If last week’s presidential debate had been a
prizefight, they’d have
stopped it on a fourth-round TKO. If it had been
a Little League game,
they’d have invoked the 10-run "mercy" rule.
If it had been a college
football game, sportswriters would have chided
John Kerry for scheduling
a pushover like George W. Bush. Anybody who thinks
Bush "won" his first
encounter with Kerry is probably still in the
market for Chicago Cubs
playoff tickets. It wasn’t simply that Bush lost
the argument. He made
the most fundamental political mistake of all:
He believed his own—well,
"propaganda" is a word I can get into the newspaper.
Unprepared for an
opponent of Kerry’s ability, Bush let his inner
punk show: smirking,
sneering, rolling his eyes and slumping over
the lectern like a petulant
teen. At times, the president appeared visibly
angered that anybody,
much less the Massachusetts senator he’d mocked
as a "flip-flopper" to
invitation-only crowds of GOP activists, was
allowed to contradict him.
At times, he looked visibly confused.
I’m not much on psychodrama, but given Bush’s
personal history, the most
telling moment may have come early in the debate,
when Kerry, a tall,
aristocratic New Englander, Ivy League scholar,
athlete and war hero,
paraphrased the words of a former U.S. president
with a biography much
like his own. "You know the president’s father,"
Kerry said, "did not go into
Iraq into Baghdad beyond Basra. And the reason
he didn’t is, he said, he
wrote in his book: because there was no viable
exit strategy. And he said our
troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile
land. That’s exactly where we
find ourselves today. There’s a sense of American
occupation."
Kerry accurately summarized President George H.
W. Bush’s book,
"A World Transformed." Invading Iraq during the
1991 Gulf War, he wrote,
"would have incurred incalculable human and political
costs.... The coalition
would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting
it in anger and other allies
pulling out as well. Under the circumstances,
there was no viable ‘exit strategy’
we could see.... Had we gone the invasion route,
the United States could
conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land. It would have
been a dramatically different—and perhaps barrenoutcome."
It was a telling blow. A better description of
the catastrophe caused by
President Junior’s rash stampede to war, what
Kerry called his "colossal
error of judgment," would be hard to imagine.
A shrewd debater would
have seen it coming. Of course, hardly anybody
imagines that this President
Bush has read his father’s book. As Junior has
scornfully told us, he doesn’t
do "nuance." Besides, Kerry’s the kind of person
he has openly resented all
his life—born to privilege like him, but with
many of the virtues of his class,
intellectual achievement and physical courage
among them.
Bush never really recovered. He spent most of
the debate praising his own
determination and repeatedly condemning "mixed
messages," like a parrot with
a stunted vocabulary. The effect was to magnify
his worst faults: his inability to
admit error or change his mind in altered circumstances.
Kerry skewered him there, too. "Maybe someone
would call it a character
trait, maybe somebody wouldn’t," he observed.
"But this issue of certainty:
It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be
certain and be wrong."
Kerry gave a list of poll-tested examples, from
foreign policy to global warming
and stem-cell research, on which Bush is both
dead certain and dead wrong.
Since the debate, Bush’s response has been equally
characteristic. Back
inside the warm cocoon of invitation-only campaign
events, he seized upon
a phrase from the debate and twisted its meaning.
"Senator Kerry last night said
that America has to pass some sort of global
test," he told a jeering audience in
Allentown, Pa., "before we can use American troops
to defend ourselves....
Listen, I’ll continue to work with our allies
and the international community.
But I will never submit America’s national security
to an international test.
The use of troops to defend America must never
be subject to a veto by
countries like France."
Almost needless to say, Kerry said almost the
opposite. He affirmed that
"the president always has the right and always
has had the right for pre-emptive
strike." He said he would never compromise that,
but would act in a way that
"passes the global test where your countrymen,
your people, understand fully
why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can
prove to the world that you
did it for legitimate reasons." In short, Kerry
thinks the president should act like
the leader of a democracy, with what the Declaration
of Independence called
"a decent respect for the opinions of Man-kind."
It’s no surprise that a callow
impostor like Bush pretends to misunderstand
him.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little
Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.