Frankly, I think he lost the election when he opened his speech with a jaunty salute and a chipper, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.” Politicians can generally get away with looking evil, stupid, and clueless- because everyone expects that- but looking silly is typically a career-killer. Frankly, I suspect that the line must have been inserted into the speech by a Republican operative because I can think of no better way to get at least half of the people watching the speech to think “man, what a Jackass” just a few seconds into the speech.

While we’ll probably have to wait until next week to know for certain, all early indications suggest that this year’s Democratic National Convention was a complete flop with the public. The Rasmussen Tracking Poll’s rolling average shows no bump whatsoever for Kerry from the convention: on Sunday, convention-eve, the results were 47% for Kerry and 46% for Bush. Today, with a full day of post-convention polling, the results remain the same. Zogby’s convention poll, touted by the left, showed Kerry failing to gain a single point as a result of the convention and Bush losing just three (within the margin of error). When Ralph Nader is added to the mix, Kerry’s actually lost a point from where he stood in Zogby’s last pre-convention poll. The post-convention Newsweek poll, a poll notoriously skewed towards Democrats, showed a four point bounce for Kerry- easily within the margin of error. Unless anything changes in the coming days it will be impossible to conclude anything other than that this year’s Democratic convention was a failure on a tremendous scale- the worst convention since the Republican convention in 1992.

At this point, barring unforeseen events (the bane of all politicians) the election is Bush’s to lose. John Kerry had a chance to sell himself to the American public, and he appears to have utterly failed. His convention, whose message can be summed up as “Democrats are Patriots Too!” had a cloying and desperate feel to it. So far as I can tell the sole point which the Democratic Party sought to drive home was that, yes, John Kerry was a Navy Lieutenant some thirty-five years ago. The only other Presidential candidates I can think of who have leaned so heavily upon their military records have been those such as Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower who, you know, commanded great American armies in two of the most fearsome wars in world history. The Silver Star and a few Purple Hearts is enough to earn someone a seat in Congress, perhaps even the Senate, but the Presidency?

If you weren’t paying close attention to proceedings you could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that, after Vietnam, Lieutenant John Kerry jumped into a time machine and arrived in the year 2003 to begin campaigning for President. No reference at all appears to have been made, in all of the convention, to his service as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and no more than a few words were dedicated to his two decades in the Senate in which he’s managed to introduce an astonishing four bill and four resolutions which have passed through Congress (including two designating various periods as “World Population Awareness Week”- what a life story!). I think that more time was devoted to John Kerry’s few years as a prosecutor in the 1970’s than were to all of his time in the Senate where, even his staunchest defenders concede, his record is the weakest of any Senator to be a major party candidate for President since Warren Harding in 1920. So far as I can tell the crux of the entire Democratic case is that, since John Kerry served in Vietnam, he’s fit to be President. If that’s the sole criteria for the Presidency they ought to run Colonel David Hackworth for the job who, since he won ten Silver Stars to Kerry’s one, must be ten times the potential President that Kerry is.

What other message did this Convention seriously try to convey: that a President Kerry (or: John Kerry, President as his personal plane bills him) will seek to “restore relations” with America’s “allies”? To which I ask: which allies? Last I heard Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Poland, and Italy all had major units of their armed forces deployed into Iraq. Even Russia, apparently, has offered to send troops if asked (and if, undoubtedly, they are paid off in some way). So, which allies does he mean to “restore relations” with? France? Germany? Canada? Spain? Because they, frankly, are pretty much the only major Western nations now outside of the Coalition. If you weigh the numbers and consider the relative strength of the nations, they ought to be seeking to repair their relations with the United States, not the other way around.

In any case, it was a serious error for the Kerry/Edwards campaign to stake so much upon Kerry’s Vietnam service. At this moment the public has an idealized view of Kerry’s time in combat- as good a view as they’re ever going to have. When they begin to hear about both the questions which revolve around Kerry’s actual time in service and his later anti-war activism the waters are going to, at the very least, be muddied a little bit.

For example, when the general public finds out that of the twenty fellow Swift Boat commanders featured in a picture being used by the Kerry campaign (and used in his little movie at the convention) eleven consider him unfit to be President, two are dead, four are neutral, and two support him: well, that raises a few questions to say the least. As well, I think that we’ll hear a lot about band-aids in the weeks to come. I doubt if more than 1% of the public knows the story of John Kerry’s first Purple Heart and, when they learn it, it’s going to have an effect. The image of a young John Kerry lobbying for a medal for a wound which was treated with a band-aid is a telling one. In this case, it might be the band-aid that will do him in. In any political story it’s often a little detail that sticks in people’s minds- like Sandy Berger’s socks.

Now I know that people are going to say, “Well, Bush was AWOL” or whatever else they want to say. Well, that’s not the point: everyone knows that already and, upon the whole, the popular perceptions of Bush’s service in the National Guard are much worse than the truth of the matter. In any case, we’re not talking about George Bush at the moment: we’re talking about John Kerry. George W. Bush hasn’t based his campaign upon his National Guard service.

Now that Kerry’s raised the issue of Vietnam, we’re also going to have to have a real talk about his anti-war activism which, while known, has yet to be explored in any depth. If was extremely foolish of John Kerry to think that he, one of the leading members of the anti-war movement, could get away with now running for President on the basis of wartime heroism in a war which he denounced as immoral and atrocity-filled. Voters are stupid: but they’re not quite that stupid.

Perhaps the best indicator of the failure of the Democratic Convention is the performance of the Iowa Electronic Market in recent days. The IEM is a project of the University of Iowa where individuals lay down actual money on political and world events. In the Winner-Take-All Vote Market, where individuals buy shares which pay out at a dollar if their candidate wins the election, Kerry shares have dropped from $.524 on Friday to $.481 at the present time. In other words, people willing to put their money where their mouth is experienced a sharp loss of confidence the moment that the convention ended.

Now we’ve got a month in which, for lack of money, the Kerry campaign is going to have to “go dark” just as the Bush campaign kicks into action. Then we’re going to have a Republican National Convention whose star speakers (other than the President) are going to be John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Colin Powell- collectively men who are probably the four most popular politicians in the entire country. Something tells me that Governor Terminator is more likely to move someone’s numbers than President Malaise and that the hero of 9-11 has more credibility with the American people than President Blow Job and Vice President Nutjob combined.

The best thing about the coming Bush victory is that it’ll crush any chance that John Edwards will ever be President. The baby-faced Southern demagogue may think that even a losing campaign will make him the front-runner for the Democratic Nomination in 2008, but he’d be wrong. When Kerry loses that’ll put Edwards effectively out of politics for four years. By the time 2008 rolls around he’ll be a nobody.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps polls next week will show John Kerry with a massive bounce. Perhaps next week President Bush will tell a national television audience of how he accepted Satan into his heart. I don’t know. But, before you taunt remember this: seven months ago virtually every Democratic partisan online was looking forward to the certain inauguration of President Howard Dean.