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Originally posted by Gattigap
Yep, that's the one (though mine was on radio). The danger for each side's partisans is succumbing to the temptation to extrapolate too far from Bush's abysmal press conferences or otherwise "extemperaneous" interviews, or from Kerry's speeches.
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Actually, never mind.
Hoagland in WaPo tells us that the negotiated format for the "debates" will essentially reduce the event to dueling stump speeches.
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The rules constrain Kerry more than Bush. Unless the challenger is prepared to "cheat" Thursday night -- to go up to and even across the lines of prescribed and proscribed behavior -- the devil in these details will tilt the first debate into an exchange of stump speeches.
That prospect delights the Bush camp.
"We've got the better campaign speech and the only candidate who is good at delivering one," says a Bush campaign insider. An internal study by the Kerry campaign echoes this view. It found that in 2000, Bush took 18 lines from his standard speech and repeated at least one of them 59 times in three debates against Al Gore. "We have to deal with the fact he stays on message," says a Kerry strategist.
The precautions the Bush camp has taken suggest that its fears in the first debate center on Kerry's prosecutorial experience and debate techniques. James Baker, Bush's chief negotiator, seeks to protect his client's flanks with rules that prevent the two candidates from asking each other direct questions or addressing each other with proposals. And they may not roam, Clinton-style, from their podiums, when the debates move into a town hall setting.
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I also remember learning via TDS that a big sticking point was the Bush camp's refusal to keep the temperature below 70 degrees because, as a Bush adviser put it, "Kerry's a sweater. Women don't like a sweater."
Nicely done, Karl! Nicely done indeed.
