TEMPE, Ariz.—”The president is an alien. There’s your quote of the day,” Ken Mehlman said before the final presidential debate to reporters who were peppering him with questions about the rectangular shape underneath the president’s jacket during the first debate. “He’s been getting information from Mars,” said Bush’s campaign manager, and at the debate, “his alien past will be exposed.”
Well, at least it wasn’t that bad. Indisputably, this was the president’s best debate. Just as it took Al Gore three debates to settle on the right tone during the 2000 campaign, President Bush figured out in his third face-off with John Kerry how to be neither too hot nor too cold. But Kerry was as good as he can be, too, and more important, what good the president did with his performance will be overshadowed Thursday when the TV networks spend the entire day running video clips of him saying of Osama Bin Laden on March 13, 2002, “I truly am not that concerned about him.”
By denying that he had ever minimized the threat posed by Bin Laden, Bush handed Kerry, during the very first question, the victory in the post-debate spin. The Kerry campaign’s critique of the president is that he doesn’t tell the truth, that he won’t admit mistakes, and that he refuses to acknowledge reality. Bush’s answer played into all three claims. Within minutes, the Kerry-Edwards campaign e-mailed reporters the first of its “Bush vs. Reality” e-mails, complete with a link to the official White House transcript. A half-hour later, the Democratic National Committee circulated the video.
If the president had ignored Kerry’s charge, everyone would have forgotten about it. By contesting it, Bush handed Kerry two gifts: As delighted as the Kerry people must be by yet another untruthful statement from the president, the substance of this particular statement is even more important. Dick Cheney’s false declaration that he had never met John Edwards didn’t help the Bush campaign, but this error will be orders of magnitude more damaging. Video of the vice president standing next to Edwards at a prayer breakfast is embarrassing. Video of the president saying he isn’t concerned about the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks is devastating.
The president’s blunder also provided at least a glimpse of the foreign-policy debate I hoped to see. Here’s a more complete version of the president’s 2002 comment: “I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.” The president’s philosophy toward the war on terror could not be clearer: It is a war against nation-states, not against “nonstate actors” like al-Qaida. Bin Laden was dangerous because he controlled a state, not because he controls a terrorist network. When the Bush campaign talks about “going on the offense,” this is what they mean. Kerry, after all, talks about hunting down the terrorists where they live. To Bush, that’s not good enough. The subtext of the initial exchange between Bush and Kerry was more illuminating than the entire first debate.
The Bush counteroffensive to the president’s mistake was to try to find a Kerry misstatement to fill in the “on the other hand” section in fact-checking news stories. During the debate, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt sent out an “Urgent Alert” to reporters that read, complete with weird capitalization: “John Kerry’s statement that he passed 56 bills during his 20 years in the senate is a complete and utter falsehood. Kerry passed five bills and Four resolutions.” In Spin Alley after the debate was over, Bush campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish called Kerry’s comment about the number of bills he authored his “Al Gore moment.” But when Schmidt asserts that Kerry passed only five bills and four resolutions, he means bills that passed both houses of Congress and were signed into law. The Bush campaign’s own “Breaking Debate Fact” e-mailed during the debate says that Kerry was the lead sponsor of 31 bills, 122 amendments, and 28 resolutions that passed the Senate.
Kerry did make some misstatements of his own, of course. He repeatedly said his health-care plan covers all Americans, which isn’t true, and his assertion that the Bush campaign hasn’t met with the Congressional Black Caucus isn’t true, either. After the debate, Joe Lockhart admitted that Bush had a “ceremonial” meeting with the black caucus. But Kerry’s minor inaccuracies will be overshadowed by the video of Bush saying, “I truly am not that concerned about him.”
The most telling pre-debate quote came from Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who told the New York Times that the first debate “was a chance for the president to lay [Kerry] out and just lock it. In the past two weeks, that’s been turned on its head.” That was my sense going into this debate: The situation was precisely the reverse of where the campaign stood before the first debate. Another decisive win for Kerry could have ended the race, as the campaign dominoes would have begun to fall his way. That didn’t happen, and the debate was much closer than Kerry would have liked.
But as with previous debates, Kerry won the post-debate instant polls. After the last two, Kerry’s margin of victory grew substantially beyond the margins in the snap polls. Bush’s Bin Laden goof will give Kerry his best opportunity to score a post-debate knockout.
