The "bounce in the polls" thing is a very clever Roveian trick. The Bush folks got Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Gallagher, Scarborough, et al., to say that there should be a bounce (who says so? give me a statistically significant sampling of precedents please), so they could, over the next days (and now weeks) rant on about how surprising and ominous it is that there was no bounce. It was predicted by, and only by, them so they could later make it out as a sign of weakness when it didn't happen. It is really the same "expectation management" that they practice constantly -- Bush comes off as an idiot in debates, so they predict ahead of time that he will look like an incredible idiot, so when he only looks like an idiot, people say "he did a great job". We're still millions of jobs in the hole from the start of his presidency, but they crow like heck over each incremental gain. These folks are master manipulators, and roughly 50% of Americans eat it up. Doesn't sh_t taste good?