Public Spotlight Focuses on V.P. Debate
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WASHINGTON – With opinion polls showing the gap between the presidential candidates shrinking, the stakes have risen for tonight’s debate in Cleveland between the parties’ vice presidential nominees.
Both campaigns say the face-off is taking on greater importance than normal for running-mate showdowns.
Republicans are depending on Vice President Cheney to halt the sudden loss of GOP momentum since last week’s performance by the president in his foreign policy showdown with John Kerry. Democrats are looking to John Edwards to add to the sudden impetus that their campaign says it has picked up.
As the running mates finalized their preparations for tonight’s debate, the presidential contenders maintained their frenetic pace on the campaign trail, with Mr. Bush making his 17th presidential trip to the hotly contested state of Iowa. The president signed a tax-relief measure that keeps three middle-class tax breaks from expiring January 1 and revives other tax incentives for businesses. It affects about 94 million Americans.
“I’ve lowered taxes and my opponent wants to raise taxes,” the president said, labeling Mr. Kerry a tax-and-spend liberal. He also blasted his Democratic rival’s foreign policy as “dangerous for world peace.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Kerry was in New Hampshire and later in Pennsylvania, where he criticized Mr. Bush’s 2001 decision to ban federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells.
As the White House candidates clashed, a new poll released yesterday suggested that president still enjoys an edge over his rival. A Pew Research Center poll found that among likely voters,49% favor Mr. Bush and 44% Mr. Kerry. Several surveys published at the weekend and conducted after last Thursday’s debate suggested that the Democrat may have pulled even.
The director of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, said the poll suggests “the public images of these candidates are fairly locked in. One night doesn’t appear to be doing it, even though it was a very good night for John Kerry in the eyes of the voters.” He added that Mr. Kerry “still has a lot of work to do.”
Yesterday, the party spin-doctors started to prepare the public ground for the VP debate, with both sides trying to lower expectations for their candidates. Behind the scenes, though, campaign advisers were anticipating an intriguing contest between two highly eloquent politicians – one an old Washington hand who has filled some of the top political jobs reaching back to the Nixon era, the other a first term senator with far less experience but smooth courtroom skills honed as a personal-injuries attorney.
The tightness of the race has fueled interest in the debate between the running mates, as has the very different styles of the two men. Like the presidential debate last Thursday, Iraq is expected to be the main topic tonight, and the clash is likely to be less amiable than the VP debate four years ago between Mr. Cheney and the then-Democratic nominee Senator Lieberman.
The North Carolina senator aims to take a much harder approach than Mr. Lieberman did, and Kerry campaign aides say Mr. Edwards is being coached to try to goad Mr. Cheney into losing his quiet air of command. “Edwards has to break through” the vice president’s unflappability, said Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant.
Mr. Edwards might bring up the wartime government contracts won by Halliburton, the oil-services giant the vice president ran during the 1990s. Earlier this year, Mr. Cheney became highly irritable with Democrats who questioned his integrity over Halliburton, and he snapped and swore at Senator Leahy of Vermont over the issue on Capitol Hill.
The conversational sit-down format for tonight’s debate is the same that favored Mr. Cheney four years ago and may hinder Mr. Edwards’s efforts to be more confrontational than Mr. Lieberman.
Bush campaign advisers say Mr. Cheney will seek in his matter-of-fact way to highlight his rival’s lack of experience. He is also determined to counter some of Mr. Kerry’s foreign-policy statements in last week’s debate, said a Bush campaign spokesman, Scott Stanzel.