Expectations Management II

A lot of folks are wondering if I'm kidding about this, but I'm deadly serious -- Bush will have the edge in the debates. The one thing that George W. Bush is really good at is talking in a compelling way about national security and the war on terrorism. All the best-known moments of his presidency have been speeches, full of soaring, grand rhetoric about the goodness of America, the vileness of its foes, and the boldness of his vision of a world transformed by liberty and democracy. And the reality is that he's good at it, and his speechwriter is damn good, too. The problem is that in order to put these lovely texts together, the Bush team needs to depart fairly radically from empirical reality. That makes him a bad president and a bad person, but the texts as such are far superior to the more scrupulous ones that Kerry has on offer. But people would rather listen to what Bush has to say than to what Kerry has to say. Insofar as we have a duel between two brands of speechifying, people will choose Bush. Only reality cuts against Bush. But debates are not about reality, they're about Bush's rhetoric versus Kerry's. And Bush will do very well.