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The Bush-Kerry debates: Doppelgängers weigh in

Elisabeth Bumiller IHT
Monday, October 4, 2004

WASHINGTON Senator John Kerry calls him "Bushie," but he isn't talking about the president of the United States. "Bushie," though, is someone nearly as important to his political future: Gregory Craig, the Washington lawyer who plays the president in the mock debates that Kerry uses to prepare for his real encounters with Bush.

"I think we were batting .950 in the first 45 minutes," Craig said in an interview over the weekend, recounting how accurately he felt his side had predicted what the real George W. Bush said in Miami last Thursday.

On the Republican side, the White House uses Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a longtime Bush family friend, as the stand-in for Kerry. Gregg played Al Gore in Bush's debate preparations in 2000.

"Gore was predictable in the sense that he was mechanical in many ways, and plotted in a specific direction," Gregg said in an interview last week. "But John Kerry goes in three or four different directions, and they're not necessarily compatible."

Neither doppelgänger knows the other well, but they have similar jobs: huge amounts of research into the policy positions and speech patterns of Brand X, a search for the weak points in his own candidate's argument, then a set of closely guarded run-throughs intended to expunge Kerry's verbosity or Bush's peevishness.

"We would try to get him to the point of impatience - we challenged him," said Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, recalling how Gregg and the staff tried to push the president's buttons in their mock debates.

After the encounter in Miami, which even Republicans said had helped Kerry, Card insisted that Bush had been merely "anxious" to rebut his opponent and was not the angry and defensive president the Democrats described. When asked if any of the president's mock debates had not gone well, Card replied that "some days are better than others."

This week, both Gregg and Craig will be busy preparing for the second presidential debate, to be held Friday in St. Louis, Missouri, a town-hall-style encounter with audience questions expected to focus heavily on domestic policy. "I think the president is much, much stronger in terms of content on domestic policy than most people expect," said Craig, who insisted he was not spinning positively about Bush to lower expectations for Kerry. "I think he's got a story to tell on his education initiative. The Democratic critique is that it's underfunded and the hopes have not been met. I think that's all true. But he has imposed accountability and increased funding, and in terms of content, he's got a case to make."

Craig was asked to serve as Bush's stand-in in August by Vernon Jordan, the Washington lawyer who is leading Kerry's presidential debate team and is an old friend of former President Bill Clinton. Craig, 59, is an old Clinton friend, too, and was called in to serve as a quarterback to the White House staff during the former president's impeachment inquiry.

Since the summer, Craig has studied nearly every utterance of Bush, all nicely organized for him on www.whitehouse.gov.

"It's a great Web site," Craig enthused. "You can look at all the speeches, and you can see where he adds a new line about Senator Kerry's speeches on Iraq."

In the process, Craig said, some of the president's well-worn phrases have entered his family lexicon. Bush says this in nearly every speech: "If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch." When one of Craig's teenagers went out not long ago, Craig said, "You're going to tell us when you're coming home tonight. No permissiveness - not on my watch!"

Craig, a partner at the Washington law firm of Williams Connolly, said his preparations had given him new insight into Bush, a man he has never met. "I've learned to admire, more than I would have, his compulsion for simplicity," Craig said. "I understand there's some content to it, and I understand the power of the simple phrase. Prior to this, I would have just shrugged it off as an empty slogan."

Gregg, who ran Bush's losing primary campaign in New Hampshire in 2000, was less forthcoming about his behind-the-scenes work than Craig. "One of the reasons the president asked me to do these things is he knows I'm not going to talk about how he prepared," he said.

But Gregg, 57, did say that playing Kerry was hard because Kerry changed his positions so much - the No. 1 White House talking point on Bush's debate prep last week.

"He's constantly on the move," Gregg said. "He either subtly or substantively can change his positions from week to week."

Gregg declined to say how many debate preparation sessions the president had, although Bush's advisers said the president was adamant that he not be overloaded in the last minute. (Kerry had three full days of debate sessions at a Wisconsin resort last week.)

"We've done as many as the president thought were necessary," Gregg said.

E-mail: [e-mail] -- Tomorrow: John Vinocur writes on whether the Bush administration is ducking a confrontation with France to win the election.

Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune

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