Campaign ’04: CRUNCHTIME

THERE IS TO BE NO SCOWLING this time, George Bush’s counselors told him, even if John Kerry attacks your mom. Campaign officials say it took Karen Hughes a good while to convince the Commander in Chief after the first presidential debate that he had looked irritated. “I was not irritated,” he told her, irritated. “Sir, you were,” she said. Hughes is one of the few who can tell the President what he might not want to hear and show him what he might not be able to see for himself. Within 72 hours of losing that first debate, which in a TIME poll cost him a full 11 points among female voters, the Bush campaign had launched a new ad aimed squarely at women. Heading into Debate Round 2, many Republican strategists expected to see Kinder Gentler 2.0 Friday night. But they turned out to be wrong. That’s clearly not how Bush thinks this choice will play out.

From here on, the polls provide at best a mischievous measurement: what matters is not just where the numbers are but also which way they’re moving. A trailing candidate has momentum as long as his stats are improving; a leading candidate can look desperate and defensive if his advantage is slipping away. With two of three presidential debates past and just three weeks to go, the candidates face the moment of greatest danger and opportunity–which is why, after weeks of gloom, this has been a sunny stretch for team Kerry and why Bush’s supporters were relieved to see him pushing back hard in the second matchup last week.

A race that many Republicans privately hoped might be wrapped up by now has come down to hand-to-hand combat, fought not just by two bareknuckle candidates but also by thousands upon thousands of soldiers in the trenches, signing up every last voter, knocking on doors, drilling through databases and aiming for Nov. 2, when whoever has the stronger ground game wins.

BOTH CANDIDATES STAND BEFORE THE SAME audience, but they talk to different ones, and in their responses, you can read the race. If, during the first debate, Kerry came back from near death to win a second look, on Friday night he appeared to have a more specific audience in mind: the uncommitted female voters who admire Bush’s strength but are worried about his methods. These are the ones, a Republican operative admits, who “hated Bush’s first performance, said that the President reminded them of the husbands they have or the ones they left who don’t listen and won’t talk and don’t like to be criticized.” A TIME poll found that women moved hard to Kerry after that showing, from a near dead heat to a 12-point Kerry advantage. In a race this tight, that is an earthquake. Without women on his side, Kerry is not even in the game, since Bush holds a 16-point lead among men.

So in the town hall-style debate last Friday, Kerry was clearly intent on courtship. He used the word respect each time he answered a woman’s question about values, and he presented himself as a drug-reimporting, budget-balancing, stem-cell-researching champion of middle-class families. Sometimes even blatant pandering works if it shows that you’re listening.

By way of contrast, it quickly became clear that the President was not about to arrive in St. Louis and flirt. He came to fight and did, staring down opponent and questioner alike. If polls show that even 33% of Bush voters are looking for a second-term course correction, Bush had little to say to them. He is holding fast, no doubts, no surrender. There would be no admission of error, despite a weeklong discussion within his campaign about whether to show any contrition about anything. “There’s no turning back now,” says an outside adviser to the Bush team. “It’s too late for the President to admit mistakes or take a nuanced position on Iraq. He just has to keep arguing he was right and Kerry’s a flip-flopper who can’t be trusted to keep America safe.”

The President benefited from what he might call the soft sympathy of low expectations. He may have won simply by not losing a second time. “He was alive, and he brought his fight,” says a senior G.O.P. official. “Conservatives are thrilled–and they were not thrilled 10 days ago, believe me.” This time the famously tight Bush team, which had sprung some major leaks in Coral Gables, Fla., had its talking points down: the President “shattered Kerry’s credibility” by whacking him with his liberal Senate record, while Kerry looked arrogant and aloof. At one point, when the camera caught Kerry leaning back, his head rolling back with his body, Bush-Cheney communications director Nicolle Devenish and much of the senior campaign staff, who were watching in the holding room, started shouting “Haughty! Haughty! Haughty!” That was the Bush spinners’ word of the night, a favorite sentiment that showed up in early focus groups, designed to paint Kerry as out of touch and Bush as a man of the people.

But Kerry is clearly benefiting as well from, of all things, the very attacks that had battered him in the first place. For months Kerry has been caricatured as a weak lefty waffler, most recently in an ad sponsored by the National Rifle Association’s political arm showing the Senator as a poodle with pink bows over the line THAT DOG DON’T HUNT. So uncommitted debate viewers were probably surprised by what they saw for themselves: a TIME poll found that after the first debate, Kerry’s favorability ratings actually surpassed the President’s. By 5 points, voters found Kerry more likable than Bush, even as they viewed Bush as more steadfast. If, when voters get to watch Kerry up close for 90 minutes, they see someone even minimally plausible, it not only helps Kerry, it may also hurt Bush’s own credibility, since he has made it so clear that he thinks Kerry is not suited to be President.

And that credibility was already taking a beating. Every time Bush tried to regain his footing, he tripped over more bad news and more second guesses, including those from his own team. The military and civilian death toll in Iraq continued to climb, so that the recently optimistic Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi sounded darker about the prospects for stability any time soon. British hostage Kenneth Bigley was beheaded. It emerged that U.S. forces had found floor plans of schools in six American states on a computer disc in Iraq, which launched a round of newscasters interviewing school superintendents from Florida to Oregon about whether a Beslan-style massacre could happen here. Al-Qaeda was thought to be behind the bombing of three Egyptian tourist sites popular with Israelis. While the White House welcomed the historic image of Afghans holding their first–and miraculously nonviolent–democratic elections, charges of possible fraud marred the picture of liberty working its magic.

Even as Kerry repeated his lines that Bush had misjudged, if not misrepresented, the threat that Saddam posed, a more damaging case was being made by members of the Administration itself. First, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that he had seen no compelling evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then the Washington Post reported that former Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer said the U.S. had not sent enough troops during the early days of the occupation to prevent the rampant looting that took place then as well as the sense of lawlessness that now rules portions of the country. Most explosive of all was weapons inspector Charles Duelfer’s 918-page CIA report on Saddam’s weapons, which concluded that while the Iraqi leader had wanted weapons of mass destruction, he destroyed his stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War and had no programs or materials to make new ones anytime soon.

The Bush campaign claimed vindication by focusing on Saddam’s intent. The report showed how Saddam was “gaming” the U.N., Bush said, by using the oil-for-food program to undermine sanctions. Far from being containable, as Kerry suggested, the report concluded that “Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime,” which would have allowed Saddam to break loose and rearm. But the report also noted that Saddam “had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions.” As former inspector David Kay noted on the Today show, Saddam “had a lot of intent. He didn’t have capabilities. Intent without capabilities is not an imminent threat.” While Bush had always been careful not to call the threat from Iraq imminent, Duelfer’s report certainly made it seem more distant.

But if the week’s news kept Bush playing defense, Kerry was at risk of overplaying his hand. “You don’t make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact,” he said. All Bush had to do was recite Kerry’s own past speeches, warning of the threat Saddam posed and citing the same catalog of weapons the Administration invoked. “Now today my opponent tries to say I made up reasons to go to war,” Bush said on the campaign trail last week. “Just who’s the one trying to mislead the American people?” On the day after Duelfer’s report was released, Bush went at Kerry with a blowtorch, lampooning his insistence that a “global test” was required to justify pre-emptive U.S. military action, describing his health-care proposals as “Hillarycare” and slamming him for setting “artificial timetables” for troop withdrawals from Iraq. “Senator Kerry has a strategy of retreat,” Bush declared. “I have a strategy for victory.” Never mind that each of the charges was a distortion, if not an outright deception. In a fight for every last vote, Bush wasn’t pulling any punches.

Heading into the final weeks, both candidates have bought themselves some momentum. Kerry has bounced back from a six-week doldrum, Bush from a 10-day stumble. While plenty can happen between now and Nov. 2, it has become far more likely that there will be no great margins in this election. Every vote will count, especially in those states where a swing of several thousand voters can make or break a President. Reported by Perry Bacon Jr. and Matthew Cooper/St. Louis and John F. Dickerson and Michael Duffy/Washington