September 02, 2004
It's All Been Building Toward This
Posted by The Editors | 04:28 PM
Anticipation is high for President Bush's acceptance speech tonight. The president must tread carefully, calibrating his remarks to satisfy conservatives while appealing to moderate swing voters, including conservative Democrats.
Pointing to a public cranky about the present, Democrats say Bush must say how he will change course. But this would seem an unlikely tack for a president who must tout his accomplishments, which presumably help account for what is good or bad about the current state of affairs. "I think it's what he is not going to say that will help Democrats," said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. Some GOP strategists agree, according to ConventionDaily.
"This convention right now has been 'all terror, all the time.' The upside [of that] is that it's the strongest issue for the president, and he hopes to transcend traditional issues to be elected on the war on terror. But if events in the real world combine to bring domestic issues into focus, that brings Kerry back into the race, or at least gives him a window of opportunity to take advantage of," said a veteran strategist.
Some Republicans are saying that the president and his team have to do more than insist that the nation cannot afford the risks of changing horses in the middle of a war. "The biggest thing they've got to do is explain the reasons behind their policies and action," said a veteran of George H.W. Bush's White House. "But the sad fact is that they seem to think assertions, tough language, sloganeering, and applause lines constitute persuasive argument. They don't and never have."
And as one senior Republican member of the House remarked, "People want 'the vision thing,' the sense that the president is looking beyond the next bump in the road, or worse, not only looking behind."
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