WITH debate season finally over, the presidential race is almost exactly where everybody predicted it would be eight or nine months ago. Polls say the race is dead even, which is what people mean when they say the election is going to be close. The key battlegrounds remain Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, just as everybody anticipated.
Even the statewide races that are surprisingly close – Colorado, which should be a Bush gimme, and New Jersey, which should be Kerry country – aren’t terribly surprising, because they were showing signs of it months and months ago.
So we’re where all the pros said we would be. With that in mind, just how significant were the debates?
They were significant because in the week before the first encounter it appeared the president might be running away with the race. Had the president performed brilliantly rather than disappointingly in the first debate, maybe he would have. There’s no way of knowing.
But there’s something wrong with the idea that George W. Bush was going to walk into his second term without having to sweat bullets in the final month. The 2004 election only felt like it might be a Bush landslide at the end of September because John Kerry was conducting himself so haplessly and had been criticized so effectively – not because the president had made a really positive case for a second term.
One way or another, even if Bush had put away Kerry in the opening debate, I believe the race would have tightened up. That’s in part due to the profound divisions in the body politic. It’s also due to Kerry’s own competitive strengths. But mostly, I think, it’s because of Bush’s most damaging political weakness: His capacity for complacency.
It may be the only political weakness he inherited from his father, a far inferior politician who spent much of 1992 acting as though he simply could not believe the country would choose a philandering draft-dodger over him. We saw the same dynamic at play in the first Bush-Kerry clash, when the president acted offended and outraged at the kinds of challenges and counterstrikes Sen. Kerry was hurling at him.
You can only assume that Bush’s peevishness was derived from his belief before the debate that everything was going his way and this Massachusetts liberal flip-flopper couldn’t lay a glove on him. He was unprepared for Kerry’s toughness and unable to adapt to an opponent who went so quickly and powerfully on the offense.
Is that because he only speaks to friendly crowds and avoids tough questions from the press? Perhaps. But throughout his career as a presidential candidate, the temptation of complacency has dogged George W. Bush.
It was present during the early months of the 2000 Republican primary, when he made ghastly speeches and debate appearances – confident that his organizational and money-raising skills would carry the day. They did, eventually, but his bumbling helped elevate his only serious contender, John McCain, into a full-fledged rival.
And it was present during the ruinous final week of his campaign against Al Gore. Bush was, in most polls and in his own internal polling, somewhere between 5 and 10 points ahead. Assuming that he had Florida in the bag, he spent a few days campaigning in California – a risk he could not afford to take and which he only felt comfortable in taking because he and his team allowed themselves to become complacent.
The complacent Bush we saw get his clock cleaned in the first debate was nowhere to be seen by the third debate on Wednesday, when he displayed the kind of ease and engagement that so many people find so appealing.
Complacent Bush would have shown up at some point, because he always has. It’s better that he showed up on Sept. 30 rather than on Oct. 30, the way he did in 2000.
The president needed to feel that he could lose this race in order to do and say the kinds of things he needs to do and say to win it.