates.

Then again, maybe he should cancel the debates. The less we see of him, the better chance he has.