While Republicans just move on when they make mistakes, Democrats in New York go into therapy. It took about as long as milk turning to yogurt for last week’s righteous rage against the Bush campaign’s stoking of the Swift boat veterans’ smear campaign against Senator Kerry’s war record to morph into self-flagellation about the way the candidate is blowing it.

The sight of the GOP partying in their own back yard just rubbed salt in the wound. No amount of protesters toting coffins in Union Square could distract the Democratic elite from one jarring, panicky fact: The Swift boat assault had worked and the president is now pulling ahead.

Democratic dismay had been mounting since the Mr. Kerry campaign’s latest waffle on Iraq. Knowing what he knows now, his adviser Jamie Rubin commented to the Washington Post, before he retracted it, the candidate would “in all probability” still have voted to authorize the war. George Soros, whose deep pockets are helping a massive get-out-the-vote campaign, is said to have taken one

look at the antiwar passion in the streets on Sunday and started worrying about the dampening effect of Mr. Kerry’s failure to differentiate himself from President Bush on this issue.

Radical cartoonist Art Spiegelman was so depressed at the news after his return from vacation in France he started to gird his head for defeat. “I am not preparing to lose,” he corrected me. “I am preparing to leave.” There was also a strong collective yearning for Mr. Kerry to pack up his water skis, windsurf board, mountain bikes, and other high-speed jock props until he had won the only race that matters.

All the insecurity bore out what President Clinton told a dinner party in Chappaqua last summer: “Republicans wake up every morning fixated on moving the ball. Democrats wake up desperate not to drop it.”

Against this mood, the party thrown for Senator McCain by his 49-year-old wife, Cindy, at an East Side restaurant to celebrate his birthday and to stroke the media had the dreamy quality of an alternative political world. Here, instead of being seen as The Enemy as they are in Bushland, press types felt once again the respected pillars of the fourth estate. The senator’s fearless informality conjures up the pre-blog, pre-cable era when the off-the-record stuff over cocktails can be about racy adventures he’s shared in foreign junkets or irreverent asides about Senate colleagues. Meanwhile, Mrs. McCain – who has traded the blonde crop of the 2000 campaign for shoulder length glamour – shimmered around the party in a mint-green Chanel suit, dispersing deftly targeted warmth. It made every hack feel like Scotty Reston, every cable babbler like Edward R. Murrow.

New York Democrats everywhere still want to believe against the clear evidence of his voting record that Mr. McCain was nearly their guy. And then boom! His big speech the next night. It was one thing for Mr. McCain to turn down the vice presidential spot on the ticket, but did he have to turn himself into the president’s formidable cheerleader-in-chief? It was all the more traumatic for Dems that their “bipartisan” hero evoked his Vietnam valor by never mentioning it once. While Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam reputation flails in the political rice fields, Mr. McCain’s is thrown around his damaged shoulders like an invisible cloak.

On the convention floor the sea of cowboy hats and diamante W pins pitched you straight into the raucous rodeo with destiny. For New Yorkers used to the name of Senator Santorum only surfacing as a laugh line, it was strange to collide with the purposeful weenie himself bristling with clean-cut cockiness in a patch of TV light and a circle of rapt North Carolina delegates. Stranger still to find yourself caught up in a conga line of swaying adulators behind Vice President Cheney as he barreled through the crowd with his wife, Lynne, looking more like a bored retiree at a school Field Day than the Prince of Darkness.

It was left for Mayor Giuliani to seize the fight back from McCainish statesmanship and take to the streets of New York. The former mayor’s wolverine smile as he filleted Mr. Kerry’s flip-flops was the pre-Churchillian Rudy we used to love to hate. It was typical of Mr. Giuliani that halfway through his speech he almost forgot where he was and plunged back into gangbuster book tour mode where he’s the shameless star of every anecdote. But his joke about Mr. Kerry’s penchant for taking two sides being the reason for Senator Edwards’s Two Americas will remain the defining joke of the political season.

After Night Two Democrats were breathing a little easier. Governor Schwarzenegger’s big fat bloviations and First Lady Laura Bush’s numbing niceness was the wake-up call that all is not lost. The big C of Courage is all very well, but what about the little c of competence? The relentless serenity of the first lady’s smile made one suddenly long for the irritating complexity of Theresa Heinz Kerry. New reports had started to circulate about the shake-up at the top of the Kerry campaign plus an anecdote about what Mr. Kerry had said to an anxious supporter at a Hamptons’ fund-raiser last week: “Just wait. You have no idea how hard I am going to kick their ass.” (This, however, was followed by more gloom that the campaign “shake-up” meant not fewer but more consultants on the conference calls.)

What the Democrats’ wobblies showed was the lack of a core connection to Mr. Kerry, which makes it hard to sustain faith. No amount of changes at the top will provide that unless, as Richard Ben Kramer, the author of the definitive book on the 1988 campaign, “What It Takes,” told me, Mr. Kerry finds something to say that “matches his own story.”

Messrs. McCain, Giuliani, and Schwarzenegger found that match this week. But so far Mr. Kerry has only found the Clintonian echo of “Send me.” As Mr. Cramer put it, “He has to find that thing in himself that stretches him to the size of president. Not for us, but himself. This can’t come from outside. When he finds it inside the American people will know it’s there.”