The polls are pretty much back to where they were before the Dem convention and that has a lot of pundits mystified. Surely the Obamessiah's Greek Temple speech would have have driven voters into throes of ecstacy and given him a 40 or 50 point bump in the polls.
Well, maybe not.
Jennifer Rubin at Contentions gives us some reasons why:
How can it be that The One is in a dead heat, that the bounce — if the mini-rise in a couple of tracking polls can even be called that — is already subsiding? There was The Speech! The media all told us he was fabulous! Several explanations are possible.
First, the Denver bounce met the Sarah Palin bounce and the two cancelled each other out. It seems that the appearance of the mother of five with plenty of moxie and anecdotes (and a healthy dose of executive experience) was every bit as exciting and uplifting for McCain as the Temple of Barack address was for Obama. Despite the loony blogosphere conspiracy theories and tasteless attacks against her, the public is intrigued and delighted by her. Hence, she wiped out whatever memories there remained of Obama’s speech after the last firework faded from the sky over INVESCO field.
Second, we keep telling you — it is a really close race. The electorate is evenly divided, the Democrats managed to find a candidate so weak as to counteract the generic ballot advantage, and the two contenders appeal to different groups of voters of roughly the same size. Hence, we return to rough parity after small events are observed and processed by voters.
Third, perhaps the observations here and of longtime pundits like David Broder and William Safire were on the money: Obama’s speech was too angry and negative and it contained too much big government liberalism. He already had people who think everyone is “getting knocked” down and the only solution is to tax the rich and expand the reach of government. Liberals liked him before and they liked him after the speech — you can tell because their spokespeople in the form of the national media told us so. But the people who will swing the election five points one way or the other remained unmoved, it seems, or were least as equally moved by Sarah Palin’s speech last Friday in Dayton.
And finally, the “Celebrity” ad attacks and debunking of Obama’s mass rally-style of politics insulated people from the impact of the speech, or helped to turn off as many people as it excited. Even people who liked the speech had a little voice inside ( the voice of Steve Schmidt, really) saying, “You know it’s kind of silly all this movie set stuff and rock bands –he is running for President.” So the bounce was even briefer and smaller than the Magical Mystery tour bounce from earlier in the summer.
The bottom line: this may prove demoralizing to the Obama supporters and to some extent their media cheerleaders. As for the latter, their reactions and observations ( “It was a symphony not a speech!” Peggy Noonan mockingly recalls one of them exclaiming) have proven again and again to be irrelevant and not indicative of much of anyone who matters in this election. Each time they miss the boat we get confirmation of this reality.
McCain and Palin, if they ever get their Convention, will have their shot at bouncing the polls upward. We will see then whether voters are “unbouncable” or whether The One just isn’t, after all, the one to move undecideds.
I have a feeling that a week from now the polls will be right here again, assuming there's some kind of bump for the GOP campaign. That will depend on McCain and Palin's speeches.
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