Bush's Real Opponent

By David S. Broder
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A21

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry faced very different challenges when they met Thursday night for their first debate, but only Kerry seemed to recognize exactly what he needed to do.

The Democratic nominee's task was to straighten out the internal contradictions that had facilitated the successful Republican assault on him as a flip-flopper. He bent every effort to the urgent need to appear straightforward and strong -- keeping his back straight, his head high, his answers short and his thoughts clear. For most of the night, he was the aggressor, pressing the case for a change of command in the war on terrorism, which has been Bush's strongest suit.

Bush had a different assignment. A Kerry weakened by months of Republican rhetoric painting him as a vacillating wimp was far less of a threat to a second term than the disturbing news bulletins and television pictures from the Iraq battlefront. Bush's need was to reconcile his upbeat rhetoric about the coming of a new democratic era in Iraq with the bloody warfare that has pinned 140,000 American troops in that misery-laden country with no end in sight.

In 90 minutes before the biggest audience of the campaign, Bush not only failed to do that -- he barely tried. And that omission leaves him at risk to future events as the insurgency in Iraq gathers momentum.

Instead of dealing with his greatest vulnerability, Bush did what was predictable. He repeated the favorite examples his campaign has gleaned from the abundant contradictions on Iraq policy Kerry has uttered since he first voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein back in 2002. It is a catalogue that has become familiar through millions of dollars of Republican ads, and by the time Bush had used the same phrase seven times -- citing Kerry's dismissal of Iraq as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" -- there was a rote quality to the recital that reduced its sting.

the rest is here: Washington Post