One reader wrote last week to gently chide me for not having written more about the election. Why have I been avoiding the subject? For one thing, it's very hard to find space to write -- almost any analysis or opinion I've thought about posting here can be found elsewhere, and more succinctly or eloquently put. Meanwhile, there's been almost no positioning by the candidates on policy issues -- instead, the campaign has focused on broad stroke "themes" and character questions. These are important -- they'll probably decide the election -- and I talk about them frequently in private conversation, but it's not something I usually want to spend my spare time writing about. Still, I'll probably write about the campaign more in the coming weeks (it seems unavoidable), and in case you want to now what I've been thinking about the campaign for the past few weeks, I'll tell you now.
Up through the afterglow of the Democratic convention, I felt strongly that we'd see a Kerry victory, and a blowout. Polls I've seen over the last year or so have convinced me that Americans are ambivalent about Bush, and the fact that people still hadn't fallen in line for him in late spring seemed to bode well for Kerry's chances.
But I've sobered up since then in the face of a truly masterful Bush campaign and apparent incompetence on the part of Kerry's handlers. Kerry's failure to respond immediately to the attacks against him was an incredible blunder, and part of a patten of failures to seize the initiative. Focusing on his Vietnam service at the convention may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it allowed the Bush campaign to focus its attention on that service instead of Bush's record.
Shouldn't this have been apparent to professional political strategists? Polls at the time showed widespread dissatisfaction with Bush's handling of the economy and domestic issues as well as the war in Iraq -- and things in Iraq have only gotten worse since then. But the campaign has been about Kerry -- his service, his flip-flopping -- and yet people are still saying they don't know him. What a disaster.
Kerry can still win, though. Bringing in some faces from the Clinton administration (expert in weathering GOP attacks) was the right move, and the message has become more appropriate for a challenger in a midterm election. They've inverted their strategy -- before, Kerry was treating his foreign policy credentials as an established fact and centering his rhetoric on domestic conerns. Now, he's talking about Iraq instead, drawing attention to the president's failures with the knowledge that as a Democrat, he's got the upper hand on domestic issues. (Provocatively, this is exactly the strategy Dean employed to such great effect.)
The debates can't do much for Bush except solidify his position, but they can help Kerry by providing a foil for all the attacks we've heard up to now. Because he'll have such a big audience, if he can come across in a way that refutes all those nasty accusations, they'll fall away and he'll suddenly have a double digit lead. Frankly, I doubt this will happen; it's hard to imagine the Kerry I've watched all year suddenly becoming dynamic or engaging (take a look at Stanley Fish's editorial in Friday's Times). But, anything's possible... and the door is always open for Bush to make some kind of fatal error.
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