It's the IQ, stupid

Kerry outsmarts Bush in crucial first debate.

By Tim Grieve

Oct 1, 2004 | John Kerry didn't destroy George W. Bush in the presidential debate Thursday night. John Kerry didn't turn water into wine, and he might not have turned any red states blue. But for 90 minutes, John Kerry put George W. Bush on the defensive. For 90 minutes, John Kerry looked like he could be president. And for the moment -- for the moment -- a race that once seemed lost suddenly seems alive again.

John Kerry won.

It happened slowly, and sometimes it seemed that it wasn't happening at all. Kerry opened in fits and starts. He answered moderator Jim Lehrer's first question with the sort of strong, clear, declarative sentence that seems to evade him -- Lehrer asked Kerry if he thought he could make America safer, and Kerry said, "Yes, I do" -- but then interrupted himself to offer expressions of gratitude to the hosts of the debate. Later, Kerry waited way too long to respond to Bush's "flip-flop" charge, and his first few swings at it were ineffective. "I believe in being strong and resolute and determined," Kerry said at one point. "We have to be steadfast and resolved, and I am," he said at another.

But as the night went on -- as Bush smirked and stumbled and even seemed to sigh -- Kerry hit his stride and found his strength. The moment came about half an hour in, when Lehrer asked Bush about his policy of preemptive war. Bush said he had "never dreamt" of starting a war before Sept. 11 -- "but the enemy attacked us, Jim."

Kerry was on it, and his response was devastating. "The president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate," Kerry said. "In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, 'The enemy attacked us.' Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al-Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist ... That's the enemy that attacked us. That's the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains."

Bush had no response, at least no intelligent one. "Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us," he said. "I know that." But it wasn't so clear sometimes that Bush did know that. Earlier in the debate, he had mixed up Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and had to stop to correct himself.

It wasn't Bush's only low point. Bush's message discipline has served him well in this campaign -- every man, woman and child in America knows that John Kerry is a "flip-flopper" -- but Thursday night, message discipline looked like mindless repetition. Bush used the words "mixed signals" or "mixes messages" nearly a dozen times, and it seemed like a lot more. He accused Kerry of changing positions eight times. And he complained seven times about Kerry's calling Iraq "the wrong war at the wrong time."

Next Page: The president's Pet Goat moment: He sputtered and stared into the distance

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