He just doesn’t measure up

Well, the presidential debates are behind us now, and Election Day is dead ahead. Conceivably, some event between now and then will take everybody by surprise and upend all of the conventional calculations. But the chances are that what we see today – the rival presidential candidates as they now appear – is pretty much what we will see on Election Day. The vast majority of voters have already made up their minds about whom they will support.

Before the debates, most polls indicated that Bush had an impressive lead over his opponent. Kerry and his advisers were to blame for much of it, having decided to make the Democratic convention a celebration of Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam 35 years ago. That inadvertently set the stage for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose devastating attacks on Kerry dominated the month between the conventions. Those attacks, and the bounce Bush received from the Republican convention in New York, combined to produce Bush’s amazing lead in late September.

But Kerry indisputably “won” the first debate, appearing calm, reasonably friendly, and in impressive command of a large number of facts, while Bush seemed irritable and underprepared. Bush didn’t repeat the mistake: In the second debate, while Kerry duplicated his own earlier performance, Bush was alert and decisive, and acquitted himself well as a plausible commander in chief. Polls immediately reflected the difference, with many more viewers scoring the debate as a tie. In the third and final debate, both men held their own: another tie, at least in my opinion.

The overall result, therefore, was a net plus for Kerry. He was not just a braying donkey, after all, and the polls immediately reflected the change: Bush’s lead almost entirely disappeared, and the contest was suddenly a close one again.

But then a remarkable thing happened. In mid-October, Bush again opened a lead over Kerry. It wasn’t as big as the earlier one, but it was real, and it was substantial. A few polls showed Bush ahead by five or six points – well above the statistical margin of error. There had been no big developments in the campaigns themselves, or in the nation or the world, to account for the change. What was going on?

A spokesman for the Bush campaign, asked exactly that by a TV interviewer, may have hit on the correct answer: “People aren’t voting for a speaker,” he asserted. “They’re voting for a leader.”

In other words, Kerry’s relative success in the debates, and particularly in the first one, had indeed done him some good. His long, complicated, other-handed speeches during the primaries, and in the summer months thereafter, had impressed voters very little. But in the debates Kerry came across better. Nothing ruffled him – he kept his composure and good humor, and he demonstrated that he knew quite a lot about various complicated issues.

He is, in short, an excellent debater. But apparently that does not mean, to a lot of voters, that he is necessarily the right man to serve as president and commander in chief in the war crisis that now stretches ahead of us.

Domestic issues dominate most elections, but they don’t dominate this one. And whether George W. Bush was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein isn’t the issue, either. The attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, by 19 Muslim fanatics who cheerfully committed suicide in the process, were opening shots in a war America didn’t seek, but which we have no choice but to wage. It will go on for years, perhaps many years, and it will end either in the destruction of militant Islam or in the collapse of the United States.

John Kerry will not end that war by holding a “summit” with kindred spirits like Jacques Chirac, or by taking only military actions that pass some “global test.” Good debater though he may be, he lacks the toughness that George W. Bush has already demonstrated he possesses. Which one would you want at your side, walking down a dark and dangerous street?