The downside of last week's convention was that the Republicans performed brilliantly. The upside is that it may finally have lit a fire under John Kerry.

He has waged the most lackluster campaign so far, but the spectacle at Madison Square Garden, where he was attacked, often unfairly, and mocked relentlessly by the Bushies, seemed to revitalize him. Immediately after the convention wound down, Kerry starting acting like someone who wants to win this election.

He fired back at Dick Cheney, who'd had a field day ridiculing Kerry as being too indecisive to be president. The voters would decide for themselves whether Cheney's five military deferments made him more qualified to defend the nation than Kerry, with his two tours of duty, Kerry said. In a direct slap at George W. Bush, he charged that a man who misled his country into war is unfit to lead the country.

The Republicans had asked for it, and Kerry seemed to be replying, "You've got it." For the moment at least, the Democrats got what they'd been pining for - a candidate whose fervor seemed to match their own.

Talk to Democrats almost anywhere, and you hear their desperation over this campaign. They want mightily to remove George Bush, but are experiencing a mixture of anger, terror and despair. Anger at the Republicans' lies about Kerry's record and their own. Terror over how well the Republican message resonates with other voters. And despair over Kerry's less than dynamic response. They can see the election slipping away if his campaign doesn't dramatically change course.

Even so, there's a well of optimism in these Democrats - maybe it's just plain, old-fashioned hope - that Kerry can still pull this thing off. At the Star Bar in Manhattan last week, where a group of young Democrats watched Bush's speech on three plasma screen TVs, they booed as the president ticked off the points of an agenda that is growing increasingly more conservative, and cheered the two hecklers who were hustled out of the convention hall.

Melanie McEvoy, 35, and Jeff Altman, 38, both told me they had decided on the spot to go to Florida a week before the election to help bring out the Kerry vote.

"I'm not sure whether he can pull it off, but we have to try," Altman said, adding that he truly believes this race is still too close to call.

The Democrats are certainly motivated enough. At 8 o'clock on the morning after the convention, Jeri Famighetti joined 500 other New Yorkers who boarded buses headed to Pennsylvania to spend the day stumping for Kerry. Her sense of urgency is so great that this is the first campaign she's worked on since Hubert Humphrey's against Richard Nixon.

Evelyn Kahn, an elderly woman who walks with the aid of a metal cane, walked up to Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe, seeing the volunteers off, and scolded him for not waging a more forceful campaign.

"[Kerry]'s ready to fight," McAuliffe assured her. "He's energized."

The Republicans have shown that a powerful tool in winning an election is crafting a simple and compelling message that people can remember, and having everyone in the party repeat it over and over again. Whether the Democrats are capable of finding that message, I don't know. But the next best thing is fighting back as if their lives depended on it. In this case, it means calling every Republican lie for what it is, and turning it back on the Bushies.

Trudy Mason, a longtime Democrat who's known Kerry for years, told me he's like a racehorse who runs best in the final stretch, and now he'll take off. There are still two months to go in this campaign, the debates lie ahead, and it's even possible that some momentous event - another scandal in Iraq, for instance - will turn the tide for Kerry. I hope last week was at least a turning point.

© 2004 Newsday, Inc.

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