Debate strategy

It's a real pleasure to read Phil Gourevitch's Campaign Journal in which he describes the strategy of the Kerry campaign leading up to the first debate with our preznit.

In the run up to that wonderful evening in Coral Gables, it was assumed that Bush had the advantage in a discussion of foreign policy, the focus of the first debate. I never really bought into that, but that was the conventional wisdom. It was assumed that Bush would be strong, resolute, and would take advantage of Kerry's nuanced views on Iraq and Islamic fundamentalism.

But Kerry had a plan. Over a series of speeches made prior to the debate, he carefully crafted his prosecutorial brief on the "serious mistakes" the president had made, and how it has hurt us in the war on terror.

In these speeches, staggered over eight days, Kerry managed to come across both as anti-war and as a hawk on terrorism—a remarkable political balancing act. He spoke of winning in Iraq, recommitting to Afghanistan, bolstering homeland security, reviving alliances, waging a peaceful war of ideas to tame extremism in the Muslim world, and hunting down Osama bin Laden. His “plan” for Iraq was as sketchy as it was ambitious—bring in allies, step up training, intensify reconstruction, foster and recruit a United Nations protection force to make elections possible, and, if successful, begin to withdraw American forces within a year. Kerry did not pretend that it would be easy to get other countries to help him realize these ends. “But I have news for President Bush,” he said. “Just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Kerry’s focus on war and terrorism was strategically timed to lead up to the first debate, and, more immediately, to overshadow Bush’s address to the U.N. General Assembly, in New York, and the state visit to Washington of Iraq’s American-installed interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (whose morning-in-Iraq rhetoric in an address to Congress might as well have been drafted by a Bush-campaign speechwriter). Kerry’s preëmptive strategy was successful: at a Rose Garden press conference with Allawi, Bush was repeatedly asked, with reference to Kerry’s charges, how he accounted for the discrepancies between his triumphalist claims about the pacification and democratization of Iraq and the anarchic scenes of battle, bombardment, carnage, and beheading that filled the news. For the first time since the Democratic Convention, at the end of July, Kerry was setting the agenda for the nation’s political press, and he was doing it by speaking substantively to the all-dominating issue of this election year. “He’s wanted to give that speech for a long time,” Stephanie Cutter told me after Kerry delivered his withering assessment of Bush’s war policy, and Senator Joseph Biden said that Kerry had told him, “I feel liberated.”

We have heard, for months, how screwed up the Kerry campaign is; how they can't pin down "a message;" how closely trailing Bush was a sign that Kerry was the wrong nominee for the Democratic party (never mind the fact that Bush is the incumbant and has never shied from using the power of his incumbancy). That Rove has made him dance like a puppet. Basically a rehash of all the bull -- from both sides of the aisle -- we heard about Gore in 2000. Rove is brilliant and Democrats are all a bunch of wonks who can't inspire Americans.

Well, forget about that now. Despite the so-called liberal media who continue to advance the meme that Kerry lacks charisma requiring a transplant from Clinton, and that his supporters just aren't very excited about him. And that the tens of thousands who are showing up at Kerry campaign rallies are, really, just a few hundred who happened by. By finally explaining to millions of Americans his plan for Iraq and terrorists -- and in the process clearly showing that Bush does not have a plan -- Kerry has taken control of this race (aided, indeed, by some 300 tons of Al Qaqaa explosives).

Here's a favorite bit from the article:

At that time, six days before the debate in Coral Gables, the suggestion that Bush might be vulnerable on Iraq or the war on terror was a kind of heresy. A wire-service reporter urged Biden to reconsider. Kerry’s “core competencies,” the reporter said, were the economy and health care. Wasn’t Kerry just being opportunistic, now that Iraq was in the headlines? “No!” Biden shouted, and when the reporter persisted—“What if the beheadings aren’t in the news in October?”—the Senator tipped back on his heels a moment, as if to get a better look at him, and said, “Hey, you are a real horse’s ass, aren’t you?” Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary, who has been travelling with Kerry since early September, stood nearby, jiggling with laughter. McCurry told me, “The subtext of this whole week was: If you think that George Bush’s strength is foreign policy and national security, think again, then look at Kerry.”

Damn. Love to know the name of that horse's ass.