RALEIGH – Thursday night, President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry offered the voters of our country a candid, informative, and revealing discussion of the national-security challenges facing the United States. As presidential debates go, I thought it was a good one.
Each candidate came to the University of Miami with a different strategy in mind. They did not come to fight the other fellow’s chosen battle.
John Kerry, the challenger, came to straighten out some of the confusing aspects of his campaign’s message on Iraq and the war on terror, as well as to demonstrate his depth and breadth of knowledge of foreign-policy issues in an obvious attempt to make the president look less able and up to the task. He needed to explain to a doubting public that his positions were coherent, that they demonstrated the right approach to leadership, and that Americans should feel safe about transferring command of the country’s military and national-security apparatus to him.
George Bush, the incumbent, came to hammer home a line of attack against Kerry’s seeming inconsistency and indecision that appears to have been working in recent weeks, as well as to articulate, clearly and repetitively, his core convictions about how the war on terror must be waged. Fight the terrorists over there, so they can’t stage attacks over here. Remove gathering threats such as Saddam Hussein’s regime so as to preempt future attacks and to deter – let’s face it, to intimidate – other enemies or potential enemies with designs on dangerous weapons and links to terror networks.
In one sense, Kerry was playing offense and Bush defense. Kerry is behind and needed to rebut and persuade. Bush is ahead and needed to repeat and reassure. In another sense, though, the roles were reversed. Bush took the offensive against Kerry, who was forced on the defensive on several occasions, needing to try to explain conflicts between his past statements and his current policies.
Stylistically, Bush performed better at first but then began to get a little annoyed and possibly tired. Kerry was nervous and ineffective at first but then found his voice.
Because each had a different objective, it is not easy simply to declare one or the other the winner. I think both essentially stuck to their initial strategy and thus “accomplished what they needed to do,” as the debate spinners put it. Although it may be difficult for me to separate my judgment about the event from my conviction that the president’s policy is wiser, I will say that I think Bush was the better communicator here. Two exchanges stand out. One was Kerry once again questioning the value of the coalition in Iraq – and Bush, once again, arguing that denigrating the contributions of allies such as the Poles and Australians is no way to make friends and earn the confidence of reluctant nations. The second was when Kerry suggesting that a president’s use of preemptive force against America’s enemies needed to “pass a world test.” That seemed to contradict his initial promise not to subject our national security to the judgment of a foreign power, and Bush called him on it.
The presidential race goes on, its fundamental dynamics unchanged. Pretty good debate, though.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.