A cornered rat:
Bush Shows a Different Side, but Not His Best One
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: October 9, 2004
The president managed not to scowl. But he let his feelings get the better of him, getting hot under the collar in a medium best served cold.
From the outset, his clenched jaw twitched, and he blinked repeatedly, like a man whose contact lens hurt. And when Senator John Kerry turned and confronted him face to face with the latest report on the absence of illicit weapons in Iraq, President Bush snickered derisively - the first sign that the president, though more combative than in the first debate, was not on his game.
And a town-hall debate, which was expected to be a strong forum for Mr. Bush, turned into a voyeuristic reality show: would the president lose it like a contestant on "Survivor"? He came close a few times.
When Mr. Kerry accused the president of going to war unilaterally, Mr. Bush could not suppress his anger. He jumped off his stool and interrupted the moderator, Charles Gibson of ABC, saying, "I've got to answer this." Mr. Gibson wanted to pursue the subject of whether deploying Reserves constituted a form of military draft, but Mr. Bush was adamant. "Let me just answer what he just said about going alone," he insisted. "You tell Tony Blair we're going alone! Tell Tony Blair we're going alone!"
Mr. Bush tried to charm his audience, but there was little laughter when he tried a self-deprecating joke about his first debate, saying his opponent's answer almost made him want to "scowl."
And he barely won a polite laugh when he looked startled when Mr. Kerry suggested that he owned a timber company. "I own a timber company?" Mr. Bush exclaimed. "News to me. Need some wood?"
He scored rhetorical points, but a television debate often turns on demeanor. And the president never seemed to make Mr. Kerry, cool and stately, squirm.
In their first debate, in Florida, an austere debate club format that leashed the two candidates to identical lecterns, Mr. Kerry remained confident; Mr. Bush grew peevish, defensive and rattled. When Mr. Kerry said that it was Al Qaeda that attacked on Sept. 11, not Iraq, Mr. Bush sounded more like a sullen schoolboy than a president as he retorted: "Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that."
Obviously intent on correcting that first debate (he even shook hands more warmly with Mr. Kerry as they walked on stage), Mr. Bush spent much of the night attacking his opponent's policies instead of explaining his own. He wanted to sound firm and forceful, but his voice rose when he insisted his opponent's contention of being a fiscal conservative was "just not credible." At times, he spoke so loudly he was yelling, getting testy with the audience as well as Mr. Kerry.
And not unlike that first battle, the president sounded angry and defensive, as if scolding the undecided. "Yeah, great question," he said when a man asked him about the draft. "Thanks. I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft. Period."
Mr. Kerry made a point of remembering the names of the questioners in the audience. ("Now to go back to your question, Nicky," he said, a bit unctuously, "we're not getting the best cooperation in the world today.")
The president thanked people for their questions, but he was less willing to risk addressing them by name.
The folksy terms he uses that get fond laughter from Republican fans did not seem to sit quite as well with his earnest Midwestern audience, though he did score a point by insisting that Mr. Kerry could not say one way or the other what his stance is on the late-term abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. He could not resist adding a Reaganism: "You can run, but you can't hide."
His intensity is always powerful, but on the small screen, his hunched shoulders and compressed neck made him look a bit like a coach in the locker room signaling that the team is down at the half and needs a comeback.
At best, he tied the game. An instant ABC poll found that 44 percent thought Mr. Kerry won, 41 percent favored Mr. Bush and 13 percent though it was a tie. Fox News looked on the bright side, with Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, concluding that the president had done "much better" this week than last. But Morton Kondracke, another Fox analyst, said he thought "the president seemed to be on the defensive."
The arena was round, but Mr. Bush acted as though he were cornered.
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