Kerry must learn from Reagan in last debate

Kerry must learn from Reagan in last debate
Tristram Hunt in Arizona on why the Republican bastion could fall to the challenger
Sunday October 10, 2004
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1323857,00.html
In his fading years, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright embarked on a final grand project. Invited in 1957 by King Faisal of Iraq to design a new opera house, Wright expanded the brief into a plan for Baghdad complete with museums, parks, university and authentic bazaar. Dispensing with his 'prairie style', he peppered the scheme with domes, spires and ziggurats.

The 1958 revolution meant that none of it was built. But the ever-resourceful Wright simply offered the design to a new client. And today, the Baghdad opera house is the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University: an example of Wright's versatility and the forum for next week's presidential debate. Under the arches of a lost Iraqi skyline, George W Bush and John Kerry will meet in debate for the final time.

It could scarcely be more appropriate in an election dominated by foreign affairs to an extent not seen since the Vietnam war. Friday night's second debate started and finished with WMD, the role of weapons inspectors and the use/misuse of intelligence. In the event, both sides walked away from St Louis, Missouri, with something to celebrate.

In contrast to their first encounter, Bush, as one commentator put it, 'turned up': he was energetic, engaged, supple and often intelligible. Following on from Dick Cheney's highly effective blocking of John Edwards in the vice-presidential debate, the Republican tail-spin of the past few days has come to a halt.

Meanwhile, Kerry continued to look and sound presidential. As ever, he was authoritative and suitably aggressive - but, at last, he also gave something of himself. In a response to a question on abortion, he finally started to talk about his Catholic faith and break down some of that Brahmin reserve. Yet even if an instant poll gave Kerry a slim victory, he failed to deliver the knock-out. With only 23 days left to the election and Bush still fractionally leading, a decisive blow is what is needed for the final head-to-head.

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Here in Arizona, Kerry's strategy to focus so determinedly on foreign policy could play either way. This is a state on the domestic front-line in the 'war on terror', producing one of the most celebrated victims of the neo-conservative movement.

Pat Tillman was an all-American hero, a graduate of Arizona State University who went on to play professional football for the Arizona Cardinals, only to forego a lucrative future with the NFL to enlist, alongside his brother, Kevin, as an Army Ranger.

Laid-back and highly popular, he was the quiet warrior of America's global imperium. But after initial deployment in the Middle East, he was transferred to Afghanistan where, in April, he was killed by 'friendly fire'.

Unlike the hundreds of other deaths, Tillman's sacrifice jolted the myopic complacency of US public opinion. Arizona went into mourning as the Cardinals retired his number 40 and 'Pat Tillman Freedom Plazas' were planned.

But on his former campus, underground posters have started appear with the haunting refrain, 'Remember me?', asking whether 'I' needed to die for 'Bush's wars'.

Despite the losses, it would take a substantial shift for this electorate to dismiss their commander-in-chief mid-war. Arizona is, after all, a state which grew rich in the post-war years on the back of the military-industrial complex.

Its clear skies proved ideal for pilot training, drawing in high-tech firms in their wake. Today, it retains that martial spirit, with an array of military bases and culture of service - not least in the form of its popular senator, Vietnam veteran John McCain (whom many now regard as the leading Republican candidate for 2008).

Moreover, since the 1950s Arizona has been seen as the birthplace of modern Conservatism. It was from this rugged landscape that Barry Goldwater emerged. His anti-government credo - 'Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice' - set the modern Republican party on its course. Under Goldwater's guidance, power drifted from the Rockefeller moderates to the free market individualists of southern and western America.

Although Goldwater lost catastrophically to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, his anti-Communist, laissez-faire ideals would triumph in Ronald Reagan. And now, in Bush, many Arizonans see a south-western compatriot ready to defend gun-ownership, gas-guzzling SUVs, and 'traditional values'.

But while Bush continues to lead Kerry in Arizona by 10 points, hope is in the air for Democrats. Recent polls have shown a marked increase in undecided voters, as well as another 500,000 people registering to vote. And, in a state that only went Bush by 6 per cent in 2000, that could be enough to make the difference.

The final debate is in theory focused on domestic policy, but will inevitably slide back towards Iraq. So far, one of the more effective tactics of the Kerry campaign has been to emphasise how America is bearing 90 per cent of the war's costs. This week, Kerry's challenge is to link that $200 billion expenditure to faltering economic confidence at home.

The middle-class boom of the Clinton years is a thing of the past. House prices, college fees, health costs, even petrol prices are creating what Kerry exaggerates as 'a crisis of the middle class'. Those concerns, together with worries over the fiscal deficit and mounting unemployment, need to be connected in the popular imagination with the Iraqi war mismanagement.

To do so, Kerry might follow the lead set by Goldwater's apprentice, Reagan. In his 1980 debate with President Carter, held amid another US foreign policy debacle in the Middle East and rising costs of living, Reagan suggested to his audience: 'It might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores? Is America as respected as it was?'

Then, as now, the answer was 'no' and a one-term incumbent was ousted from office. This Wednesday, another act of regime change might be enacted under the arches and palm trees of a Baghdad skyline.

· Tristram Hunt is a visiting professor at Arizona State University.