After the First Debate

John Kerry is caught in a pragmatic dilemma. George W. Bush is reciting a philosopher's dilemma. After the first debate, the American presidential election is not much closer to resolution.

First, Kerry's dilemma. American politicians -- especially presidential candidates -- face three strictures. First, they must not show a hint of pessimism. Second, they must not admit that the United States might be in the wrong. Third, they must maintain that every problem has a solution.

Kerry is smart enough to know that the disaster in Iraq may not have a palatable solution, that the United States was wrong to go to war there, and that these facts together give reason for pessimism. One of his strongest cases against Bush is recital of the facts that would support these conclusions: rising numbers of American dead in each month, epidemic failures in reconstruction, the loss of American moral authority in other democracies, and the enmity of hundreds of millions of Muslims. But he is not allowed to draw the devastating conclusions. He must then become optimistic, and insist that we will win in Iraq, that we are still welcome there, that the world will rally around us to rebuild that country.

It has been said that, when you strike at a king, you must kill him. Kerry is forced to draw back his blade an inch from the king's heart. The argument becomes this: Kerry has the fortitude, or integrity, or charisma, to do what Bush cannot. But when this is the argument, Kerry works at a disadvantage: a majority of Americans still believe Bush is the stronger character, that he has a surer hand and a clearer heart.

Bush, however, has been driven into a corner by the disastrous reality of Iraq. In a real sense, it is no longer open to him to say that the results of the war have been good, or that there is presently much cause for optimism. So he makes consistency a virtue over and against reality. His debate refrain was that, as the commander-in-chief of American troops, the leader of a (modest and troubled) international coalition, and the signal enemy of Islamic extremism, the president cannot be seen to admit error. This is to recite Plato's argument for the "noble lie": the truth would destroy the polity, so to save ourselves, we must lie to ourselves. Bush famously declared in a debate against Al Gore in 2000 that his "favorite political philosopher" was Jesus Christ. After this debate, one might fairly wonder whether he has opted for Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, the priest who opted to serve the devil because he concluded humanity could not abide the truth Jesus had revealed.

The bizarre paradox, of course, is that Bush is proposing a noble lie on national television, saying in effect, "It will make us all better people if we can just ignore these terrible facts." It may just work. American governance in the past three-plus years has rested on systematically denying overwhelming truths: the real cost of massive tax cuts, the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks of September 11, and the difficulty of occupying and rebuilding Iraq are only a few stark examples. The facts have been more or less available all along. Each time, the facts have gone down to defeat. Maybe deception has become such a habit that Bush can now say, "If I acknowledged these harsh realities, you would have to stop believing in me, and we cannot accept that."

Bush has an advantage on television. He is by traditional standards less "presidential" than Kerry. He is small and jumpy. His face contorts, seemingly involuntarily, into undignified and sometimes fatuous expressions. He is usually on the edge of inarticulacy, one word away from incoherence.

In today's America, though, the stars of television are those who can produce an illusory intimacy with the audience, those who make viewers feel the person on the screen is speaking directly to each of them. In part because Bush never learned to speak like a politician of the old school -- an orator -- he is fluent in the television idiom. He seems natural. He chooses words and phrases the way ordinary Americans do in ordinary conversation. Even at his clearest and most direct, Kerry does not speak naturally. He is deeply schooled in a tradition that regards political rhetoric as a distinct medium, with its own rules and standards of excellence. In the era of televised empathy, however, when all forms of communication strive for the emotional appeal of the face-to-face exchange, Kerry's skill makes him as much an anachronism as a master of his craft. He is articulate in a language now hardly spoken.

That in microcosm describes the stakes of this election. For decades, Americans have flirted with giving up on politics -- that is, forgetting that political decisions, and voting first of all, are choices of a special sort, requiring information and judgment about the direction the country should take. Instead, our tendency has been to confuse political decisions with other choices, especially emotional, intuitive judgments about whom we like, or trust, or find "comfortable." For voters, the appeal of this attitude is that it is easy: we can judge candidates the same way we assess co-workers or in-laws. There is no need to educate ourselves in the duplicities of the Bush tax plan or the outlines of Kerry's proposal to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on health care. For the media, the appeal is also laziness: it is easier and more fun to speculate about the personalities of candidates -- and, in the ultimate mirror-box, to speculate on what readers and viewers will make of candidates' personalities -- than to report on the issues that elections actually decide. As for candidates, the winner of every campaign since 1980 has been the one who managed to make voters feel "at home" with him -- Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush, who lacked the gift but edged out the singularly awkward Michael Dukakis.

If we give up real politics for personality, sooner or later we give up democracy for demagoguery, and promise to anoint the candidate who tells us the best lies, in the smoothest style. If George Bush wins the election in November, the United States will have taken another step in that direction.