Which is not to say Kerry had no strong moments. The high point of his performance came in response to Bush's contention that his decision to invade Iraq was driven by the fact that "the enemy attacked us."
Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al-Qaeda attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains -- with the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist.With that, Kerry reconfigured the debate. Now he is the tough-minded one, focused like a laser-beam on killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his cadres while Bush chases phantom threats in the Iraqi desert.
But it's not enough. Kerry can't count on everything working in his favor in the upcoming debate. Bush certainly might repeat the bizarre body language that tilted the playing field, for example, but odds are he'll improve. And what's more, the best thing -- bar none -- Kerry did was simply show up, providing a contrast between his real self and the bizarre straw man the president runs against when out on the stump. To make progress, Kerry needs to get better at projecting a strong image of himself and seizing opportunities to slash at the incumbent.
Most people would rather vote for the guy who goes too far in responding to threats to American security than the candidate who does too little. And liberal rhetoric on Iraq sometimes seems to slip toward the idea that the problem was somehow that it was unfair to Saddam Hussein, casting a brutal dictator as the victim of Bush's aggression. More often, the war is portrayed as an affront to the United Nations, international law, European public opinion, or some other abstract entity.
During the debate, Kerry used the slogans of alliances and multilateralism, emphasizing them rather than al-Qaeda in his de facto opening statement. He then accused Bush of lying about his intention to build a coalition and exhaust the UN process before going to war. Thus, rather than thrusting the stake into the president's heart Kerry managed, if anything, to make himself look bad -- weirdly obsessed with the United Nations, which is, at best, tangentially relevant to the question of the president's honesty, and oddly naïve about the intentions of a president who no serious person believed was going to be restrained from regime change by the Security Council.
Kerry should have simply said Bush took his eye off the ball and let Osama get away. Fortunately for the Democrats, Bush later made his "the enemy attacked us" mistake, thus giving Kerry the opportunity to press his better argument. But counting on his opponent to slip up is a dangerous game to play. And Kerry didn't even take advantage of every opportunity Bush handed him. The president twice referred to 100,000 trained Iraqi troops, crying out for a rebuttal noting that only 22,700 of those troops are minimally prepared to do their jobs, and fewer still are fully trained. "The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice," according to the president, who's apparently unaware that Khan was pardoned and precisely zero members of his network are in prison.
Barely a word was said about the president's mishandling of Iraq after the end of major combat operations, despite the fact that this is Kerry's best opportunity to win over swing voters who backed the war but are uncomfortable with the course it's taken. The CIA's recent pessimistic report about Iraq received only a single mention -- one that likely wasn't understood by people who don't follow the issue closely.
Kerry also got lucky. The president overlooked his only major misstep, a reference to the need for a "global test" before taking preemptive action. What Kerry meant -- "global" meaning something like "holistic," rather than "international" -- was perfectly sensible, but it's an open invitation for Republican distortions and Bush is already deploying the line on the stump.
Optimism is the new pessimism in liberal circles these days, but the reality is still that the race is about even. And despite his dismal performance on Thursday, the president is not a debater to be misunderestimated -- he's only lost once in his political career. If Kerry really was the best debater since Cicero he'd have nothing to worry out, but he isn't. Bush turned in an uncharacteristically poor performance, and he probably won't do it again. Kerry needs to bring his A-game.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
