A few weeks ago, the Washington Post Style section profiled a new book with the couldn't-be-clearer title He's Just Not That Into You. The book offered its female target market a revolutionary new insight: If a man does not pursue a woman, it's because . . . he doesn't like her very much. When the author first explained his theory to his female friends in Los Angeles, they were thunderstruck: "It was like we were all punched in the stomach."

Male readers of the Style section must have wondered: Can half the human race really be so deluded about the fundamental facts of life? But that question is unfair. After all, a very great many of those male readers are national Democrats--and they share exactly the same blindness as those Californian women.

If their candidate is trailing in the polls, as John Kerry is trailing now, they will try a million excuses before considering the possibility that the problem is . . . their candidate. He's got so much going for him! He's smart, he's handsome, he has medals: How could the voters not immediately fall in love?

Of all the roster of excuses Democrats invoke to explain why the voters suddenly go cold ("Maybe they have lost our phone number? Maybe they have commitment issues?") the absolute favorite is the excuse we have begun to hear this summer and fall: Their wonderful fella has fallen victim to Lee Atwater-style Republican dirty tricks.

In a September 1 syndicated column, former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich explained how Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election because of an Atwater-directed smear campaign: "We lost six points," she recalls, because Atwater deceived the voters into thinking that Dukakis had once suffered from depression.

In late August, Maureen Dowd revealed that "W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival."

On the eve of the Democratic convention, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson proposed that Kerry avenge defeated Democratic senator Max Cleland and a string of liberal victims stretching back to the McCarthy era with a reprise of the famous McCarthy-era zinger: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

It's as if the Democratic party has spent the past 24 years at some Terry McMillan-style pajama party, eating Haagen-Dazs from the carton and reassuring itself, "We're not to blame. It's those evil Republicans--and those jerk voters."

The idea that Democrats are hapless victims will perhaps surprise Henry Hyde, Raymond ("Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?") Donovan, and a long line of Republicans stretching back to the Nixon and Ford administrations. As for the claim that the Republicans possess some kind of inbuilt advantage in getting their message out--well, that's kind of a harsh verdict on the editors of the New York Times, who are doing the very best they can.

But let's go to the tape on the basic issue. Do Democrats lose elections because Republican lies cause the public to misperceive where Democrats really stand on the issues? In fact, those post-convention polls show a public highly alert to the genuine differences between the two parties.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.