QandO

August 13, 2004

The Horse Race
Posted by Dale Franks

I usually don't worry too much about giving hores-race analysis of the election, but sometimes, even the horse-race story is important.

Jules Whitcover of the Baltimore Sun discusses the Bush Campaign's one-two punch against Kerry for his vote on the Iraq war. As Whitcover notes, it's put Kerry in a bad position.

Mr. Kerry, in taking Mr. Bush's bait and saying he would have gone into Iraq, weapons of mass destruction or no, appeared to be denying he had flip-flopped on his pre-war Senate vote authorizing the use of force. If so, it only dug him a deeper hole with anti-war Democrats who claim the Iraq invasion was illegal, or at least an unnecessary war of choice.

As he has attempted throughout the campaign, Mr. Kerry has labored mightily to attach conditions to that vote, alleging that Mr. Bush not only misled the country on why he was going to war but also failed to work through the United Nations sufficiently to achieve an international response.

But the Democratic nominee's tortured inability to articulate his position on the war vote in a way that would dispel voter confusion continues to haunt his campaign.

And that's not his only problem, as Ryan Lizza points out in The New Republic. The real troubvle for Kerry began when he decided to make the Democratic Convention about national security and his military service.

The dueling messages -- the economy versus the war -- are a reminder that for all the recent talk that Iraq has turned into a liability for Bush and that Kerry has made great strides in how voters view his approach to terrorism, the old conventional wisdom that Kerry needs the campaign to be about the economy while Bush needs it to be about national security has returned.

The shift in emphasis by Kerry suggests his campaign realizes that it may have missed an opportunity by making his convention almost entirely about strength and national security. Kerry's aides insist that there was no bounce available to him because of the polarized electorate, but other Democrats disagree. They point out that numerous polls show there is a majority for change in America. Whether one looks at the percentage who say the country is on the wrong track or the percentage who say Bush should not be re-elected, there are indeed enough voters looking for a new direction that Kerry should have had a bigger bounce.

Rather than emphasizing his strengths—economy, health care, and other bread and butter issues—Kerry chose to try and shore up his weakness in national security. But, considering the lopsided advantage that Bush has in those areas, all he managed to do was to turn the campaign into a discussion of precisely those things that work best for Bush.

Now, Kerry's in the position of having to try and bring the discussion back to his strengths on bread and butter issues, while BC04 keeps hammering him one the national security side.

Whitcover thinks that's there's really only one choice left to Kerry.

Rather than trying to parry the president's taunts on the run, the time may have come for Mr. Kerry to hold a full-blown news conference focusing solely on defending that vote and why he cast it as he did. With all the millions his campaign has been spending on television ads, maybe he needs to buy air time to present a more carefully crafted defense.

He could also use such an occasion to spell out his contentions that Mr. Bush has botched the aftermath of a war that the senator now apparently says was justified. As matters stand, Mr. Kerry needs to explain himself not only to clarify his views to the general public but also to reassure all those Democrats who support him essentially because he is not George W. Bush.

But even that's a tough road for Kerry to travel, because it runs the risk of turning off the anti-war constituency in his own party. Why, after all, are they going to be keen to vote for Kerry if his position on the war is that it was necessary, irrespective of whether Saddam had WMDs, and his only quibble with Bush is that he'd have waged the war more effectively? That's not the candidacy the anti-war folks are looking for. And, with Nader as an even more distant also-ran in this election than he was in the last one, that really leaves the anti-war folks with nowhere to go…except not to go to the polls on election day.

So, at the moment, Kerry's in a difficult position. He's been forced by the BC04 campaign to make a definitive statement that alienates a good chunk of his own voters. The best he can hope for is that he hasn't alienated them enough to keep them from going to vote out of sheer hatred of George W. Bush.

And if you think this is bad, wait until the debates. If Kerry tries to nuance his way through the presidential debates in this fashion, he's gonna come off looking more indecisive than Jimmy Carter did in 1980.

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