TO PRESENT THE DETAILS DON'T YOU NEED A PROGRAM?:

Gut-Check Time for Kerry: Pummeled for weeks by Bush & Co., he's now being pelted with lots of advice -- mostly bad. But the woozy Dem can still prevail (Lee Walczak, 9/05/04, Business Week))

The Bush high command has found that, more so than in previous elections, voters are intensely information-hungry in 2004. Americans want specifics about issues such as soaring health-care costs, job security, the anti-terror war, and that much-advertised light at the end of the oil pipeline in Iraq.

Bush claims Iraq is on the road to democracy and has promised sweeping Ownership Society programs that are both controversial and beyond his means to deliver. So he's content to campaign wrapped in a flag of patriotism, while leaving it to surrogates to systematically destroy Kerry's character.

On the other side, Kerry is running on the promise of a hugely expensive and highly interventionist Middle-Class Safety Net that he claims would create jobs that cannot be generated by government fiat or via tax credits. He has left himself open to character assault by virtue of a long Senate career in which he often sidled up to both sides of an issue. [...]

So what will it take for Kerry to become the Comeback Lieutenant? A quasi-policy wonk with a good grasp of programmatic details, he needs to edge Bush on points in the debates by relentlessly drawing the contrast between "failed" GOP policies and his supposedly better Democratic alternatives. Then he must charge into the battleground states with a head of steam in October and count on the Democrats' potentially superior turnout machine to win the ground war -- and the election -- for him by the slenderest of margins. [...]

Even as the former President was being prepped for his heart-bypass surgery, which was performed on Sept. 6, word came that he had been spending hours on the phone with Kerry, offering detailed advice for rescuing the campaign. (I can just see the scene in the operating room, where Bubba tells the anesthesiologist to hold off for a few minutes, he's gotta get Kerry on the cell phone for one more bit of guidance about campaigning in Youngstown).

Clinton is an acknowledged political master. So what could possibly be wrong about any of this? Well, for one thing, the minute ol' Bill gets off the phone with Kerry, he tells 14 of his friends, who tell 22 reporters, who promptly write that Clinton is calling the shots from afar. We had this dynamic during the Al Gore's late Blue Period, and it wasn't favorable to the former Veep. It similarly diminishes Kerry.

A ponderous JFK-wannabe, Kerry is no Bill Clinton and never will be. What is instinctively simple for Clinton is immeasurably hard for Kerry -- one-on-one empathy. In the long run, Kerry needs to win or lose on his own terms, without backstage coaching from Cousin Bill. At a minimum, he needs to put the lid on the whispers from the Clinton camp. If these guys were as brilliant as they think they are, Wesley Clark would be the Democratic nominee. [...]

Sensing that Bush has successfully transformed the debate into a dialogue about the global war on terrorism, Democrats are urging Kerry to get off foreign policy and refocus his campaign on jobs, jobs, jobs. It would be a fatal mistake to take that advice. First off, those jobs are coming back, and unemployment is falling.

Kerry's best issue is the more complex set of social pressures known as the middle-class squeeze, but it can't be his only issue. People want to know what the Democrat would do to extricate the U.S. from the seething mess in Iraq and how he would back up his claims to be more aggressive in the pursuit of al Qaeda.

If Kerry can't nail Bush for cooking up the war to oust Saddam Hussein on essentially false pretenses and then making an unholy hash of the occupation, he has no prayer on Nov. 2, because Iraq is a topic of conversation from one end of this country to the other.

So voters are starved for concrete information but John Kerry's best strategy is to foist off some fuzzy mumbo-jumbo about how he'd have handled Iraq differently, though he voted for the war, and about relieving the imaginary middle class squeeze? He's toast.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 10, 2004 6:56 AM