Monday, 04 October 2004

Winning the spin: In 2000, the initial polls showed that Al Gore won his first debate against George W. Bush — but the GOP waged a very effective campaign to change that outcome. They shifted the focus away from the substance of the debate, and relentlessly hammered away at Gore's mannerisms. He sighed. He "wasn't comfortable in his own skin." Never mind the debate itself: Bush won the game of low expectations, and packaged himself as the candidate you'd rather have a beer with.

In 2004, Bush is losing both the debate and the post-game spin: Kerry's team did a masterful job of setting expectations, playing a briar-patch game with the flashing red light on the podium — it turns out Kerry's speaking skills improve when he's limited to two minutes, while Bush does worse when he's forced to fill two minutes — and so far the Bush campaign's early attempts to shift the focus are failing. The Kerry campaign and their surrogates are keeping the Bushistas on their back feet; witness this exchange, for example, to see who's getting the better of whom.

The Cheney-Edwards debate will be a crowd-pleaser, but we've already seen that even a knock-out punch against a VP candidate will not move the polls very much. Lloyd Bentsen annihilated Dan Quayle in the '88 vice-presidential debate, with the line that all but ended Quayle's career: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." But the senior Bush rode Reagan's coat-tails to victory, unlike Gore in 2000 — and Mike Dukakis did not look presidential on the campaign trail, where Kerry is looking more and more like the 44th President of the United States.

So the road to the White House now runs through the second presidential debate, the one with the town-hall format in St. Louis — and Bush's guilty secret is that he only won the 2000 town-hall debate because Gore did even worse. Bush is a walking disaster without a script, and the town-hall debates are known for throwing the most curveballs: The candidates could predict and prepare for the questions Jim Lehrer asked, but in a town-hall debate the topics could be anything from ethanol subsidies to Venezuela. If you thought Bush looked like a deer in the headlights last week, St. Louis should give him even more of a challenge — and Kerry doesn't even have to set expectations, because Bush can't afford to lose two consecutive debates.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 2:27 am. comments.