CAMPAIGN 2004
The Last Debate--and Beyond
The Kerry style won't overcome the Bush substance.
I have one complaint and two predictions.
My complaint is that every four years, we are asked by virtually everyone involved in national politics to believe that one of the two major party candidates for president--but only one--is an idiot, or untrustworthy. This is nonsense. Neither John Kerry nor George Bush is either stupid or untrustworthy. Nor was Al Gore, or Bob Dole, or Bill Clinton, or the senior George Bush, or Mike Dukakis. You simply cannot rise to the highest levels of U.S. politics if your word is not good, or if you are a dim bulb. So let's give the Bush-bashing and Kerry-bashing a rest.
My first prediction is that Sen. Kerry will win tomorrow night's debate. There really is no more able debater on the political scene today, and Sen. Kerry, increasingly Kennedyesque, seems to be hitting his stride. We will hear a great deal tomorrow night from him about jobs and families, about health care, children, environmental protection and the Supreme Court, all delivered with earnestness, confidence and fluency. At the end of the evening the quickie polls will declare him the victor.
The debates will have given Sen. Kerry the opportunity to show that he can go toe-to-toe with an incumbent president, and to demonstrate sufficient gravitas and mastery of subject matter so that it will be difficult to argue that he could never cut the mustard as commander in chief.
My supply-sider friends may never speak to me again, but a Kerry presidency is not unthinkable. So, in fairness to all, we should examine what it might be like.
Under President Kerry, we would quickly have a substantial tax increase, which is heresy in my world, but we had one early on under Bill Clinton (remember the "stimulus package"?), and the economy seemed to do all right as the 1990s wore on. We would surely also witness far greater reliance on diplomacy in international affairs, which could strike some as overcautious or insufficiently muscular, but it would be interesting to see what would happen.
What kind of president would John Kerry be? My guess is he would be a thoughtful president. This is not necessarily all good--you have to make dozens of yes-or-no decisions every day in the Oval Office, and there's no space for "maybe" on the decision memos, absolutely no dithering allowed--but it's not all bad, either. The guy has style.
Which brings us to substance. Here the terrain grows rockier for the Kerry camp.
First, many voters as they go into the booth will likely have in mind what each man would do in Iraq. Here Sen. Kerry faces a quandary: He has committed himself to increasing the participation of allies in our coalition, yet he has called our existing allies the "coalition of the bribed and the coerced," and the Iraq campaign nothing more than a "grand diversion," wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. Against that backdrop, it would require the combined skills of Metternich and Beelzebub to persuade new allies to join the effort.
Second, his assertion that U.S. moves should pass a "global test" may give some voters pause. While he truly does believe in the morality of diplomacy, ever since George III most Americans have disliked the idea of asking a foreign potentate for permission for anything.
Third, it does appear that Sen. Kerry's position on the war in Iraq has changed. My own view is that the antiwar John Kerry is the real John Kerry, and that what Sen. Kerry is now saying is what he believes. The difficulty, of course, is then to explain why he did not vote against the use of force in Iraq, just as he had voted against the first Gulf War resolution in 1991. The suggestion from President Bush is that the senator's vote for the war, which predated the rise of Howard Dean, was based on a domestic political calculation.
Fourth, President Bush is not distorting Sen. Kerry's voting record when he says it is among the most liberal in the Senate. Sen. Kerry was ranked the No. 1 liberal by the National Journal, which has no dog in the presidential fight. One can scarcely imagine the screams of outrage if the GOP chose as its candidate the most conservative member of the Senate. "Out of the mainstream!" would be just the opener.
Fifth, the fact is that President Bush has an ample record to run on: a resolute stand against global threats and enemies, a tax cut that virtually all economists agreed was helpful in pulling the country out of recession, major achievements in education (No Child Left Behind), health care (prescription drug benefit for seniors) and law enforcement (Patriot Act), and interesting new salients like the faith-based initiative for social programs.
My second prediction is that after George Bush has lost the debates on style, he will win the election on substance.
Mr. Weld, a principal at Leeds Weld & Co., was governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997.
