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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (75765)	10/8/2004 12:51:15 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793896

New Republic blog - FORESHADOWING TONIGHT'S DEBATE: I think it's safe to say we know how the president is going to deal with Paul Bremer's comments and this week's WMD report in tonight's debate. He's going to attack John Kerry. Here's how he foreshadowed his debate strategy on the campaign trail yesterday, in case that wasn't obvious enough already: Talking to a cheering partisan crowd here in the afternoon, the president quoted at length from a statement the Massachusetts senator made on the floor of the Senate almost exactly two years ago, warning of the danger that Mr. Hussein might spread nuclear technology around the world. After reading from Mr. Kerry's statement, the president looked up at his crowd in a park here and asked, "Just who is the one trying to mislead the American people?" My advice to Kerry is to follow the lead of his running mate and not even dignify this charge with a response. To respond would be to play right into Bush's strategy of trying to take the spotlight off the administration and shining it on Kerry. But, of course, it's Bush who has some serious 'splainin' to do. Kerry needs to spend the entire night hammering that point home. One concern I have about tonight's debate is that the townhall format doesn't really lend itself to hitting Bush on Iraq. If the postdebate focus groups I've been watching are any indication, "undecided" voters seem to want the candidates to talk about what they're going to do in Iraq going forward, not the mistakes made so far. This is, of course, preposterous, since our options going forward have been shaped entirely by the administration's long list of failures. You can't discuss one without the other. But the questions are likely to be along those lines nonetheless, which could complicate things for Kerry. Still, I'm not overly concerned about this problem. For one thing, Bush is clearly going to set the tone by attacking Kerry first. So if anyone's going to alienate the undecideds in the audience, it's going to be him. Second, I don't put too much stock in what people say when asked what they want candidates to talk about. They all know to tell pollsters they want to hear about the future--and they may actually mean it. But I have no doubt they also find attacks on candidates' records pretty compelling.