Will There Be An Obama Bounce?

Probably not as big as the one the McCain camp is predicting:

John McCain’s presidential campaign, playing an aggressive version of the expectations game, circulated a campaign memo predicting Barack Obama will get a nearly 15-point bump in the opinion polls as a result of next week’s Democratic Convention.

The memo comes as Obama kept the country — and the increasingly frenzied media — in the dark about who he had picked as his vice presidential candidate.

The McCain campaign already is looking at ways to steal some of Obama’s spotlight in the coming week, with a plan for instant responses to speeches by Obama and his supporters.

Even so, McCain aides are predicting that Obama’s short-term success could rival that of Bill Clinton’s, who got a 16-point bump in the polls after he was named the Democrat’s nominee at the 1992 convention in New York.

“Barack Obama is more similarly situated to Bill Clinton in 1992 than any other candidate in recent history,” Sarah Simmons, a director of strategy for the McCain campaign, wrote in the Friday memo. “Bill Clinton was a new candidate on the national scene; he was running in a ‘change’ oriented election cycle and the economy was voters’ top issue — a dynamic he was able to capitalize on.”

The McCain campaign also expects Obama, who is leading McCain 42 percent to 39 percent in a FOX News poll released this week, to get a temporary 5-point bump from announcing who he has chosen as his running mate.

It all depends on how the Obamessiah's big Thursday night speech goes, as well as who his long-awaited VP is going to be. If the speech comes off looking like another Nuremburg rally, I don't think the bounce will be that impressive.