Jump Ball
Dotty Lynch is the Senior Political Editor for CBS News. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points
Two presidential debates down, one more to go. And the outcome of the election is as uncertain as ever. The debate audiences have been huge but what impact they have had is a matter of, shall we say, debate.
This spring the chattering class (including this chatterer) started to speculate that 2004 could be a repeat of 1980. An unpopular incumbent saddled with serious foreign policy problems facing a challenger who was an unknown quantity. In the 1980 debates, Ronald Reagan was able to convince enough undecided voters that he was not the dangerous loose cannon painted by the Democrats but someone who could be trusted to take the helm from the weakened Jimmy Carter.
After the first 2004 presidential debate, the 1980 model regained some popularity. According to both the pundits and the polls, Kerry won that debate hands down. President Bush looked uncomfortable and inarticulate and challenger Kerry gained in likeability and strength. A Time magazine poll released after the debate showed the return of the gender gap; Kerry who was losing women voters in September had a 12-point advantage with this key constituency.
Debate number two was judged a tie, but the expectations game gave a spin advantage to President Bush. The initial assessment was that his performance was strong enough to stem his slide and over and over we heard that he seemed "back on his game." Kerry was not as crisp and in charge as he was in debate number one and occasionally wandered in his answers.
Now other models are being discussed. Could this be 1984, where the incumbent (Reagan) tanked in debate number one, only to rebound in debate number two? Or more like 1988, when another Massachusetts Democrat found himself on the ropes on domestic issues.
The Kerry campaign has been hot to pivot onto domestic issues for months. Friday was Kerry's first chance to talk to a big audience about health care, the environment and jobs. Although he moved off flip-flopping to ideology, the Bush line of attack was not a surprise. Labeling Kerry another tax-and-spend big government liberal is straight out of the GOP playbook. And Kerry seemed to be taken a bit off-stride by this.
Slate's Will Saletan invoked the dreaded "D" word in analyzing Kerry's performance in Friday's debate. He speculated that maybe it was Dukakis running Kerry's debate prep. That is the unkindest cut of all for Kerry who spent a huge amount of time in the early days of his campaign making sure he did not repeat Dukakis' mistakes and letting everyone know he was no Michael Dukakis.
Saletan was referring to Kerry's dispassionate use of big words in his Dukakis analogy but the fight the Bush folks are starting to make – tax cuts vs. big government – is the one that worked in '88. The Bush game plan now seems to be motivating his base, figuring that the few undecideds left aren't going to come his way. And nothing gets conservatives on fire more than the specter of a tax-and-spend liberal in the Oval Office.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was able to shift the argument about big government to policies that "put people first." By the late '90s, he brazenly continued putting people first while proclaiming that the era of big government was over.
One former Clinton adviser has suggested that Kerry could get out of the "liberal" box by making the case for change. However, the adviser says Camp Kerry believes the word "change" worries people in this post 9/11 era. They may try to make the point more subtly, offering plans to "make things better."
In 22 days we'll know if its 1980 or 1988 all over again. Or whether, a whole new model will be created. As of now, all we know for sure is that it's tight as a tick.
By Dotty Lynch