Anyone who thinks Kerry has ignored that advice need only look back at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Party attack dogs were fed tranquilizers in their red meat. Kerry, himself, was boringly wuzzy.

Result: No sizeable “bounce” in ratings, whatever those are worth. Despite the transfusion of John Edwards onto the ticket, Kerry remains flat as a flounder – a floundering flounder, at that.

It was a painful disappointment to the blood-lusters among delegates who came to the convention to lynch Bush in absentia and then go bouncing into the opinion-polls stratosphere.

They Still Don’t Get It

Not to worry, the Kerry wise ones continue to insist. They have Bush right where they want him. So sit down and shut up.

Here are a few common-sense questions to ask yourself about what’s going on out there beyond the Beltway Neverland:

America doesn’t split right down the center. It’s a mixed bag. At least three opinions are held on any subject of importance. Neighbors may hold one of those opinions today, another tomorrow, and the following day decide they’ve still not made up their minds.

More things in America are worth holding onto (as in conservative) than overturning (as in liberal). Hollywood celebrities – who Kerry thinks are the heart and soul of this nation – are bizarre, not typical, Americans. They fascinate not because they are like us but because we aren’t like them – and glad not to be.

The political center is not in the center at all, but somewhat to starboard – and moving gradually more that way every day. So the big fault line, if it’s there at all, is on the conservative side of ideological dead center.

They may tell nosey pollsters they have. They may be leaning this way or that. Americans have a frustrating, but rather gratifying, way of waiting till they’ve had time to think things through before locking in on how they’ll vote for president.

Kerry’s merchandisers are fundamentally off base when they counsel him that the “undecided vote” has shrunk to a barely discernable fraction.

Something electrifying. Something compelling enough to grab everyone’s attention. A catalytic political event, that’s what.

In chemistry, when a catalyst is introduced into two stable substances it causes them to go active, even to the point of creating a new substance.

In politics, a catalyst would cause voters – from the left, from the center, even from the right – to coalesce around John Kerry, forming a mass large enough to win the election.

Neither Sizzle Nor Steak

Nothing like that happened at the Democrats’ convention. Everything remained inert.

Would it have happened if Kerry’s script censors had allowed Howard Dean, Teddy Kennedy, both Clintons, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, the whole rootin’ tootin’ leftwing load of them, Kerry and the missus included, to pop out from behind their masks of mediocrity and reveal their true colors? Go radical-left like Al Sharpton and Max Cleland did when they jumped the traces?

It would certainly have had a catalytic effect on some of those voters pulsing to and fro within the off-center center. You can bet the Kerry bounce would have made it up at least to the bottom of his chin.

In Any Event, Too Late

Would that have been enough? Not if you accept the basic premise that America has not lurched left-nutsy.

True, it could have provided Kerry some smidgen of spark to build on over the next 13 weeks till the election. An no one knows what might crop up that could give Kerry the winning edge had he gone catalytic in Boston. Now, John Kerry will never know.

That’s what happens, Johnny boyo, when you forget you are Irish, act like you are French and, out of ineptitude and impotence, opt to remain inert in the middle of your own stagnant presidential campaign.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

All of John Perry's articles.