High noon for Kerry

After months of exchanging insults from a distance, George Bush and John Kerry will finally face each other tonight in a debate that is likely to be the challenger’s best chance to turn the election around before the November 2 poll.

The debate, at the University of Miami, is the first of three, but it will have the biggest audience — up to 50-million Americans — and it deals with the issue at the heart of this presidential election: national security, Iraq and the ”war on terror”.

Senator Kerry enters the 90-minute debate having consistently trailed in the polls for the past month, and is currently behind by about half a dozen percentage points. Democrats complain he has allowed the White House to define him — as a wavering, uncertain leader — and that he, in turn, has failed to define a president who continues to project steadfast resolve in the minds of a majority of Americans.

The Miami debate will be Kerry’s best, and possibly final, opportunity to turn the tables on his opponent on the issue that matters most.

”This debate is by far and away the most important,” said Thomas Steinfatt, a University of Miami communications professor, adding that the White House could even try to pull out of the next two encounters if it did not go well.

The Bush camp has already hinted it might do that if television companies stray from the rigid rules on coverage, banning shots of one candidate reacting to the others remarks.

”Kerry certainly can’t lose this one,” Professor Steinfatt said. ”If the polls after two days showed that Bush has extended his lead, I would say Kerry was done.”

The second debate, in St Louis on Friday week, will be a less-focused ”town meeting” encounter with questions on a wide variety of subjects from an invited audience. The final debate, the week after, will dwell on the economy and domestic issues. These have been displaced from centre stage by the bloodshed in Iraq and the ever-present fear of another terrorist attack.

Both candidates are arguably unbeaten in head-to-head debates, but they enter the chamber on Thursday night with vulnerabilities.

The Massachusetts senator faces a particularly tough challenge. While President Bush just has to stay the same — stick to his message and avoid being knocked off balance — Kerry has to change.

”He tends to be long-winded. As a TV persona he’s a bit stiff and formal and it doesn’t work well,” said Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor and the author of Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV.

Kerry has a deserved reputation for sentences tangled with parenthetical asides which have helped the Bush campaign paint him as a waffler. A comic radio sketch this week had his campaign aides inflicting an electric shock on the candidate each time he used a subordinate clause, until he finally spat out a declarative sentence.

But the senator also a reputation for sharpening his game, and his vocabulary, in the last weeks of a campaign when his back is against the wall. He did it in 1996, when he was in danger of losing his Senate seat to a sharp-witted Republican, William Weld.

Over the course of a marathon eight debates, Kerry asserted himself, proving himself most effective when put on the spot.

At one point Weld challenged him on his opposition to the death penalty and pointed to the mother of a murdered policeman, asking the senator if he thought the murderer’s life was worth more than his victim’s.

”I know something about killing,” Kerry responded, in a characteristic reference to his Vietnam days. ”I don’t like killing. I don’t think a state honours life by turning around and sanctioning killing.”

”Kerry is a master of the fine art of changing the subject,” Weld said recently. ”By the time he finished, everyone had forgotten what the question was.”

Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, agreed that Kerry’s verbosity was being overplayed. ”He’s not going to fall into sort of meanderings he makes in a speech. He’s less likely to do that in a debate format. He seems to have a real understanding of what that format requires.”

Bush has also shown he is aware of what is expected of him. In past debates he has stuck with unerring discipline to his talking points and shown himself capable of projecting his ”regular guy” image through the staged formality of such events to the studio and television audiences.

But in the past he has always been the underdog, famous for his mangled use of English, and has successfully lowered expectations so he could beat them. His aides have attempted to do the same this year, even describing Kerry as ”better than Cicero”, but it has not worked.

A Gallup poll this week showed that 44% of Americans expect the president to win , compared with 32% for Kerry.

After four years in office, Bush can no longer convincingly play the role of newcomer, and will have a record to defend. The president has been rattled before, most memorably when Senator John McCain attacked his campaign tactics in the 2000 Republican primary.

Kerry’s background as a courtroom prosecutor could help him capitalise on that potential vulnerability. But the groundrules, hammered out over weeks of negotiation, help the incumbent. Neither candidate is allowed to ask the other a direct question.

Perhaps the biggest challenge both men will face on Thursday night is overcoming the sheer weight of all their preparations. ”You want your candidate to be prepared but you also want him to be loose, and those two objectives are often at odds,” Shesol said.

”There’s a danger of being so heavily coached that you’re just trying to remember your lines rather than responding to the moment. You’ve got to be nimble, and you’ve got to listen.”