Strike three!

Bush gets that sinking feeling as a steady and presidential Kerry sweeps the series.

By Tim Grieve

Oct 13, 2004 | Can George W. Bush feel it slipping away?

It's early still. It will be early until the campaigns and the 527s flood Ohio and Florida and Pennsylvania and Iowa with wave after wave of nasty ad. It will be early until Karl Rove uncorks whatever nasty tricks he's been holding in reserve. It will be early until Osama bin Laden is captured or a terrorist attack is warned of or realized. It will be early until the votes are cast and counted and contested and counted again.

It is early -- things can change -- but the momentum in this race has turned against the president. George W. Bush and John Kerry met for their third and final debate Wednesday night. It wasn't a Kerry blow out like the first one. It couldn't be. But for third night in the row -- four if you count the Cheney-Edwards debate -- the challenger went face-to-face with the incumbent, and the challenger got the better of it. A Gallup Poll of debate watchers gave Kerry a 14 point win; a CBS News poll of uncommitted voters gave it to Kerry by 14 points; and ABC called it a tie but said "bragging rights" go to Kerry because the ABC poll over-sampled Republican voters.

Over in a quiet corner in the press hall an hour after the debate ended, Karl Rove said it wasn't so. He said he still believes Bush won all three debates, even that disastrous first one. He said that anybody who believes the post-debate instant polling is "kidding yourself." The momentum belongs to Bush, he said, and "the wind's at our back."

There may be something on Bush's back, but it's not the wind. Bush needed a decisive victory Wednesday night to stop his sudden and now steady slide in the polls. He didn't get it. Bush wasn't bad Wednesday; his performance was plainly the best of his three. He was clear and focused, and he offered buckets of the good ol' boy Texas charm that seemed to be AWOL for the first two debates. He didn't scowl and he didn't stumble. He scored points on taxes -- looking directly into the camera and telling workers how he put more money in their pockets -- and he came off as utterly reasonable on religious freedom and gay rights.

But Kerry was right there. He passed the presidential test in the first debate, and he did less than nothing to hurt himself in the second two. The man may not have been scintillating in St. Louis and Tempe, but he was steady. Again and again Wednesday night, Bush wandered off into some tangent or tall tale. Again and again, Kerry calmly reined him back in and set the record straight. Asked about jobs -- a topic that hurts him in swing states like Ohio, and one for which he has no real answer -- Bush segued quickly into an answer about education. Kerry called him out. "I want you to notice how the president switched away from jobs and started talking about education," he said. It was a small point, but it was effective. When Bush tried to steer a job discussion to education again later in the debate, every viewer must have seen exactly what he was doing. "Listen," he insisted, "the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it." You could almost hear people saying, "Sure it is."

When he wasn't keeping Bush in check, Kerry was helping himself. He proved himself surprisingly agile at questions of faith. He spoke eloquently about the balance between his religious views and his public life -- quoting the Bible along the way -- and then still had enough in reserve on the subject to answer it anew the second time it came up. Bush parked a question about what he's learned from the women in his life -- he even had Kerry laughing at his jokes about how the first lady sets him straight -- but Kerry answered back with a response about "marrying up" (to ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz, of course) that was funnier, and a story about a conversation with his mother just before she died that was more moving. Kerry came off as likable then. Earlier in the night, when he said swapping after-school programs for tax cuts for the rich "not in my gut" and "not in my value system," Kerry seemed both human and strong. It turns out he's not Michael Dukakis.

Next Page: The falsehoods were flying

• View blog reactions