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Post-convention assessments dominate the news magazines this week, and the debate is largely about whether voters vote for form over substance or vice versa, and what that means for whom.
Time‘s Joe Klein writes that “campaign politics isn’t about details. It is about impressions. …” Observes Klein: “The message of the [convention] week was: You know where Bush stands. You can’t be sure about Kerry. … Bush conveys an impression of strength — and the Republicans tried very hard last week to convey the impression that Kerry is Fifi the French poodle.”
Kerry, in his failure to date to mount a heart-felt response, is losing the battle of perceptions, says Klein (along with quite a few other observers):
I have never seen a presidential campaign in which the strategies of the two parties are so different, and so dreadful. The Republican strategy is to demolish Kerry, posit the president as a man of simple strength and do everything possible to avoid a discussion of Iraq or the effects of globalization on the American economy. The Kerry strategy is to present an “optimistic” candidate with a “positive plan for the future.” The Kerry consultants, who actually believe this claptrap and have zero sense of political theater, sound like a bunch of low-budget Ginzu-knife salesmen when they represent their candidate on television.
The New Yorker‘s unfailingly enlightening Philip Gourevitch shadowed Bush on a campaign swing to New Mexico, a state the GOP barely lost to Al Gore in 2000. Gourevitch also had impressions on his mind, and he devotes much of his report to analyzing the president’s successful choice of words and body language:
Bush campaigns with the eager self-delight of a natural ham. There’s an appealing physicality about him. When he says he wants your vote, he does not just mouth the words but follows them through with his entire body, rising to his toes, tilting toward you yearningly. When he works his way along the edge of the stage, waving, shaking hands, he has the concentration of an athlete in the thrall of his game. …
He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is — if not especially literate — acutely verbal. His words, in transcription, might seem mindless, incoherent, or unintentionally hilarious (“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family”; “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we”), but it is pretty plain what he means.
After watching the president in action, Gourevitch concludes: “Neither [candidate] can expect to win on his merits. Rather, for each the best hope is to make the other one lose — and, for the moment at least, Bush had succeeded in turning [what was] a referendum on himself into a referendum on the other guy.”
Not surprisingly, David Gelernter at The Weekly Standard sees Bush not as a candidate of impressions, but as a candidate of substance, which, in the end creates the right impression:
Bush’s greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event — the end of the Cold War [and collapse of the Soviet Union]. … In moral terms: If you are the biggest boy on the playground and there are no adults around, the playground is your responsibility. It is your duty to prevent outrages — because your moral code demands that outrages be prevented and (for now) you are the only one who can prevent them.
Gelernter blames the “liberal elite” for fueling anti-Bush sentiments because they want “everything to stay just the same.” He also charges that this largely-undefined group is racist, in that it habors a hatred for “white, religious American conservatives.”
Bush has a simple message for the reactionary left: The times change and we change with them. He is a progressive conservative — and a progressive president in the best sense. And he has established his greatness in record time.
With the clock ticking toward November 2, and Kerry sliding into an 11-point deficit in a new (and disputed) Newsweek poll, “Kerry seized control of his campaign message as Republicans partied in New York, ” write Newsweek’s Richard Wolfe and Susannah Meadows. While Kerry has a history of come-from-behind finishes, Wolfe and Meadows wonder if is there enough time to salvage the candidacy. Responds a senior aide: “I hope we don’t get to the near-death experience again. I think he’s a lot better when he’s behind, but I hope we don’t get too far behind.”
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.