The contest for the White House was locked in a dead heat on Sunday, with Republican and Democratic strategists looking to the third and last debate to score the convincing victory that could alter the dynamics of the race.
With just three weeks until voting day, the gap between George Bush and John Kerry has narrowed significantly.
An ABC television poll conducted after Friday night’s debate in Missouri and released on Sunday put Bush marginally ahead with 50% support compared with 46% for Kerry, but still within the margins of error.
That tightening of the race elevates the importance of Wednesday’s debate in Arizona as the last, best chance for either candidate to take a decisive lead.
With that debate, the focus of the campaigns shifts from Iraq to domestic issues, where the Democrats believe they have an advantage.
”We have to, number one, focus on making sure the American people know what’s happened over the last four years,” the vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, said on Sunday morning in one of several appearances on the weekend chatshows.
Edwards said Bush had presided over historic job losses and a worsening economy, charges the Democrats plan to amplify in the run-up to the debate.
Although two instant polls crowned Kerry the winner of Friday night’s clash in Missouri, the victory was not so decisive as to reverse the Republicans’ overall edge.
For his part Bush was far more in command of his material than during his dismal performance in the first debate, and he held his temper largely in check, replacing the angry scowls with a studiously blank expression.
The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said Kerry had improved his ”likeability quotient”, especially among uncommitted voters. ”He clearly established a sense of confidence and likeability and made possible these gains in personal favourability which, I believe, will translate into vote changes during the next week,” the pollster said.
Now that the Democratic candidate has established a presidential demeanour with his two solid debate performances, he must work to convince the American people that he shares their concerns about jobs and healthcare. ”We are going to find that John Kerry is a fighter for the middle classes,” said Joe Lockhart, a senior campaign adviser.
Kerry, meanwhile, picked up on one of the most pointed exchanges of Friday night, when Bush refused to answer a woman who had asked for three examples of mistakes made by his administration. ”Do we want leadership — as it’s called — that can’t face reality and admit mistakes?” Kerry asked a Democratic rally in Ohio.
But the president has been just as active in setting out the parameters of Wednesday’s debate. With Iraq on the sidelines for now, Bush has abandoned momentarily the ”flip-flop” label that has dogged Kerry throughout the campaign to focus on making the case that the Democratic candidate is a tax-and-spend liberal.
Bush used the ”liberal” epithet four times in Missouri, and stayed with the theme in campaign appearances at the weekend. In the mid west battleground states of Iowa and Minnesota, Bush moved to cast the Democratic challenger as a high-spending liberal who would raise taxes to pay for government welfare programmes. Kerry ”can run but can’t hide” from his past support for tax increases, Bush repeatedly said.
The Republicans have homed in on Kerry’s healthcare plan, saying it would create an unwieldy government bureaucracy. ”If you like the DMV [department of motor vehicles] and you want to get that for your healthcare, you’re going to love the Kerry plan,” Bush’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, said on Sunday.
Edwards has also become a target. A millionaire trial attorney before entering politics, he has become a convenient focus for Republican charges that health costs have escalated because of lawsuits.
Meanwhile, Kerry was out courting the crucial black vote on Sunday. He attended two church services in Miami, one with Haitian Catholics and the other with black Baptists, where the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton tied his election to the civil rights struggle. ”We have an unfinished march in this nation,” Associated Press reported Kerry as saying at the Friendship Missionary Baptist church.
”Never again will a million African Americans be denied the right to exercise their vote in the United States,” he added, referring to the disputed Florida recount in the 2000 presidential race.
Black turnout is key to Kerry winning in Florida and elsewhere — less than 10% of black voters nationally supported Bush in 2000. – Guardian Unlimited Â