George W. Bush’s Changing Face
Let’s pretend—for the purpose of this analysis—that the plans and policies President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry proposed in their three debates were equally meritorious. (Next week, we can pretend that James Baker doesn’t have a conflict of interest with regard to his role as the President’s Special Envoy on Iraq’s debt.)
Looked at from this politics-aside perspective (to the extent that such a perspective is possible), it’s obvious that both candidates performed poorly in the debates in certain areas—Kerry in his strained attempts to crack jokes and show emotion, and the President in his tortured efforts to look like he had a firm grasp of the issues. But the one thing that stands out, as we look back at the Miami, St. Louis, and Tempe showdowns, is a strangely un-Rove-like phenomenon: the normally extraordinarily-disciplined President repeated a well-documented mistake of the past.
No, he didn’t reiterate Gerald Ford’s assertive claim that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and no, he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and accuse a town hall questioner of implying that wealthy people aren’t affected by GDP. Rather, he repeated Al Gore’s most basic slip-up of the 2000 campaign: he brought a completely different attitude to each debate.
In 2000, Gore clearly had a strong command of the issues, and there was every reason to believe that he would outlast the inexperienced Texas governor in a series of bouts over politics and policy. But Gore couldn’t stay in the ring with Bush without exploding, so in the first debate, he attacked him like a six-year-old upset about going to bed. Then, following a storm of the negative reviews, he came to the next debate with a newfound persona, a warm and fuzzy one at that, and went easy on Bush in an effort to come off as a nice guy. In the end, the question, “Who is Al Gore?” began to take on a life of its own—despite the fact that he had a policy line extremely similar to that of his popular predecessor, Bill Clinton, and a resume that towered over his opponent’s.
Of course, when we look back on the 2000 election, points concerning electoral votes—the Nader factor in Florida and New Hampshire, Gore’s loss in his home state of Tennessee, and the Democrats’ decision to hold Clinton on the sidelines even in Arkansas—tend to take center stage. However, the fact of the matter is that if Gore had simply won his debates against Bush, which he certainly should have, he would have won the election by a comfortable margin regardless of any single state’s final tally. But he lost the debates; and he lost them because he kept changing his attitude, leaving voters wondering if he actually had a real one of his own.
Kerry, undoubtedly conscious of this problem of Gore’s in the 2000 debates, brought a much different approach to his prime-time face-offs with Bush. Sure, he dodged questions, twisted numbers, and gave his fair share of poor responses, but he maintained a consistent, professional attitude throughout the series (and it should be noted that by doing this, he seemed to weaken the impact of the Republicans’ “flip-flopping” charges). He attacked Bush repeatedly, but did so like the prosecutor he is, presenting the President’s record and explaining its problems and implications. For the most part, he avoided both whiny diatribes and friendly compliments—and in the end, by most accounts, he won the debate series handily. As USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro wrote, Kerry “managed to achieve the steadiness and consistency that had eluded Al Gore in his 2000 debates with Bush.” This, of course, is not to say that Kerry was a charmer at the podium, but simply that he understood the importance of consistency with regard to his attitude and avoided the mistake that dogged Gore.
Bush, on the other hand, apparently missed the memo. He showed up in Miami with the misguided confidence that a personal, whiny plea about his job being “hard work” would sway the swingers. Then, changing gears, he came out firing in St. Louis, yelling angrily at the town hall-style audience. And in his final outing in Tempe, he transformed again and went for the friendly, likable guy approach. Like Gore in 2000, he gave voters reason for confusion and even greater reason to ask, “Who is George W. Bush?”
Given the intense strategizing that obviously went into the Bush campaign’s preparations for the debate series, it seems odd that the President made that simple mistake. Now, in two campaigns in a row, we’ve seen a candidate running relatively strongly in polls show up as three different people to the three presidential debates. Granted, Bush’s mistake may not prove to be as costly as Gore’s in 2000, since people are much more familiar with a sitting president than a sitting vice-president. But nonetheless, his changing attitude in the debates may cause uneasiness among some tiny slice of the electorate—which, this year, as we all know, could make all the difference.
