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| 5/25 |
| 2004/9/27 [Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:33780 Activity:high |
9/27 http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/27/debates.tm Debate negotiations conclude for first debate Kerry got: - Three debates not two debates. Dubya got: - Short lecterns separated by 10 feet, can't walk to the other side (Dubya won't look shorter than Kerry; Kerry will look awkwardly tall) \_ Doesn't the taller candidate win like 90% of the time? \_ 100% of the time since TV was created http://csua.org/u/988 (Gore won the popular vote in 2000) - Warning light displayed on TV when speaker goes over time (Dubya won't have problems with short answers; Kerry, problems) - Can't ask direct questions to other candidate (Kerry can't query Dubya on specific points on Iraq) \_ This provision is the stupidest crap ever. It becomes a press conference instead of a debate. Fuck our managed democracy. \_ Hey, Bush can't even manage to get through a Press Conference without a few amazing gaffes that the US domestic press rarely if ever reports. The debates are essentially over before they begin - short of some sort of freak incident (i.e. Bush the Elder puking on the PM of Japan), it will be declared a Bush victory no matter what. This would happen regardless of format. \_ The candidates have pulled this in the last couple of election cycles as well. It's anti-democratic and stupid regardless of who it might help. \_ Yep. This alone should be reason enough to vote against Bush. - Foreign policy in first debate, not domestic policy (this one makes sense) - Room temperature above 70 degrees (Kerry sweats; Kerry wanted below 70) \_ Uh, really? Wow. \_ Temperature in a performance is a funny thing. A warmer room makes for a drowsier audience. Letterman keeps his studio cool (~50) for a reason. \_ Audience? For a televised presidential debate? The TV viewers are the audience. \_ 50F? I have a hard time believing they'd keep it *that* cold. Anyone without a sweater would be shivvering. \_ There was one episode when he raised it from 53 to 57 which was met by cheers from the audience \_ Maybe Kerry will bring his own Air Conditioned suit! "I am no longer John Kerry, I am now 'Mr. Freeze' and the new president of the United States. And you, Mr. Bush, are now officially... On Ice." \_ This won't be funny when Arnold runs for President. \_ Yes it will! |
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| www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/27/debates.tm -> www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/27/debates.tm/ Inside the debate strategies In a close race, Bush and Kerry know little things can matter most By KAREN TUMULTY AND JOHN F DICKERSON | WASHINGTON When a race for President gets this close, no detail is too small to leave to chance. Which is how it happened that a man who once oversaw Middle East peacemaking found himself haggling last week with one of Washington's most storied power players over the matter of ... The proposal: to allow the millions of Americans watching this Thursday's first presidential debate to see the warning signal whenever George Bush or John Kerry has exceeded his allotted time to answer a question. It was a transparent gambit by the President's representative, former Secretary of State James Baker, to raise the famously windy challenger's chances for embarrassment. But Kerry's negotiator, lawyer Vernon Jordan, gave in just as he had to Baker's earlier demand that the lecterns be an unimposing 50 in. Bush will look miniaturized in comparison with the 6-ft. After Jordan and Baker finally came to an agreement at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, putting their heads together over a laptop to approve the official announcement, they headed for the bar. That both men were in a celebratory mood might reflect the fact that each camp came away convinced it had snookered the other. Their 32-page "memorandum of understanding," which may still be revisited because of objections by the commission that sponsors the debates, stipulated everything from equivalent-size dressing rooms to a preapproval process for the pens or pencils Bush and Kerry will use to take notes. The Bush camp, knowing television viewership falls off after the first debate, made sure this week's matchup would focus on foreign policy, which they feel is the President's strong suit. Team Bush has studied old videotapes of Kerry's 1996 Massachusetts Senate re-election campaign debates to the point where advisers like Karl Rove can recite portions from memory. As a result, Bush's negotiators insisted on banning nearly all the stagecraft Kerry had used to devastating effect against his GOP opponent, Governor William Weld, such as roaming from the lectern and asking direct questions. What Kerry's camp got were three debates rather than the two that Bush's campaign initially said it wanted. Getting three contests "was much more important to us than any detail of the format," says Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill. A challenger always wants as many chances to stand on the same stage as the sitting President and take some shots, and Kerry thinks the debates are a place where he can shine. For months, the candidates have fired off stump-speech gibes, ridiculed each other through surrogates and watched independent political groups hijack the race with attacks the campaigns themselves wouldn't make. But all that was shadowboxing compared with what will happen over 90 min. According to the plan, a second debate next week, in St. Louis, Mo, will feature questions from an audience of voters with loose allegiances to the candidates. The stakes could hardly be higher, with the debates starting at a moment when the race has once again tightened. A TIME poll conducted last week shows President Bush's advantage shrinking to 6 points from the 11-point lead he enjoyed a week after the Republican Convention. What's more, with better than 1 in 3 voters saying they plan to watch all the debates and an additional 49% saying they will watch at least some, the matches may be the test of whether Bush and Kerry will overcome, or confirm, the doubts each has tried to sow about the other in the minds of voters. According to the poll, of the 19% of voters who claim they are undecided or could still change their minds, 69% say the debates may be what clinches it for them. Even as Bush's team was congratulating itself for rearranging the debate order to put foreign policy first, there were forces at work that might undercut that advantage. Kerry finally seems to be finding his voice on the Iraq war, just as the news from that country is being dominated anew by beheadings and car bombings. In TIME's poll, taken a week after Kerry launched his broadside that Bush was "living in a fantasy world of spin" about the real outlook in Iraq, only 37% of voters say Bush has been truthful in describing the situation there, whereas 55% say the situation is worse than the President says. And 51% echo Kerry's contention that the US action in Iraq has made the world more dangerous, up from 46% in early September. For Kerry, the contests are a badly needed opportunity to reintroduce himself to the electorate. About 1 in 5 voters, according to the TIME poll, still don't know enough about him to have an opinion. That segment of the population has actually grown in recent weeks. One perception that has taken root is that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Only 37% of voters say they believe he sticks to his positions; So it could be all but fatal for Kerry to do or say anything in the debates that might reinforce that image. With so much on the line, Bush started prepping this summer and has had occasional full-length dress rehearsals, but the pace picked up last weekend at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg, who played Al Gore in the 2000 drill, stood in for Kerry, and admaker Mark McKinnon assumed the role of the first debate moderator. It all took place in a one-story building known as the Conference Center, where Bush practiced behind a lectern and aides flashed cue cards that told him how much time he had left, just as officials will at the debate. Sessions were scheduled for 9 pm ET so that the early-to-bed Bush could set his body clock to the precise time of the real thing. Aides have given Bush audiocassettes of Kerry's favorite attack lines, which the President listens to as he flies between campaign events on Air Force One and sometimes as he works out. The political team started preparing for this phase of the campaign more than six months ago, during the Democratic primaries. Some of the talking points, e-mails and press releases they generated were issued then, but a lot of the other material disappeared into a computer network accessible only to officials of the campaign. The network was set up to test the rapid-response reflexes of the Bush team and perfect a system of information sharing that the President's spinners will use this week to highlight Kerry's misses and Bush's hits on the debate stage. All those Democratic-primary debates also kept Kerry in practice, his advisers say. His campaign has guarded his debate preparation as closely as they did his selection of a running mate, making sure that only a handful of advisers are in the room when he drills. admaker and speechwriter Bob Shrum, who helped get Kerry in fighting shape back in 1996; Kerry's longtime adviser Jonathan Winer is charged with making sure the candidate is prepared on every issue. Bush is being played by Greg Craig, who was White House special counsel during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. Wife Teresa is often on hand for the prep sessions, but one source said she has little to say, at least in front of the others. He has encamped in Wisconsin, 40 miles outside Madison, at the House on the Rock Resort, where a two-room suite goes for $199 a night. The facility provides ample biking and hiking trails for a candidate who aides say doesn't like to do more than about two hours of debate practice in a row without taking a break. It doesn't hurt that House on the Rock is smack in the middle of a crucial swing state where recent polls have shown Kerry struggling. Past performances suggest that both sides have plenty to fear in their three engagements. "You will never see a more personable John Kerry than in these debates," predicts Weld, who in June met at Bush headquarters with imagemaker Karen Hughes and White House communications director Dan Bartlett and since then has been offering tips to campaign manager Ken Mehlman. His warning to them, Weld told TIME, is this: "Watch out for this guy. Don't expect him to make a mistake or to come across as aloof. Kerry, after all, founded a debating soci... |
| csua.org/u/988 -> www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-06-23-bush-kerry-cover_x.htm Of six measurements for predicting the outcome of presidential contests, all with excellent track records, each signals a clear outcome in November. The problem is, they're pointing in different directions. A formula by a Yale University economist that has correctly predicted five of the last six elections shows President Bush winning in the biggest landslide since Ronald Reagan's 49-state victory in 1984. not since Harry Truman in 1948 has a president in that territory won the election. The rally-round-the-flag reaction to terrorism, the politics of key states and other factors carry such conflicting clues that this election is impossible to predict. Analysts say the crystal balls have been clouded by an evenly divided and polarized electorate, the impact of the war in Iraq and the public's pessimism despite an improving economy. The result: Both campaigns have ammunition to argue that victory is a sure thing and their opponent is doomed. "Something new may be going on that means the (old) equation is not that good any more," says Ray Fair, the Yale economist who has been tinkering for a quarter-century on a formula to predict the vote. Former Republican national chairman Frank Fahrenkopf Jr. calls it "the most confusing election of any I've ever seen." The smart answer is yes -- Advantage: Bush Presidential elections, especially when an incumbent president is running, typically turn on pocketbook issues. Yale University economist Ray Fair has developed a model that uses economic statistics alone to predict presidential election outcomes. Year Incumbent party candidate Predicted vote share{+1} Actual vote share{+1} Did the predicted winner actually win? Economist Ray Fair's formula is based on that assumption. It uses the nation's growth rate, inflation rate and an economic "good news" calculation to predict what share of the two-party vote the incumbent party will receive. The formula now forecasts Bush will get more than 58% of the vote this fall, close to the 59% tidal wave that re-elected Ronald Reagan. The Bush campaign sent reporters a memo Tuesday touting the economy as "remarkably similar" to the one Bill Clinton enjoyed in 1996. But Fair, who also has devised formulas to predict marathon times and the quality of French wine, says it could be wrong this time. Another is a disconnect between economists' optimism -- over the past three quarters, growth has been the strongest in 20 years -- and voters' views that they're still struggling. Fair believes that a similar disconnect was the culprit the last time his formula erred. In 1992, it predicted that Bush's father would win re-election. Until the final weeks, a president's approval rating has been a more reliable indicator of whether he's going to win than the polling question that gets all the attention: the head-to-head matchup against his opponent. In the last half-century, incumbent presidents with job-approval ratings of 50% or higher in May of the election year ended up winning. Year President seeking re-election Job approval in May of election year Approval rating over 50%? For an incumbent, 50% is considered the dividing line between safe and vulnerable. If his job approval falls below that level, voters are ready to fire him. The issue then becomes whether they are ready to hire the challenger. "When an incumbent is running for re-election, he's basically asking the voters to approve of the way he's done the first term so he gets a second," says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. The board continues to renew his contract as long as he's doing well." The five incumbents since Dwight Eisenhower who won in November had approval ratings that were consistently above 50% by February of the election year. The three who lost had ratings consistently below 50% by March. That's where Bush finds himself these days -- a point the Kerry campaign underscored in a memo with charts sent to reporters late Tuesday that declared Bush's job approval "lower than 'every' incumbent who won re-election." "He doesn't fit as negative a trajectory as his father or Carter, but neither is he as positive as any of the winners," Newport says of Bush. Bush's approval rating in the latest USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll: 47%. Despite concerns about the strength of FDR's health and the length of his tenure, voters agreed. Five presidents have run for re-election during major wars; Note that two presidents chose not to run during wartime: Harry Truman in 1952 (Korean War) and Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (Vietnam). All five presidents who have run for re-election during major wars have won -- from James Madison during the War of 1812 to Richard Nixon during Vietnam. "Part of it is a desire not to reward the enemy by tossing out his enemy, which is the president." He says controversy over Iraq may be "attenuating" this advantage for Bush, though. Still, security issues have made some voters reluctant to replace the commander in chief. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says that's particularly true among middle-class suburban women who are prime targets for Kerry. and it's not going well -- Advantage: Kerry From Abraham Lincoln to George W Bush, no Republican has been elected president without carrying Ohio. In 2000, Bush won the state, but by just 35 percentage points and only after Al Gore abandoned campaign efforts there. This time, Kerry leads in three of the last four statewide polls, though in two of them the margin was too small to be statistically significant. The latest survey, taken by the Los Angeles Times June 5-8, put Kerry at 46%, Bush at 45%. The president is vulnerable because Ohio, like other states in the Rust Belt, has been battered by the loss of manufacturing jobs during his term. In Stark County -- a bellwether county in this bellwether state -- Timken last month announced it was closing three steel plants; vacuum manufacturer Hoover this month decided to close its headquarters and move it to Iowa. Unemployment already was at 99% in the Stark County city of Canton, well above the national average. Janet Creighton has been the mayor of Canton for 19 years and is Bush's campaign chairwoman for Stark and seven surrounding counties. "I would say we're holding our own" on the economy, she says. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas won their elections. In contrast, South Dakotan George McGovern and Minnesotan Walter Mondale managed to carry just two states between them. And the last time a Democrat from Massachusetts was nominated, in 1988, Michael Dukakis was trounced by the elder Bush. Analysts say Southern Democrats do well not just because they carry some Southern states -- although each of those three presidents managed to do that -- but also because of the kind of politics they learned back home. "To win elections in the South, Southern Democrats have had to learn how to build coalitions, how to reach outside the party's base -- to mix conservative, moderate and liberal themes," says Ferrel Guillory, director of the Southern Politics, Media and Public Life program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "Having to negotiate the turbulent political waters in the South serves them well in facing a national electorate." Southern Democrats tend to be centrists, particularly on such cultural issues as gun control, the death penalty and gay rights. In contrast, some of Kerry's votes that were in tune with his constituents in Massachusetts could create heartburn for him now. In 1996, for instance, he was one of just 14 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Since the advent of the television age, the taller candidate for president has almost always won the election. And it has been more than a century since a shorter-than-average man was elected to the White House. That was William McKinley, who at 5-foot-7 was ridiculed as a "little boy" when he ran in 1896. The reasons are more than coincidental, according to Timothy Judge, a management professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In a study published in the spring issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, he fo... |