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Politics : Proof that John Kerry is Unfit for Command -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (14602)	10/2/2004 10:36:58 AM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27181

Not Enough- John Kerry was able to stir the faithful, but his performance wasn't enough to change the dynamics of the race. by Fred Barnes TALKING TO DEMOCRATS prior to last night, what you heard were complaints about how bad John Kerry was as a presidential candidate. The good news for Kerry is that on the basis of his solid performance in the first nationally televised debate with President Bush, the griping among Democrats is likely to cease. But change the direction of the campaign, which Bush now leads by a small but significant margin? Probably not. Or affect the outcome? Not that either. While Kerry did the best that could be expected of him in the 90-minute debate, he didn't elicit the sort of gaffe from Bush that might have altered the race. Sure, Democrats are bound to be more excited about the Kerry campaign today than they have been at any time since the Democratic convention in July. But that's not enough, by itself, to lift Kerry back to parity with Bush. What Kerry needed was some embarrassing moment for Bush, a clumsy statement perhaps or an unpresidential moment of indecision, that would be played over and over again on TV news shows for the next few days. That didn't happen. Kerry annoyed Bush, even exasperated him at times. But he didn't force Bush to make an error. So the first Bush-Kerry face-off will go down as largely uneventful, like most debates in a presidential campaign. We remember only a few of them, chiefly because some offbeat incident occurred--the elder Bush looking at this watch in 1992 or Michael Dukakis giving a bloodless answer to a question about the hypothetical rape of wife in 1988. The other debates, the vast majority of them, are forgotten. No doubt the inside-the-Beltway crowd, in the media mostly, will declare that a Kerry comeback has begun. They were poised to do so unless Kerry fell on his face in the debate. In Washington terms, of course, Kerry did extremely well, showing a breadth of knowledge about foreign policy and some attention to detail. That kind of stuff never fails to impress the press corps. But it's the voters outside the Washington-New York-Boston axis who matter. And Bush's firm insistence on a few key points--notably the need for resolve in Iraq--and his repetition of these points, is likely to have appealed to them. Repetition is Bush's long suit. His points seemed rooted in his experience in the White House, while Kerry's statements often came across as theoretical or abstract. This was especially true in the discussion of North Korea when Bush argued convincingly that Kerry's call for one-on-one talks was a bad idea because it would leave the Chinese out of the equation. With Bush, there's a kind of mystique that most reporters and commentators in Washington don't understand. They still believe the president is a bumpkin. Kerry, on the other hand, is persuasive in the Washington sense, arguing his case knowledgeably with a specific or two. So were Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. When Bush connects with voters, the media feels blindsided. Whatever Bush does to reach the public, the press rarely notices. And Bush may have done some of it last night, especially in his strong closing statement and his mention of meeting with Missy Johnson, the wife of a soldier killed in Iraq. Kerry often fails to connect, though he surely thrilled Democrats or independents already committed to voting for him. This is no small thing. If he hadn't stirred the faithful, the race would be over. The problem for Kerry, though, is that right now, there aren't enough committed folks to defeat Bush on November 2. The first debate didn't change that. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.