“They can run but they can't hide,” the great heavyweight champ Joe Louis used to say of his hapless opponents, but up until last night, George W. Bush was doing a pretty fair job of both running and hiding. Indeed, to a considerable degree, he was running ahead because Karl Rove had hidden him from any possible confrontation with critics -- and with the truth.
In accordance with the mandates of the Bush campaign, none but the faithful attend his rallies. In accordance with the mandates of the Kerry campaign, no one at the Democratic Convention had said anything seriously untoward about the president's performance in office. And while our economy has been rotting from within and Iraq has descended into an almost routine savagery, the media have blown their precious few opportunities to question the president about the disaster that is his term in office. So the president was tough because he and his minions said he was; we were succeeding on all fronts because he and his minions said we were; and he was running ahead because he and his minions had turned the focus of national discussion -- with the media acquiescing all the way -- to John Kerry's maddening complexities rather that George W. Bush's fatal simplicities.
Until last night. Not a moment too soon, Kerry shucked the Senate-speak, abandoned the adverbs, stopped depending on dependent clauses, and, in plain and forceful English, stated how Bush had put the nation at risk and had no plan whatever to extricate us from Iraq. Nobody had talked this way to Bush -- in public, anyway -- since Bush became president. And Bush did not handle it very well at all.
He blinked. He squirmed. He scowled. He repeated his lines ad nauseam. He embarked on answers in which it was clear his chief hope was that the two-minute limit would soon descend and spare him from the necessity of yet another repetition of his charge that Kerry has mixed messages -- or, as he called them during one particularly vexed reiteration, “mexed missages.” He again and again said a president had to speak clearly, but the clear speaking last night came from Kerry. (Indeed, no one has spoken so repetitively about the need for clear speaking since Sidney Greenstreet's endlessly duplicitous fat man in The Maltese Falcon.)
Kerry was specific and concrete, with facts and figures (but not too many figures, thankfully) on things like the administration's neglect of Russia's loose nukes, its failure to provide port security, and the number of nations with greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He made a prosecutor's case against Bush's decision to go to war with no plan for what to do when Hussein fell, and his failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Kerry was particularly good outlining his program to enhance homeland security. If the rap on Kerry was that he wasn't specific and that he was weak on defense, his answers went some distance toward dispelling those impressions. (For one disastrous sentence, Bush said that Kerry's homeland-security program showed that the Massachusetts senator was a big spender, but then realized that you attack Democrats for spending too much on welfare and social programs, not for funding cops and bomb detectors.)
Still, Bush did find the one apparent contradiction in Kerry's argument: If the war was as much of a disaster as Kerry said it was, how on earth could Kerry persuade our historic allies to join us in the Beheading Fields? It's a good question; it's not at all clear why the international conference Kerry wants to convene would yield any “old European” boots on the Iraqi ground. At other moments, Kerry laid himself open to the attack that he might heed international bodies rather than the American people, but Bush seemed so rattled from Kerry's attacks on him that he didn't press the case against Kerry's strategic cosmopolitanism nearly as forcefully as he could have.
Overall, Kerry accomplished a neat trick in his discussion of Iraq: He managed to seem resolute while at the same time intimating that his conduct of the war would at least accommodate the possibility of withdrawal. Bush, we should remember, is really stuck defending the proposition that we're in Iraq until it settles down. And he had no good responses to Kerry's allegations that the quagmire is the president's own damn fault.
At times, the debate pirouetted on some bizarre distinctions, such as Bush's claim that we need China to bolster our leverage with North Korea. (In his China policy, if nothing else, Bush is his father's son.) But the primary impression left by last night is that John Kerry is a straight-talking guy concerned with national security -- a straight-talking guy who has a greater command of both facts and the strategic implications of policy choices than the incumbent president can muster.
This was the Kerry who beat Bill Weld. I have no idea where he was before last night, but it was good of him to show up. He's back in the game now, with two more encounters with Bush still to come.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
