President Bush and Senator John Kerry take the stage at WUSTL tonight in the second presidential debate. This will be the first time Bush and Kerry will face each other directly on economic and domestic issues. But, the main topic is likely to be the war in Iraq, as discussed below in this article by Jon Sawyer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Sequel in St. Louis
(Republished with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article originally ran in the News section on Friday, October 8, 2004)
By Jon Sawyer
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry take the stage tonight at Washington University, in Round 2 of what is shaping up as one of the most memorable, hard-edged series of debates in modern campaign history.
The format will feature questions on both foreign and domestic issues from a group of undecided voters.
But the dominant topic is likely once again to be the war in Iraq, the issue that has overwhelmed all others in this campaign and on which the two candidates are deeply, bitterly split.
Each candidate is clearly betting the campaign on Iraq. Bush insists it is a crucial battlefield in a global war on terrorism. Kerry calls it a “profound diversion,” one that has sapped U.S. strength, cost the nation allies and made possible the escape of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
The race has tipped sharply in one direction or the other for months, with Kerry riding high after the Democratic convention in July and then reeling from questions raised by fellow veterans on his service in Vietnam. Bush came back strong, opening up leads as wide as 11 percentage points, only to falter the past two weeks as Kerry hit him hard for alleged mismanagement of Iraq and appeared to best him in the first debate last week in Miami.
The week since has brought more bad news for Bush, especially the release Wednesday of a much-anticipated CIA report that determined – contrary to Bush’s many claims – that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before last year’s invasion and no plans or programs to resume production any time soon.
Release of the report followed statements by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer, the former top U.S. official in Iraq, that also challenged key administration claims – that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was linked to the al-Qaida terrorist network and that the United States had deployed sufficient numbers of troops during the invasion and after to assure security and stability.
The balance will no doubt tip again – perhaps as early as this morning – when the Department of Labor releases its last monthly report on jobs until after the election. Foreign news could alter the scales as well, beginning with the presidential election Saturday in Afghanistan, which Bush frequently cites as proof that democratic transformation in the greater Middle East is both possible and under way. A successful, peaceful election would underscore that argument. Violent disruptions would remind voters of Kerry’s claim that Bush has oversold his achievements in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
The audience tonight will be made up of about 140 uncommitted voters from the St. Louis area, as selected by the Gallup Organization. This is the same approach followed for town hall debates during the 1992 and 2000 campaigns, but it marks a departure from the agreement negotiated last month by the two campaigns, which called for an equal number of Kerry and Bush supporters.
The Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan organization that has sponsored the debates since 1988, balked at the requirement, officials said, because the commission considered it inappropriate to fill the forum with partisans of either candidate.
This will be the first time Bush and Kerry have engaged each other directly on economic and domestic issues. Half the questions tonight are supposed to be on those topics, in contrast to the first debate, where foreign policy was the single topic. The third and final debate, on Wednesday at Arizona State University, is scheduled to focus on domestic policy alone.
Those watching are likely to find Bush and Kerry as starkly opposed on domestic issues as they are on foreign policy, with Kerry recently railing against Bush for what he calls irresponsible tax cuts and Bush calling Kerry a “tax-and-spend liberal” who would increase government’s role.
Experts in budget policy say both candidates have vulnerabilities that may come out in the questioning tonight.
Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that favors budget balance, said he hopes someone will press Bush on why federal revenues have gone down so much during his term while spending has increased: “If you think deficits are caused by spending and not by tax cuts, what plans do you have to bring spending down to (match) the level of current tax receipts?”
He said Kerry’s key vulnerability is that he has not addressed the long-term problems of financing retirement and Medicare benefits for a baby boom population that will begin retiring during the next presidential term.
“If you say we don’t need to make any benefit cuts in Social Security or Medicare over the long term, the only alternatives are to raise taxes to unprecedented levels or to run deficits that ultimately become economically unsustainable,” he said.
Memorable, combative
What he really misses, Bixby said, is a third-party candidate like Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who won 19 percent as the Reform Party candidate running on an anti-deficit platform in 1992.
In that campaign, most polls showed that Perot had won two of the three debates that year, besting Bill Clinton and the first President George Bush. Clinton decisively won the middle debate, however, a town hall forum in Richmond, Va., similar in format to tonight’s encounter, and went on to win the election.
Alan Schroeder, a specialist on political communication at Northeastern University and author of “Televised Presidential Debates: 40 years of High-Risk TV,” said this year’s series of debates is shaping up as among the most memorable and combative ever.
Each candidate faces his own hurdles tonight, Schroeder said, based on Bush’s perceived bad night in the first debate in Miami and the public’s continuing coolness toward Kerry the man.
“Bush has to counteract that impression in Miami that he was not happy to be there, not happy to be challenged,” Schroeder said. “This isn’t about how comfortable Bush is, it’s about informing the voters. So he has some damage control to deal with, right off the bat.”
As for Kerry, he has what the elder Bush “used to call the Big Mo,” Schroeder said. “Can he sustain it, can he continue to distinguish himself against Bush? It’s an interesting challenge because Bush is now back to being the perceived underdog – and that’s the position in which he’s been successful.”
One thing viewers almost certainly won’t see: any sign of the smirks and frowns that caused Bush so much grief in the wake of the Miami debate. On Wednesday, Bush quipped that after hearing all of Kerry’s contradictory positions, “you can understand why somebody would make a face.”
Tonight, however, the odds are he won’t.