There’s a certain inherent danger to handicapping a presidential
debate. Everything that’s said about tomorrow’s debate in Miami —
widely considered the most important because of the subject matter
(foreign policy) and the audience size (expected to drop off with
later debates) — gets thrown into the pre-debate spin cycle,
wherein each side insists that its candidate is at a disadvantage,
hoping to create expectations low enough to exceed impressively. By
the logic of the expectations game, the very act of declaring an
advantage for one candidate or the other marginally increases the
chance that said declaration will prove itself wrong.
That said, a few things to consider.
The Rules. The Kerry and Bush camps have
already slugged it out in a behind-the-scenes debate over the
particulars of how the debates will operate. The Bush
administration famously demanded that the schedule of three debates
be reduced to two; it’s generally thought that avoiding debates —
where the challenger has an opportunity to mount, well, a challenge
— is to the incumbent’s advantage, particularly when he’s also the
frontrunner. The Kerry camp fought for the full schedule, something
that, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill told Time,
“was much more important to us than any detail of the format.”
But consider the concessions that the Bush camp got in exchange:
Though Bush won’t stand on a “pitcher’s mound” to make up the
several inches that Kerry has on, the podiums will be ten feet
apart to blur the height difference. Tools that Kerry used in his
successful debates against William Weld during the 1996
Massachusetts Senate race, like direct questions and roaming the
stage, will be unavailable. Whenever a candidate exceeds his
allotted time, his warning light — sure to prove a Victor Laszlo
to the Rick and Ilsa of Kerry and his own voice — will appear on
television. Add to all that expectations-game coup of a match-up
being introduced by anchors as the debate that Bush didn’t want,
and the President’s advantage on this front looks pretty
clear-cut.
The Issues. That the first debate should
concern foreign policy was another concession that the Bush
campaign demanded and got; like several decades of Republican
candidates, Bush enjoys an advantage here. The Bushies could not
plan on yesterday’s announcement from Pyongyang that North Korea
now has nuclear weapons; whatever the culpability of the previous
administration, that the NorKs’ nukes went live on Bush’s watch is
a liability that Kerry will surely try to exploit, though Kerry has
his own vulnerability: he is on record in favor of cutting funding
for a missile defense that will be operational very shortly,
possibly before the election. As for Iraq, Dick Morris may well
have been on to something Monday when he said on Hannity and
Colmes that the President “has so emphasized Kerry’s
flip-flopping, so-called weakness, vacillation, all that stuff,
that Kerry has to take strong positions in the debate. And either
way he takes a strong position on Iraq, he loses.” Conservatively,
one must give at least a slight advantage to Bush here.
Likeability. Here’s where we must really puzzle
over the effects of the spin cycle. It’s widely acknowledged that
President Bush has a regular-guy charm and a gift for connecting
with people, whereas Kerry has the personal magnetism of an android
carved out of granite. This perception is so widespread that Kerry
can almost exceed expectations by registering a pulse. It’s
tempting to counterintuitively mark this as an advantage for Kerry
based on his cultivated ability to generate a “he’s not so bad”
reaction. Lest we be accused of being cynical
expectations-masseuses, let’s call this one even.
As the race stands, President Bush has a small but real lead; if
the election were held today, he would almost certainly win. This
gives him a strategic as well as psychological edge. The debates
may not change the dynamics of the race at all, or they may help
Bush, or they may help Kerry. Two of those three possibilities
would be good news for George Bush. John Kerry can afford only one
of them.
