Finally. Finally. Finally.
Seven months after he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and less than three weeks before the election, John Kerry on Wednesday night finally turned his attention to what must be his largest constituency: women.
Time and again during his final debate with George W. Bush, Kerry slipped in references to women and the issues they care about: health care, jobs, equal pay, poverty, the environment, after-school programs. Following a campaign in which he frittered away his party's traditional edge among women and a second debate in which he offered up a virtually incomprehensible defense of abortion rights, Kerry at last talked directly to and about women in a way that is likely to win him some needed support.
“I believe that choice -- a woman's choice -- is between a woman, God, and her doctor,” Kerry declared Wednesday. “And that's why I support that. Now I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade. The president has never said whether or not he would do that. … I will not.”
Kerry was direct and to the point. He said he would raise the minimum wage and help 9.2 million women earn $3,800 more a year. He defended the need for affirmative action and pointed out that it helps not only racial and ethnic minorities but women, too.
Bill Clinton he was not. Kerry is a candidate who simply is not capable of striking emotional chords. And he had plenty of chances. While watching Kerry during each debate, I could envision how the master might have evoked tears by directly addressing a woman who had been laid off, or a single mother struggling to care for her family (after her husband was killed in Iraq?), or a sick child praying that stem-cell research might save her life.
Even without emotion, Kerry might have noted that creating personal savings accounts for Social Security would jeopardize women more than men. And he certainly should have followed up his strong defense of abortion rights with a call for better sex education and access to birth control. He could also have pointed out that the so-called partial-birth-abortion ban not only fails to protect women's health but can be interpreted to restrict other forms of the procedure as well.
Still, Kerry likely went a long way toward improving his standing among women. He had to: If recent history is any indication, he will lose the election among men, potentially by a fairly significant margin. In 1996, Clinton lost narrowly among men, but he beat Bob Dole handily when women voted for him by a margin of 16 percentage points. Four years later, Bush had an 11-point advantage among men -- precisely the same advantage Al Gore enjoyed among women voters. Because more women than men cast ballots, Gore won the popular vote.
Kerry also had some help Wednesday night from Bush, who continued to reach out to his conservative base while hedging on whether he would try to overturn abortion rights.
But Kerry can't count on the president to give him the women's vote. Unlike earlier GOP candidates, Bush understands the importance of women voters and the need to make an extra effort to reach out to them. Even if he doesn't capture a majority of their votes, the president could win re-election simply by chipping away at Kerry's lead among women.
By showcasing his Vietnam-era machismo and failing to make clear his positions on Iraq and terrorism early in the campaign, Kerry managed to alienate a large percentage of women. Many tuned out as Kerry put forth plans on the economy, health care, and education -- issues they care passionately about.
Now he has another chance.
-- Jodi Enda
Helping citizen-soldiers
Wednesday night, Bob Schieffer asked what kind of relief each candidate could offer to the National Guard, “these brave Americans and their families.” He's not the only one who's asking the question: The National Guard is being used in a manner unseen since the Korean War. During Vietnam, for example, National Guard members earned the moniker “weekend warriors,” and it was considered a way to avoid combat. (Indeed, only 4 percent of troops in Vietnam were in the National Guard.) In Iraq, however, those in the National Guard and reserve component constitute more than 40 percent of all troops there. They see combat, are maimed, and die.
President Bush, however, has offered these citizen soldiers and their families little relief. In fielding the question, Kerry tried to make that clear. He cited the military's “stop-loss” policy, which prevents soldiers from leaving when their time is up, and he was correct to assert that the National Guard should be used for its intended purpose: to be deployed domestically for homeland security. Furthermore, Kerry's plans to increase Special Forces and add two new active-duty divisions to the armed forces would surely relieve some of the unprecedented strain felt by the reserve component.
For all he said, however, Kerry missed an opportunity to go in for the kill. According to Peter Feaver, a military sociologist at Duke University, the military tends to vote Republican by a margin of nearly 2 to 1. There are a variety of reasons for this, but Kerry could have started to plant seeds of doubt here by pointing out Bush's demonstrable failures to address key quality-of-life issues faced by citizen-soldiers and their families.
He also could have tried to personally connect with National Guard members and their families by “feeling their pain” -- all the while boosting his standing among them by highlighting his own record on the issue. For example, he could have pointed out that he co-sponsored a bill in the Senate that would have given National Guard members and their families access to the same low-cost health-care plan offered to active-duty military -- a bill, incidentally, that the Bush administration opposed.
-- Mark Goldberg
Finding God
Throughout this campaign, the candidates' religious faith has been used as a proxy for presidential character. For George W. Bush, of course, this is almost always a winning issue: Because his spiritual conversion happened fairly late, Bush's years as a hard-drinking carouser are off-limits to his critics. (Jesus changed him, end of story.) And Bush just loves talking about religion; indeed, he seemed to glow last night as he explained the importance of prayer in his life. Those moments were easily his finest of the debate.
Senator John Kerry, on the other hand, has been continually upbraided by critics (including me) for not doing more to make his personal religious faith more public and more accessible to voters who often swing based on issues of morality. And unlike Bush, who has no real church home or strong denominational affiliation, Kerry has had to contend with rogue factions of the Catholic hierarchy over his stances on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. (Alas, public feuds with priests don't make for great campaign coverage.)
But a funny thing happened in Tempe last night. John Kerry came away as a thoughtful man of God, chock full of presidential character and graciousness -- not President Bush.
Though Bush talks easily about religion, it is wholly unapparent that Christian principles actually influence any of his policies. The President's preference for politics over piety was thrown into sharp relief last night with this question from Bob Schieffer:
SCHIEFFER: Mr. President, I want to go back to something Senator Kerry said earlier tonight and ask a follow-up of my own. He said -- and this will be a new question to you -- he said that you had never said whether you would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I'd ask you directly, would you like to?You can safely bet that Bush's Christian base was hoping for a different answer to that question. After all, conservative evangelicals and Catholics are unequivocal in their desire to overturn Roe v. Wade -- for them, there is no other conscionable alternative. But Bush's non-answer to a simple question underscores the degree to which Republicans have used the abortion issue as a political football. The simple fact is that political conservatives can't afford to see Roe overturned -- the moral outrage it gins up among religious folks is the glue that holds the GOP together.BUSH: What he's asking me is, will I have a litmus test for my judges? And the answer is, no, I will not have a litmus test. I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution, but I'll have no litmus test.
John Kerry, on the other hand, demonstrated last night that a genuine religious faith informs his thinking, not just his choice of political rhetoric. When Bob Schieffer asked him to address the Bishops' criticisms, Kerry responded appropriately:
My faith affects everything that I do, in truth. There's a great passage of the Bible that says, "What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead."Perhaps most persuasive was Kerry's genuine graciousness toward his opponent. Bush obviously can't handle criticism -- he takes everything personally. But not Kerry. He paid Bush a deserved compliment about his leadership in the aftermath of September 11th, and made flattering remarks about Laura Bush and the twins. Kerry seemed glad to be there, and never met Bush's criticism with anything more than a slight shake of his head. No twitches, no yelling, no smirks.And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people.
A very presidential performance.
-- Ayelish McGarvey
Salvaging the budget
Wednesday night's fiscal-policy debate was, in its way, reminiscent of the more familiar standoff over Iraq. Even the most hardened Bush hater will have to admit that Kerry isn't putting forward anything one would call a brilliant solution to the problem. Bush, by contrast, won't even really admit that there's a problem. Or, at least, he's unwilling to admit that his policies -- a combination of huge tax cuts with huge spending increases -- have anything to do with the fact that all of a sudden the government is spending way more money than it's taking in. If Kerry's solution to the spiraling increases in health-care costs that drive most of the long-term problem is inadequate (rolling back some of the administration's egregious giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry), Bush's proposal (malpractice reform) is laughable. The candidates got bogged down in a debate about which percentage of medical costs are accounted for by litigation, but this is irrelevant: Legal reform might reduce costs by 1 percent or by 10 percent or by anything in between, but it would be a onetime reduction that has nothing to do with fact that the cost of health care grows faster than the economy as a whole.
On Social Security, which compared with media mythology is only a modest slice of the problem, Kerry proposes, as Bush claimed, to basically do nothing. Bush, by contrast, proposes, as Kerry claimed, to make things much, much worse by embarking on a vaguely defined privatization drive that would cost somewhere between $1 trillion and $2 trillion to finance. This on top of an ordinary agenda that proposes to keep cutting taxes (though not by as much as in the first term) and to keep increasing spending (though not by as much as in the first term), because tax cuts and spending increases, as the president explained earlier, have nothing to do with the origins of the deficit -- which, apparently, can be blamed on Osama bin Laden. Or the dot-com bubble. Or mysterious big spending forces in Congress, which happens to be controlled by the president's party.
Whoever wins is going to face a pretty sticky situation a few years down the road, and neither man has a clear plan to resolve it. But while Kerry has a record of working seriously for fiscal discipline, Bush's record on the subject consists entirely of creating the sticky situation and seeking to avoid blame for it. One of them will need to change his mind in order to grapple with the situation, but the legendarily steadfast president has had plenty of opportunity to rethink his policies and has consistently chosen to push them harder and harder come what may.
-- Matthew Yglesias
Looking for jobs
Kerry hit hard on the Bush jobs record Wednesday night, noting that this president will be the first in more than 70 years to preside over an economy that lost jobs. Aware that Bush always blames this unique achievement on the recession and the war, Kerry pointed out that such events occurred on 11 other president's watches, yet they presided over an economy with job gains.
As he has stressed throughout the debates, Kerry pointed to the unbalanced nature of the Bush tax cuts (“$89 billion to the top 1 percent”). Throughout the night, he ticked off various aspects of his plans to strengthen job growth, including better enforcement of trade policy, “taking on China” for currency manipulations that hurt our manufacturers' competitiveness, and assorted tax incentives. (Of all of these, fixing the Chinese exchange-rate problem would probably be the most effective for job growth.) Kerry also offered some useful ideas for improving job quality, including raising the minimum wage and making it less expensive for employers to provide health-care coverage.
But what was most revealing was the president's response on this issue. Regarding the failure of job growth during his presidency, he went to precisely the same place Dick Cheney had during his debate when the question came up: elementary-school education.
I don't care how much you love or value primary education; you simply cannot connect the dots between No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the losses of jobs in today's economy. Yet Wednesday night the president said that the act “is really a jobs act when you think about it.”
When I think about it, this answer just seems amazingly off-point. It's easy to tout the benefits of better elementary education (if that's what NCLB gets us), but elementary schools had nothing to do with the jobless recovery. That was caused, in part, by the failure of the Bush economics team to seriously try to stimulate job growth by applying targeted fiscal policy. Instead, the administration used the recession and the jobless recovery as excuses to implement a regressive tax agenda that was recognized at the time to be ineffective regarding job growth.
Slightly more on-point was Bush's reference to community colleges as a resource for worker retraining. But the fact is that what ails us in terms of job creation right now has very little to do with skills. In fact, our college-educated workforce is significantly underemployed, with employment rates near 20-year lows.
Perhaps you never lose points in a debate by claiming that you'll improve educational outcomes. But it's hard to imagine that anyone who is feeling economically insecure took much solace from the president's jobs program, at least as he articulated it Wednesday night.
There is some argument over just how many net jobs have been lost during this Bush presidency. Kerry cites the number 1.6 million, which is the correct value for the private sector. But because the public sector has added jobs since 2001, the overall losses total 585,000. And because the private sector is arguably the target of policies aimed at generating employment growth, Kerry is correct to stress the larger number.
-- Jared Bernstein
