Does President Bush have winner’s luck? Just as Senator Kerry launches his fall offensive with Cannonball Carville and other Clinton vets on board, the wonder boy himself goes under the knife. One of the best campaigners in political history is suddenly benched.

President Reagan’s passing was another celestial freebie for Mr. Bush. By the time the clouds of eulogy had parted, the raging Abu Ghraib prison scandal was off the front pages, never to recapture the same intensity of focus again.

The Kerry campaign has been afflicted by bubble sickness. Just as everything Mr. Bush does is seen through the prism of winning, everything Mr. Kerry does has been viewed as a symptom of a malaise.

Democratic power players seem to earn more peer points for attacking the candidate than attacking the president. They get on the phone and honk at each other about what Kerry’s gotta do to fix it, and when they are sick of calling each other, they call the New York Times.

It all reminds political joke smith Mark Katz of how it felt in the summer of 1988 to be on the Dukakis rapid-response team, founded that June. By July they had dropped “rapid,” by August they had dropped “response,” and by September they weren’t even a team, just a bunch of despondent guys. Coming at the high point of Democratic consternation, the Clinton news has produced a macabre burst of handicapping from skittish New Yorkers about other possible deus ex machina events that may redirect history. It is pretty obvious at this point that another major terrorist attack here would clinch the case for Bullhorn Bush, but what about second-tier calamities?

Republicans should not imagine that Governor Jeb’s chunky, reassuring style giving updates on emergency hurricane relief will yield warm Bushie feelings toward the family.

According to a 2004 paper by two Princeton political scientists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, titled “Blind Retrospection: Electoral Responses to Drought, Flu, and Shark Attacks,” bad weather usually works against the incumbent. Voters go into the booth, and think back on how the year sucked and pull the lever for change.

But at this teetering moment in the campaign, every other eventuality seems spinnable by Team Bush. One good side effect of the Clinton melodrama was that it made his advice to Mr. Kerry seem oracular. The former president was suddenly being heard as if from a seance in his hospital room Saturday when he urged Mr. Kerry out of the paddy fields of Vietnam and back to hammering Bush in the present tense.

The phenomenon that bedevils Mr. Kerry is that all the bad news has been around so long it’s become the new baseline. A version of olfactory fatigue has set in with the electorate. Just as you can’t smell onions when they have been around for a while, you cease to notice the consequences of bad decisions as long as they don’t get dramatically worse.

Bad news, once it’s had time to settle in, isn’t news anymore. You would have thought that Mr. Kerry has plenty of domestic material, without an act of God to speed him on his way, but the administration has been so successful at defining success downward that almost any bad news can be preemptively neutered.

A small economic uptick becomes a “revival.” A successful foreign policy is defined not as finding the guy we wanted to find but starting an open-ended war somewhere else. Lousy job figures? More people in poverty? The staggering deficit? Still fewer with health care, etc., etc.? Been there, done that. Even the president looked less engaged when he reeled off the bullet points of his “clear and positive plan” in the domestic part of his speech at the Republican convention.

It’s wondrous to see how Rove, Cheney, and Co. have managed to wind the war on terror and the war in Iraq into the same menacing turban. Moqtada al-Sadr, who at first was the unpronounceable new bogeyman with a name out of “The Lion King,” has become in the public mind Mr. Sadr, the bad guy we went into Iraq to get for doing 9/11. How did that happen? Everyone seems to want to forget that Mr. Sadr surfaced in Iraq only because we did. Or that 9/11 happened while Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were dissing the alarmist terrorism tsar Richard Clarke.

Afghanistan? It’s over. Afghanistan has gone back to being a Christiane Amanpour kind of a place.

The debates. The debates! If Mr. Bush does one of those long, eye-darting silences as he reaches for the buzzwords and Kerry scythes through with gleaming, irrefutable data… it could be a Democratic win. But Mr. Bush marketed his inarticulateness at the convention as part of his Texan authenticity.

What are the equal chances that Mr. Kerry will get himself empretzeled, as Joe Klein put it in Time magazine, in some ancient flip-flop? Mr. Bush has nailed down the strong leadership trope to the point that he can say we can’t ever win the war on terror and then reverse himself the next day, but for Mr. Kerry, one whiff of ambivalence and he’s toast.

Now that seductive old story about Mr. Bush’s missing years in the National Guard is heating up. It dovetails nicely with the timing of the publication next week of Kitty Kelley’s new trash-bomb exposee of the Bush family, but the tit-for-tat offensive has slim chance of inflicting damage taking root with the same tenacity as the Swift Boat onslaught.

The genius of the president’s well-established born-again narrative is that it means he can effectively kiss off the first forty 40 years of his life without fear of recrimination, while Mr. Kerry is doomed to trudge vote-by-vote through every one of his four terms in the Senate.

Democrats may have to make do for now with a winning metaphor. If the long-suffering Boston Red Sox beat the swaggering New York Yankees this month that could be really, really good. It would show at least that even winner’s luck can run out.