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Forget Kerry: Bush's Nemesis Is Insurgency.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(ON THE LEFT)
Byline: DAVID S. BRODER
President Bush and Sen. John Kerry faced very different challenges when they met Thursday night for their first debate, but only Kerry seemed to recognize exactly what he needed to do.
The Democratic nominee's task was to straighten out the internal contradictions that had facilitated the successful Republican assault on him as a flip-flopper. He bent every effort to the urgent need to appear straightforward and strong -- keeping his back straight, his head high, his answers short and his thoughts clear.
For most of the night, he was the aggressor, pressing the case for a change of commanding the war on terrorism, which has been Bush's strongest suit.
Bush had a different assignment. A Kerry weakened by months of Republican rhetoric painting him as a vacillating wimp was far less of a threat to a second term than the disturbing news bulletins and television pictures from the Iraq battlefront.
Bush's need was to reconcile his upbeat rhetoric about the coming of a new democratic era in Iraq with the bloody warfare that has pinned 140,000 U.S. troops in that misery-laden country with no end in sight.
In 90 minutes before the biggest audience of the campaign, Bush not only failed to do that; he barely tried. And that omission leaves him at risk to future events as the insurgency in Iraq gathers momentum.
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