U.S. President George W. Bush may have been sending "mexed missages" during his debate with Democratic contender John F. Kerry last Thursday night.
But most of the pundits weren't.
Not even the usual Bush cheerleading squad could muster up a feeble 2-4-6-8 for its boy. It had to admit debate defeat — as in da feet in Bush's mouth.
How it must have hurt them to see, just after midnight, the Kerry campaign website (http://www.johnkerry.com) post a series of positive blurbs from the right. It included praise from neoconners Jonah Goldberg ("The Bush campaign miscalculated ..."), Bill Kristol ("Kerry ... was forceful and articulate") and Fox News' Mort Kondracke ("Kerry looked like a commander-in-chief").
Even the rabidly right-wing Townhall.com, in an overview from contributors such as David Frum, called Kerry's performance "solid.''
They didn't give up quite so easily over on http://www.freerepublic.com, the mother of all right-wing websites. It's the one that gave birth to the name "freepers" for all those keyboard cowboys who do battle for the republic by sitting in their basements and e-dumping all over liberals. Thursday night, you could practically hear them crying to their mommies as they realized that Bush was blowing it.
At one point, online sleazemeister Matt Drudge attempted a Hail Mary pass for Bush by suggesting that he was tired because he had ministered to Florida's hurricane victims earlier in the day. As more than one Drudge fan scolded me, Bush had "emotionally drained himself" while Kerry was getting buffed and polished in a spa.
White House spokesperson Dan Bartlett called that "ridiculous," probably because it made Bush look weak, and like a loser. "He wasn't tired," Bartlett said. "He was very much engaged in this debate."
Oddly, many TV journalists, perhaps afraid to take sides, scraped the bottom of the rhetorical barrel to call it a tie. CBS White House correspondent John Roberts said it was "as close to a draw as you could possibly come ..."
But the viewer polls were clear: Kerry won.
Of course, that didn't stop some pundits from trying to spin that, too. Oh sure, he may have won the debate, but he didn't win the resolute leadership and likeability contest, they insisted.
Most egregiously, after days of dwelling on the debates, building up their importance, telling us they are "defining," "decisive" and "make or break it" events during presidential campaigns, there was CNN on Friday telling us they were no big deal after all.
"Well, by now we've seen the numbers, the major post-debate polls indicating the winner was Senator John Kerry over President Bush, but not to sound flip — or flop, for that matter — so what?" said anchor Miles O'Brien, echoing statements by Wolf Blitzer and Bill Hemmer.
It's easy to imagine that the tippy-toppest Republicans weren't pleased by all the Bush-lost-it banter. Many of the heavy hitters were AWOL from the cable news shows while lesser lights were dispatched to spout the talking point of the day: "flip-flopper" Kerry was "fact-challenged" with "16 different fact problems."
That was the main theme of the Bush campaign website (http://www.georgewbush.com) Friday where visitors could see how Kerry's "16 inaccurate statements ... widened his credibility gap on the most important issues facing our nation."
At the same time on http://www.democrats.org, there was a 51-second montage, "Faces Of Frustration," which shows the less-than-presidential Bush in action during the debate.
The Bush site offered no video.
No surprise there.
Which brings us to the real winner: the electorate. That's because the networks defied the rules of engagement, as negotiated by the two campaigns. Those guidelines stipulated no "cutaways" of the candidates unless they were speaking. But the networks showed split-screens — which revealed Bush's unpresidential expressions.
Bad enough that Bush couldn't muster up many coherent arguments, he could barely compose himself. But then, unlike his experience on the campaign trail, the questions weren't pre-scripted and the audience wasn't pre-screened for loyalty and reflex applause.
Not that the news channels in the aftermath dwelled much on his mugging as they once did on, say, Al Gore's infamous sighs in a 2000 Bush-Gore bout. Instead, they made an admirable effort, for once, at checking the facts.
Still, so bad was Bush's performance that Vanity Fair media critic James Wolcott (jameswolcott.com) wrote: "I pity the fools who have to prep Bush for the next debate. Because they're sure going to have one pissy pupil on their hands."
If he shows up.
As online columnist William Rivers Pitt predicts: "Watch for his campaign to reach for the chicken switch before the weekend is out ..." Additional articles by Antonia Zerbisias
The first Bush-Kerry presidential debate has highlighted the glaring differences on how best to treat America's allies. The rival candidates can be expected to continue to slug away until polling day on "who has the credibility to bring the allies back to the table."
In the ongoing chaos that is occupied Iraq, President George Bush paid tribute to those friendly nations who have stayed the course, signalling out Britain's Tony Blair for particular praise. Sen John Kerry stressed instead the need for a better set of arrangements whereby traditional alliance structures would once again be firm.
Under the Democrats it appears that Bush's alleged unilateralism would be thrown out of the window. The familiar Cold War tradition of regular and cordial prime ministerial visits by European and Asian friends to the White House might then be on its way back.
What neither of the contenders has said, though, is that the old game is nearly up. The days of the coalition of the willing are rapidly ending. It is becoming an odds-on bet that regardless of who wins the Nov 2 election, the short unhappy era of the "B-B-H-K" axis is almost over. Chances are that Messrs Blair, Howard and Koizumi are secretly ticking off the days on the calendar until they can reckon on their respective exit strategies.
Each coalition leader must now face the music and for Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, his date with destiny comes up very shortly indeed (Oct 9). After receiving a battering in the first televised debate with his younger Labour Party opponent John Latham, Howard has yet to persuade the Australian electorate that his decision to go all the way with George W was in the national interest. The polls are far from encouraging and Howard has yet to pull a decent-sized rabbit out of the hat to get the result he craves to return him to office for a third term. If he fails, there can be little doubt that the short, four letter word "Iraq" is going to be found engraved on his heart.
Blair has also got more than his fair share of headaches right now. It's been a confusing week for his supporters as the prime minister entered hospital for a mini-operation, bought himself a hugely expensive retirement home in central London, rumored to be mortgaged against his yet to be written memoirs, and vowed to keep on leading the Labour Party for years to come.
What is clear, though, is that Blair's policies over Iraq remain highly unpopular with the electorate and that noises off stage are whispering that the man should go and go soon. For the present, Blair is still running the show but his recent half-apology for getting the wrong intelligence information prior to going to war to oust Saddam Hussein suggests at the very least that he will find it hard to escape his past. Once a senior politician has to admit to his own party faithful that the issue of the Iraq war "has divided the country" and that "I entirely understand why many disagree," then he begins to look mighty vulnerable.
The same is less true of Koizumi, but he too will be hoping that regardless of whoever wins the general election in the United States, there will be a change of strategy. The recent Bush-Kerry presidential debate circled around this theme without either candidate daring to talk of cutting and running. Yet the fact that Bush is trusting the interim Iraqi government to have a force of over 125,000 trained personnel on the streets shortly implies that overall responsibility for security may pass rather quickly from American to Iraqi hands.
This would provide the ideal opportunity for Koizumi to say that he had done all he could to help Uncle Sam and that now was the time for the SDF troops to quit southern Iraq. The Japanese public would then shed tears of relief, while expenditure on Iraqi reconstruction might be rapidly scaled back and international relations commentators could record that Japan had reached yet another milestone on its journey back to becoming a "normal" nation.
Almost regardless of the outcome of Nov 2, it is now almost impossible to envisage any fresh talk of an allied coalition marching to Washington's drum. The "B-B-H-K" axis will soon be history.
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: pagetwo@iht.com -- Tomorrow: John Vinocur writes on whether the Bush administration is ducking a confrontation with France to win the election.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
