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seemed more self confident and assured than the president. Overall, in advance of the debate, people had expected Bush to win easily and Kerry to do poorly. Exactly the opposite happened, and many people on both sides of this contest were slack-jawed as a result. Should Bush lose the election, Sept. 30 will be remembered as a key turning point: a night when Bush could have put Kerry away and instead produced perhaps the worst debate performance in his career.
It wasn’t so much a failure of Bush’s travel-tested arguments, but rather his un-presidential slouching onto the podium, and his eye-glazing, overrepetition of the same hackneyed phrases. Also, let’s not forget those odd facial expressions during the cutaways. Now we see why the Bush team wanted them banned.
Finally, the expectations game, which had always favored Bush since his was consistently “misunderestimated,” backfired. For once, Bush was expected to win the debate by pundits and voters alike, and his inability to do so was magnified by that favorable expectation.
The Newsweek poll is just one survey, of course, and other polls may show somewhat different debate results—and almost certainly, there will be wildly disparate Bush v. Kerry horserace findings. But there is no question that Bush is now behind the debate eight-ball. The President simply must win, at least on points, one of the remaining debates, or he will lose so much momentum to Kerry that the challenger’s current lead may harden.
Bush has the unenviable task of doing reasonably well in two remaining debates where the odds are stacked against him. The town hall meeting on
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