Also In This Issue Sideshow: Edwards vs. Cheney Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Ad Spotlight: Bush Mocks Kerry's Positions That Shift With The Wind (Sept. 23, 2004) · Ad Spotlight: Kerry Defends Record; DNC Takes Bush On Over Iraq (Sept. 17, 2004) · Buzz Columns: Bush, Kerry Polls Apart, by Charlie Cook (Sept. 21, 2004) · Buzz Columns: For Kerry, It's Not The Economy, Stupid. It's Strength, by Jonathan Rauch (July 2, 2004) · 2004 White House Campaign Tip Sheet Additional Information On The Web Debate History, 1858-2000 · Transcript of the First Bush-Gore Debate, 2000 · Transcript of the First Cheney-Lieberman Debate, 2000 · Transcript of the Sixth Kerry-Weld Debate, 1996 · Transcript of the Seventh Kerry-Weld Debate, 1996 · How to Watch a Debate, from the League of Women Voters

By Carl M. Cannon and Alexis Simendinger,
National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Sept. 24, 2004

It's time to bring the combatants into the ring. George W. Bush used September to stretch ahead of John Kerry in the post-convention polling, leaving his challenger with three all-important chances before Election Day to use the bright lights of the television cameras and his practiced debating skills to pull the incumbent back.

Bush wants to debate the senator's words; Kerry wants the country to fire its commander-in-chief in the midst of a bloody war. As political theater, it doesn't get much better.

"The debates, in totality, are more important than the two conventions," said Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg.

There is an element of wishful thinking here: Greenberg, a Kerry adviser, knows that Bush came out of the GOP convention with more momentum than Kerry attained in Boston. But the point is valid; the audiences for these jousting tournaments are much larger than for the conventions. Nielsen ratings showed that 27.6 million Americans watched Bush give his acceptance speech in New York; 24.4 million people watched Kerry in Boston. The figures for the debates should dwarf those numbers: Four years ago, in a less polarized political environment, without a war, the debates between Al Gore and Bush attracted audiences ranging from 37.5 million to 46.6 million people. Each campaign expects a larger audience this time.

It's become a cliche to say that the pool of undecided voters this year is negligible, but the candidates might do well to remain agnostic on that point. In a September survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 25 percent of those polled said they haven't made up their minds for certain. An even higher number -- 29 percent -- said the debates will help them decide between the candidates.

Another cliche is to describe the 2004 election as a referendum on Bush's presidency. The Pew survey shows why this is conventional wisdom: A majority of Kerry voters say they are motivated mainly out of opposition to Bush, while a bigger majority of Bush voters are inspired by support for the president. Yet events of the last month have shown that Bush is not entirely what the election is about. Even after a spate of bad headlines for Bush this summer, Kerry was not able to pull away, and now he has fallen behind. Whatever doubts that voters harbor about the president or his policies, Kerry has yet to evince in a majority of Americans a vision of himself as president -- or convince them that they want him in the job.

"The Kerry camp's strategy is mainly to criticize everything Bush does," said Stu Spencer, the California GOP operative who helped prepare Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for their debates. "That's not what voters want to hear. They have a pretty good idea on their own of mistakes they think Bush has made. What they want Kerry to do is explain to them how their lives will be better if they vote for him."

The debates, with their mano a mano format, afford Kerry that opportunity in Bush's presence. Kerry's camp, while coy on details, says he will draw distinctions from Bush on foreign and domestic policy and will knock Bush's credibility on Iraq and the economy (and perhaps, subtly, his tenure in the National Guard), while striking a Reaganesque/Clintonesque tone of optimism.

"Senator Kerry needs to get an argument across that shows differences in strength of character and in their convictions," said former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, a recent addition to Kerry's team. "Voters also need to hear a message of hope. They need to get a sense from Senator Kerry that there's a better future. You do those three, you can have a successful series of debates."

Bush will counter the Kerry criticism that he is too unilateral, too stubborn, and too secretive, and has made too many mistakes, by portraying himself as a likable guy, a steady leader, and a straight shooter. Bush will also chip away at Kerry as being too Eastern, too liberal, too indecisive, and too unaccomplished in the Senate, and he will needle Kerry as being a flip-flopper who has been on all sides of the USA PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and, most of all, the war in Iraq.

"If, on the single most important issue facing the country, the voters can't tell you what he thinks, that's not a good position to be in," said Reed Dickens, a Bush campaign spokesman. "Kerry said at his convention he would defend the United States if it were attacked. Well, what president wouldn't? He revealed a pre-9/11 mind-set."

Democratic strategists concede that Kerry must confront the perception that he often seems to be debating himself on Iraq and other issues. They say he'll do this not by being defensive, but by going on the offensive.

"Bush will press him ... on this 'flip-flop' thing -- and Kerry has to deal with it somehow," said Democratic consultant Brad Bannon. "But Kerry has to press the credibility argument himself: Bush said we'd have [millions of] new jobs; we lost a million. Bush said we were going to Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction; those weapons have not been found. Bush said we'd be greeted as liberators, but more Americans have died in Iraq during the occupation than during the invasion. Kerry will say that Americans shouldn't believe anything Bush says about a second term, because he hasn't leveled with Americans about the first term."

Team Bush points out that Gore was aggressive with Bush in their debates in 2000 -- and that it backfired. Gore overlooked that Bush had proved himself in his primary-season debates with other Republicans by being disciplined and patient. That dynamic holds true for Kerry now. He earned the right to stand next to Bush onstage by sparring with a spunky field of Democratic wanna-bes, and he emerged from that process -- which included numerous debates -- as the clear winner. At this point in their careers, neither Bush nor Kerry has ever lost a consequential debate. And, except for their maiden races -- congressional elections pursued when each man was just starting in politics -- neither has lost an election, either.

Something has to give.

Scoring the Fight
Gore's three "victories" helped him lose 10 points in the polls.

The first debate is scheduled for September 30 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. The subjects will be foreign policy and homeland security. The second is on October 8 at Washington University in St. Louis, with no limitation on the subject matter. The third, at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., on October 13, will focus on domestic and economic policy. Dick Cheney and John Edwards will square off October 5 in Cleveland. (See related story.)

There is, of course, no formal system of scoring. This is a significant factor. Four years ago, the Associated Press convened a panel of debate-team coaches to rate the performances. According to these experts, Gore won all three. The public did not concur, as Gore went from being 5 points ahead before the first debate to 5 points behind after the third debate. "I had thought such a thing was unimaginable," said Greenberg, who, like many Democrats, believes that Gore lost the presidency in an encounter with his underrated opponent. "You couldn't go through that election without seeing that debates matter.... The point is, debates move voters."

But AP's debate coaches weren't the first to discover that style may be worth more than substance in an encounter that is, literally, a made-for-TV event. Richard Nixon's camp thought their man had demonstrated that he knew his brief after his 1960 debate with John F. Kennedy. But Nixon, badly made up, sporting a 5 o'clock shadow, and sweating under the klieg lights didn't look as commanding as the suave, handsome JFK. "The ones who listened on the radio said Nixon won," recalled Herb Klein, Nixon's former press secretary. "But those who watched it on television said Kennedy won. That's when we knew."

The way the pundits and the public reinforce each other can frustrate a candidate who runs afoul of the atmospherics of the event, or who commits what the press decides is a blunder. The era of cable news and insta-punditry has only made this phenomenon more pronounced. "It would be wonderful if the anchors would simply wind up the debate with a fair summary of each candidate's remarks and then sign off for the night, allowing each voter to make up his or her own mind without direction," declared University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato. "It's not going to happen."

Stature
Kerry looks the part. Now he must act it without seeming pedantic (or dull).

Challengers relish the opportunity to debate incumbents, and not only because the challengers usually trail in the polls. The president now has to stand behind a lectern without the distinctive presidential seal, meaning the challenger is literally on the same level as the president. Or, perhaps, above his level. At 6 feet, 4 inches, Kerry is five inches taller than Bush. Stature is not always a determinative difference, but it is considered an advantage, and it presumably was what the 6-foot-1-inch Gore was trying to highlight when he stalked Bush across the debate stage in 2000.

"I thought he was going to hit George!" Barbara Bush told Charlie Gibson the following morning. Mrs. Bush was not alone: One participant in a New York Times focus group of Michigan residents told R.W. Apple that he wondered if Gore "was going to smack" Bush.

But even real-life presidents can struggle to appear presidential, as the first President Bush learned while debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992. Twice, Bush sneaked a quick glance at his watch, an impolitic gesture by an incumbent already seen as too patrician. Did the president have to be somewhere that was more important?

"That's another thing I don't like about debates -- you look at your watch and they say that he shouldn't have any business running for president," Bush 41 complained to Jim Lehrer in a 1999 interview. "They made a huge thing out of that. Now, was I glad when the damn thing was over? Yeah, and maybe that's why I was looking at it -- 'Only 10 more minutes of this crap.' "

Mostly because of his genes, Kerry has already negotiated one hurdle that his former boss, then-Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, never got over: He looks the part. This is no small thing. Now Kerry must act it.

"For the first time, Senator Kerry will be side-by-side with Bush, unfiltered, in a setting in which he can exude his attributes, which are strong, but which have been called into question by the Bush campaign," said Jim Gerstein, executive director of Democracy Corps, a liberal polling outfit. At the same time, some Democrats privately concede that Kerry must overcome a tendency to sound pedantic, or -- even worse in a pop-culture era -- to be dull. Yet he must remain on-message in the debates, being critical of Bush and likable at the same time.

"I think Kerry is going to have to do more than criticize Bush," said Diana B. Carlin, a dean at the University of Kansas who has researched presidential debates. "When you have an incumbent president, the debates are a little like a courtroom situation. The presumption rests with the president -- 'you keep doing what you're doing' -- unless the prosecution creates a doubt. The challenger is a bit like the prosecution. He has to create a significant doubt."

Kerry actually has been a prosecuting attorney, and he shows it with his instincts to go for the jugular, as former Gov. William Weld of Massachusetts discovered to his chagrin in eight debates in 1996. "Millions (of voters) said the debates helped them make informed decisions on the issues," Kerry said in March, exaggerating ever so slightly. Four years ago, the Gore side raised expectations for their man while coming close to publicly describing Bush as an idiot. This was an elemental mistake, one the Kerry side is attempting to avoid, even though one of his stepsons applied that very word, "idiot," to Bush only last week. In the main, however, neither side is seriously trying to lower expectations, despite some mild feinting in that direction.

"I'm not going to poor-mouth Kerry, and everyone knows Bush has done well in his high-profile debates," McCurry said. "There probably is not going to be a single knockout punch. George Bush is never going to look like he got hit between the eyes like Dan Quayle did when Lloyd Bentsen said he was 'no Jack Kennedy.' He's not going to look at his watch like he can't wait to get back to the country club, like his father, or come across as remote as Dukakis."

In an effort to avoid a verbal miscue, modern candidates tend to be repetitive. If anything, both candidates in 2000 came across as too programmed: Gore's rhetorical "lockbox" was matched by Bush's "fuzzy math."

But the nation has been attacked since then and is at war. With troops in the field, uncommitted voters want more than bromides and slogans -- and will be less tolerant of smirks or putdowns. Each candidate's debate negotiation team tacitly acknowledged this to be the case: The rules stipulate that the podiums be 10 feet apart and that, aside from shaking hands, the candidates are to stay behind them. Call it the Al Gore Rule.

Iraq and Terrorism
Will voters "stay the course" with a commander who was wrong about weaponry?

In Coral Gables, those 10 feet will rapidly feel like worlds apart, or at least that's the hope of Kerry and his team. There is no bigger hurdle for the Democratic challenger than to persuade enough voters in enough battleground states to change wartime presidents. The senator who voted to give Bush the authority to go to war wants to use the debates to explain why he now condemns the president's methods and motives, to outline a victory plan of his own that makes sense, and to laud the goal of delivering democracy to 25 million people who have no democratic history, while promising to bring the troops home by 2008. Kerry says he has his own perseverance strategy, plus an exit timetable. It's a tall order for the tall man.

Bush says simply that the United States will "prevail" in Iraq. "Stay the course" -- Bush said it when the United States attacked Iraq, and he continues to say it 18 months later. The president wants his consistency to be its own virtue, and it is up to Kerry to make a persuasive case that constancy is no substitute for wisdom. Against Bush's idealism and relentless optimism, Kerry must somehow cast himself as the just-as-sunny realist who has the more commanding grip on the facts. "Iraq is in crisis," Kerry said in a September 21 press conference that his aides characterized as debate prep in itself, "and the president needs to live in the world of reality, not in a world of fantasy spin."

Bush's aides say he will stress that Iraq is the central battlefield in the war on terrorism; Kerry counters that, however evil Saddam Hussein was to his own people, Afghanistan is where the United States should have focused its assault on terrorism, and that the war against Islamic fanaticism is now more difficult, not less so, because of the U.S. performance in Iraq. The president says his re-election is key to finishing a transition to democracy in Iraq; Kerry says Bush's re-election would be the central impediment to the international teamwork required for success in Iraq.

It's a debate that has been going on for months and will come to verbal blows when the two eager opponents meet in the ring next week. Until now, the president has been successful, according to recent polls, in turning Iraq into a gauge of Kerry's fitness to serve as commander-in-chief: Why elect a perceived flip-flopper who voted for the war and against the $87 billion for the troops? Who fought in Vietnam, but came home to condemn his comrades as war criminals? Who at one point endorsed putting more U.S. troops in Iraq before saying he would begin drawing down forces in six months?

"But that's not the debate. That's the debate the president wants to have now," Kerry said at his news conference when asked again to explain his voting record on Iraq. In a pivot toward the future -- a pivot that impatient Democratic advisers urged on Kerry in August -- the senator said voters want to hear who has the better plan. He repeated the four ingredients of prescriptions for Iraq that he outlined in a speech given the day before.

"The debate now is whether or not you have a plan to win and whether or not you ... are facing the realities on the ground in Iraq," Kerry said. "Iraq was not the war on terror the day that the president decided to go. The war on terror was Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and Afghanistan."

Kerry may be practicing his debate strategy, but the Bush team is skeptical that it will wash.

"John Kerry's own words [on Iraq] are his worst problem," said Terry Holt, a top Republican National Committee official and former Bush campaign spokesman. "The president will remind John Kerry of his own posture in that same period [leading to the war]. There are inherent, fundamental contradictions in John Kerry's expressed views on Iraq. It's hard to see how he comes away clean from an attack on that issue."

Bush's ability to turn the tables on his opponents is a hallmark of his previous debate performances. As Ann Richards's challenger for the Texas governorship and as the amiable contrast to Gore's know-it-all experience, Bush cast himself as the comfortable alternative. The president this year has been campaigning with a GOP mirror -- one held up to reflect images of Kerry that refute and recast the senator's own campaign messages. Bush has employed the powers of incumbency to create a national identity for a little-known lawmaker who cast thousands of votes and authored no hallmark Senate legislation as the junior partner to Edward Kennedy for nearly 20 years.

The president will continue that approach in the debates, hoping to bait Kerry into a distracting, defensive swamp that short-circuits a deeper dissection of Bush's own governing record. Bush will also return like a boomerang to the theme of delivering on the promises he made when he campaigned four years ago. Academics who've studied presidential debates found that voters are eager to measure candidates' rhetoric against perceived results.

Thus, it will be up to the viewers watching these debates to decide whether they think Bush's confidence about Iraq -- and the economy -- correspond to the facts on the ground.

State of the Nation
Bush could win the debate on the war but lose the election on the economy.

Bush's September lead in the polls could be transitory if the sought-after swing voters in important electoral states, such as Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, grant Bush high marks on terrorism, while also deciding that terrorism or the war are not their voting yardsticks for 2004. It could happen.

"It appears that swing voters are most eager to hear the candidates' positions on domestic issues rather than discussions about terrorism and Iraq," the Gallup Organization reported in a recent analysis by Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport. Gallup found that 43 percent of swing voters name the economy as the issue key to their presidential votes this year, followed by 27 percent who said health care was on their minds. By contrast, Iraq attracts 17 percent, and 11 percent named terrorism.

And it is infinitely easier for the average voter to measure Bush's domestic record than to sort out the realities in Iraq. The voters who tune into the debates know firsthand what their tax cuts in 2001 and 2002 amounted to, what their health insurance costs, the price of a tank of gas and a gallon of milk, and the number of jobs that were lost to India or Mexico when their local plant closed.

Heading into the town hall meeting with voters and the final debate on domestic issues, Bush is in the stronger position, said the University of Kansas's Carlin, because voters know Bush's at-home record and are still vague on Kerry's. Because the senator in his convention speech "didn't articulate" his domestic record, Carlin noted, he leaves the debates as the last national moment to make those introductions. "It's not that he's lacking it," she added. "He just needs to get it out there."

Jonathan Orszag, a former economic adviser to President Clinton, describes the case this way: "In front of tens of millions of television viewers, President Bush can't run and hide from the fact that he has helped turn record projected budget surpluses into record deficits. He can't run and hide from hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, and he can't run and hide from the fact that family income is down more than $1,500 on his watch. That's his record."

For his part, Bush will tout "how to grow the economy by empowering Americans to make their own decisions," said Bush campaign spokesman Dickens. "These are candidates with two really different views," he said. "The president's prescription is to cut taxes and decrease the size of government. Senator Kerry's is the opposite."

Kerry is eager to point out the contrasts himself. But when asked during the January 22 Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire how he would respond when the president asserts that Kerry will raise voters' taxes, Kerry's answer was a long-winded muddle, suggesting he has needed the year to prepare for these bouts with Bush.

"That's a fight I look forward to, because if George W. Bush wants to stand there beside me and defend raising taxes for people who earn more than $200,000 a year, which are the only people who might be argued will have a tax increase by rolling back the Bush tax cut that they rushed through, instead of giving all of America health care and education so we truly leave no child behind, that's a fight we deserve to have in this country," Kerry said as he caught his breath last winter. "That's a fight we will win."

Probably not with that explanation. But Kerry supporters insist he has a case to make -- and that Bush's presence on the stage will concentrate Kerry's mind. Stay tuned.

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