Tightening Race Increases Stakes of Final Debate
By Adam Nagourney
The New York Times
Wednesday 13 October 2004
WASHINGTON - President Bush and Senator John Kerry meet in their final presidential debate on Wednesday night after two encounters that polls suggest weakened Mr. Bush and fortified Mr. Kerry, leaving some Republicans concerned that the final 20 days of the contest would be more competitive than they had expected.
Republicans who had been confident of victory before the debates said they were uneasy as Mr. Bush returns to a format - 90 minutes of questions from one moderator - that has seemed to play to the strength of Mr. Kerry, a 20-year senator and former prosecutor. Mr. Kerry burnished his credentials in the first two debates, averting an early collapse that Republicans had sought, and Mr. Bush has lost some or all of the lead he had before their first debate in Florida on Sept. 30, a series of recent polls suggests.
Republicans are also concerned that the debate, at 9 p.m. Eastern time in Tempe, Ariz., is the only one devoted to domestic policy, and polls show Mr. Kerry has an edge on many of those issues.
"By any objective measure - if Republicans are going to be intellectually honest with ourselves - prior to the first debate, we were pretty comfortable, " said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. "It was a chance for the president to lay him out and just lock it. In the past two weeks, that's been turned on its head."
Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican nomination in 2000, said that Mr. Bush's performance had improved markedly in the second meeting and that he was confident Mr. Bush could take advantage of what he said were openings Mr. Kerry provided in the first two debates. But, he said, "I don't mean to be disloyal to my friends, but I think the Kerry people are feeling pretty good about things."
Mr. Bush's aides, expressing confidence, pointed to polls finding that voters were uncomfortable with the idea of Mr. Kerry as a wartime president, as well as some showing Mr. Bush with a slight edge.
Still, some Democrats argued that this contest was comparable to the election of 1980, when former President Jimmy Carter saw his standing plummet after a debate in which Ronald Reagan, who had been belittled by Mr. Carter throughout the fall, was widely viewed as winning simply by exceeding the low expectations Mr. Carter had established for him. Mr. Bush's aides have resisted that historical parallel, saying a more apt comparison was Franklin D. Roosevelt's re-election campaigns in World War II.
In this remarkable tight race, aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry said the candidates were heading into the final debate, as well as the final phase of the campaign, with aggressive plans to return to familiar territory for the two political parties over the past 30 years.
Mr. Kerry is going to turn up his efforts to portray the president as a tool of special interests, an approach he has signaled in his campaign speeches and in television advertisements, including one in which Mr. Kerry said the "middle class is paying the bigger share of America's tax burden, and the wealthiest are paying less." It was a line of attack, though worded less strongly, reminiscent of the "people versus the powerful" argument Al Gore made in the closing days of his contest in 2000. Democrats said it was designed to appeal to supporters of Ralph Nader, the independent candidate who looms as a continuing threat to Mr. Kerry, and to rouse Democratic voters that some recent polls found have been left somewhat unmoved by Mr. Kerry.
"The reason you're hearing this tough populism is because he's underperforming with some of these groups, and this is a way of bringing it home," said Donna Brazile, who managed Mr. Gore's campaign in 2000.
Mr. Bush's aides mocked the approach as crass class warfare, saying it had not worked for Mr. Gore and would fail again this time.
"Who was the last Democrat who got elected on a class-warfare platform?" said Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager. "Harry Truman in 1948. They are running in 2004 the same way they are running in 2000."
Mr. Kerry's aides argued that Mr. Bush's record provided numerous opportunities to try to paint his policies - on subjects like tax cuts and health care - as benefiting the wealthy.
"Gore won the election," said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser. "And if he had used it earlier, he would have been president."
If Mr. Kerry is looking to 2000, Mr. Bush is drawing on 30 years of Republican political strategy as he seeks to portray Mr. Kerry as a liberal, particularly on issues of spending, taxes and the military. That is designed to stir excitement among core supporters and appeal to undecided voters, Mr. Bush's aides said.
"If you say to swing voters, what are the most important issues, they are going to say terror and taxes," Mr. Mehlman said. "And in terms of taxes, this is the most liberal Democrat who has run since Walter Mondale pledged to raise taxes when he ran in 1984."
A senior Kerry aide, Michael D. McCurry, responded: "It's like the greatest hits of the 1970's and 1980's. That's a message that resonates peculiarly with the Republican base. But the irony is that it helps to shore up our base, too."
Since Wednesday's debate is the third and final one, history suggests that it will draw fewer viewers; it is also competing with the second game of the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox playoffs.
Yet the event could prove particularly consequential because the race continues to be so close, because of the high number of voters who watched the first two debates and because the pace of television advertisements in swing states has been so heavy that at this point, they are a blur to many voters.
"It would be good for Bush to reclaim this aura of presidential authority and at the same time have one or two opportunities to pierce through Kerry's veneer and tag him as a liberal on something," said Nelson Warfield, who was press secretary to Bob Dole in 1996 when Mr. Dole was the Republican nominee.
Mr. Bush's aides and some Republicans said they were not worried about how the race was shaping up, saying they had always expected it to tighten.
"Kerry gained some traction because the expectations were set so low," said Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican consultant. "But I think it's now the president's to lose. I don't think the American people are going to want to change direction at this particular time."
Mr. Fabrizio, the Republican pollster, said Mr. Bush's advisers were expressing confidence at their peril. "We should be concerned," he said. "The race is close. This whole 'We expected it to get close again' thing, I just don't buy it."
In a sign that the race is moving into its final phase, the campaigns have cut down the number of states where they are placing advertisements, a generally reliable way of measuring what states each side views as in play.
The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and Nielsen Monitor Plus, which monitors political advertising nationwide, released a joint study on Tuesday showing that the battleground, at least as far as campaign commercials are concerned, had contracted to mainly 10 states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Both campaigns have pulled out of Missouri, a state that Mr. Kerry had once hoped to win back from Mr. Bush but is now widely expected to fall under Mr. Bush's column on Election Day. Arizona, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia are also among the states that were once considered competitive but are not being heavily emphasized by either campaign.
They have, however, increased spending in Colorado, a state Mr. Bush was favored to win but now appears deadlocked, according to the study. Aides to both campaigns said the shape of the final map would probably become clear by the weekend, when polls measure the cumulative effect of the three debates.
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