Rove's plan undone

Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice said after the second debate:

"The most likely short term result for this debate will be a tie. But the most likely LONG TERM impact will be that voters have again gotten to spend time with Kerry without him being defined by either the GOP or the news media. Do the few undecided voters like what they see?"

The American people got to see both George W. Bush and John F. Kerry without media or party spin in the debates. In today's Washington Post Dana Milbank picks up this theme and discusses how the debates undid months of work by Karl Rove to paint Kerry as indecisive.

After the three debates in the past fortnight salvaged John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy, it has become clear to tacticians in both parties that the Democrat, to borrow President Bush's famous phrase from the 2000 campaign, was misunderestimated.

The Bush team's ferocious advertising push in the spring and summer and the Republican convention were successful at defining Kerry as a vacillating opportunist who has no coherent policy on Iraq and is spineless on terrorism. But the strategy may have worked too well, pollsters and operatives say: By turning Kerry into a cartoon, the Bush campaign created such low expectations for the senator that he easily exceeded them in the debates.

Rove has always tried to create low expectations for Bush and the inarticulate Bush rarely disappointed. The Rove campaign to picture Kerry as an indecisive "flip flopper" backfired when a confident and steady Kerry showed up. I'm not sure that Kerry actually has plans that will fix the mess Bush has created but in the debates he seemed to come across as someone who might. That combined with nothing new from Bush, just the same old sound bites made Kerry look more presidential than Bush. As Milbank says:

"It was a case of taking a caricature to such an extent and not realizing the caricature could be disassembled by the candidate himself in the debates," he said. "You would have expected a hybrid of Jane Fonda and Ted Kennedy would walk on stage. . . . People expected to see a left-wing, beaded radical."

Instead, viewers saw a Kerry who, if not dazzling and likable, was generally coherent and at times even forceful. And voters seemed pleasantly surprised. In the Washington Post tracking poll, the number of respondents viewing Kerry favorably jumped 12 percentage points between early September and this week; voters by 48 percent to 43 percent now view Kerry favorably, putting him in the same area as Bush, who is viewed favorably by 49 percent and unfavorably by 46 percent.

The number of people who think Kerry has taken a "clear stand" on the issues, although still low at 37 percent, is up 10 percentage points in less than three weeks.

The overnight change in perceptions of Kerry has reshaped the presidential race; the two candidates are in a dead heat, according to the poll, erasing a nine-point advantage Bush had in early September and also a perception that the race was all but over for the challenger.

Millions of precious campaign dollars down the drain. But what else could Karl do? Bush obviously couldn't run on his record.