Edwards is Ready
Oct. 5, 2004 | CLEVELAND -- Tuesday night's vice-presidential debate is John Edwards' raison d'être as John Kerry's running mate, and no one knows that better than John Edwards himself. After wrapping up a rally in Erie, Penn., Friday evening, the enthusiastic and ever-present campaigner disappeared into debate preparations in Chautauqua, N.Y., emerging just long enough for a photo op among the pumpkins at a nearby roadside produce stand. Asked about debate preparations, Edwards said four words: "Goin' fine, workin' hard."
It's hard to argue with him. After a long, slow slide, the Kerry-Edwards ticket has finally regained the momentum, if not the upper hand, in the presidential campaign. John Kerry dominated George W. Bush in their first debate Thursday night, and the candidates' performances -- Kerry's calm and confident, Bush's stammering and scowling -- have instantly changed the face of the race. The latest New York Times/CBS and CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls have the race tied or nearly so among registered voters. The Washington Post/ABC poll has Bush up by five; Newsweek has Kerry up by two.
The vice-presidential debate was always going to be important; now it's only more so. The Republicans need to stop the bleeding; the Democrats have to hope that the Cheney-Edwards faceoff doesn't kill their momentum. Pretty John Edwards needs to show he's more than the Breck Boy; dour Dick Cheney needs to show that the Republicans offer more than annoyance and fear. For the moment, at least, Democrats think they've got the better of the deal: You know you're in trouble, Kerry advisor Joe Lockhart said Monday, when you've got to ask Dick Cheney to "cheer up" the voters.
Republicans are taking an "ignore the elephant in the room" approach. Karl Rove is still trying to salvage Bush's debate demeanor as "pensive." That deer-in-the-headlights look? It was Bush "pausing" for emphasis. Other Bush advisors are arguing that the debate really didn't make a difference. On a conference call with reporters Monday, Bush-Cheney strategist Matthew Dowd said he always expected the race to be closer than the pre-debate polls would have suggested. "This race trades in a very, very, very tight margin," Dowd said. As for Kerry's sudden upward movement, Dowd said: "We don't dance in the end zone, and we don't cry in our beer."
That said, there was plenty of pre-game trash talking Monday. Although Edwards has never engaged in a one-on-one political debate -- Republican Lauch Faircloth declined to debate in his 1998 Senate race -- Bush-Cheney advisor Mary Matalin said Monday that the Democrat's experience as a "personal injury trial lawyer" would serve him well tonight. Matalin portrayed Edwards as "the man with the golden tongue," a slick lawyer who was picked as Kerry's running mate -- and she's probably right about this -- specifically with the debate in mind.
In Chautauqua, where Kerry-Edwards advisors Bob Shrum and Ron Klain spent the weekend prepping Edwards for the debate, Edwards spokesman Mark Kornblau called Cheney "unflappable" and said that the best anyone could hope for was a "draw." When a reporter on the press bus asked her colleagues how to spell "formidable," Kornblau shouted out: "D-I-C-K C-H-E-N-E-Y."
Cheney was certainly formidable when he debated Joe Lieberman four years ago. The two had a gentlemanly exchange, as befitting two old Washington hands, but Cheney plainly got the better of it. He was all the things that this administration seldom seems to be: thoughtful, reflective, open to thinking about new ideas. He acknowledged that, as a white man, he could never "understand fully" how he would feel about something like "racial profiling." Asked about gay marriage, he said people "should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into."
That's not the Dick Cheney many voters see today. While Republicans still see Cheney as a rock of experience in the Bush administration, Democrats and independents are more likely to view him as the slightly scary puppeteer who pulls the strings in the White House and profits from it. "The vice president four years ago was an enormous asset to the ticket, someone who filled in the void that George W. Bush had in the course of his six-year public career as the governor of Texas," Kerry strategist Tad Devine said Monday night in Cleveland. "I think we've seen what Dick Cheney's experience has done for this nation. I think there's a powerful argument that Dick Cheney's experience, and the advice he has given the president, has not been good for America."
In the latest Newsweek poll, 47 percent of respondents said they viewed the vice president unfavorably; only 44 percent said they viewed him favorably. Cheney's three-point negative spread is the worst of any of the four candidates: Edwards is at plus-19, Kerry is at plus-12 and Bush is at plus-3.
The Democrats can take some credit for Cheney's popularity problem -- both Kerry and Edwards take swings at Cheney on the campaign trail -- but most of it is self-inflicted. On substance and in style, Cheney has made himself a target for all who distrust the Bush administration. Cheney pushed the hardest for the war in Iraq, and then stretched the truth the hardest to support it. It was Cheney who said that Saddam Hussein had "in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons," Cheney who said that U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators." And even as others in the administration backed away from attempts to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks of Sept. 11, it was Cheney who kept pushing the lie. He peddled the discredited report that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with hijacker Muhammad Atta in Prague in 2001. He claimed that Iraq had been a base for terrorists, "most especially" the ones who attacked on Sept. 11. And when the 9/11 commission concluded that there was "no collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Cheney said he "probably" knew more than the commission did.
While Cheney has played a central role in the Iraq war, his reach -- and therefore his taint -- has extended much beyond it, too. With his refusal to release records from his energy task force, his continuing paychecks from Halliburton, and his duck-hunting trip with Antonin Scalia, Cheney cemented the Bush administration's reputation for secrecy and cronyism and a certain kind of contempt for anyone who dared to question either. And that was before he told Patrick Leahy: "Go f@@k yourself."
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