I’ve spent most of the day replaying last night’s debate in my head thinking about how I would proceed if I were Bush. This is what I’ve come up with (please bear with me, it’s going to take a while)…

Kerry has staked his entire foreign policy on a ‘the grass is greener on my side of the fence’ theme with his constant repetition of “Bush screwed up and is screwing up and I can do better”. On first blush, it’s not a bad approach as Americans are especially prone to fall for sales pitches such as this.

We’re so often unsatisfied with what we have, we’re usually dreaming about how good life would be if only… we had more money, we had a different job, we had a prettier wife (not me, my wife is plenty pretty) and so on. As a result, we fall for what I refer to as ‘the cure in the bottle’ pitch, the no-pain quick acting, no side effect solution to whatever ails us. Kerry has taken the role of the salesman: all we have to do is vote for him and life would be better, so much better.

Admitting this seems counterintuitive, I believe the opportunity for Bush is NOT to attack the salesman but instead to attack the grass that Kerry is selling. I know credibility is important in sales. Some buyers will walk away because they’re turned off by the salesman. But for most people, the salesman is only a conduit to the greener grass, the means to the end, and even when they don’t care for a particular salesman, they will often hold their breath and still buy the product. This is because they’re infatuated with the dream promised by the product being sold, because they truly want to believe something good will happen to them if they go ahead and buy the product.

Bush has gotten the mileage he can from trashing Kerry as a salesman. The people who will walk away because they don’t like the salesman have done so (it cuts both ways; people who don’t like Bush have turned away from him). What Bush needs to do now is to dispel people of the idea that the grass on Kerry’s side of the fence is really greener. Bush needs to take Kerry’s prescriptions and convince people that these pills won’t make you feel better, they will make you sick.

For example, when Kerry tries to sell a ‘global conference’ as the magic pill, Bush needs to tell people that this will lead to more Americans getting killed. When Kerry tries to sell bi-lateral talks with North Korea (if that is what he is doing; I couldn’t really tell last night), Bush needs to scream from the rooftops that this is the most dangerous course to take, that doing so is guaranteed to cause harm. When Kerry talks about ‘doing things differently’ with regards to the invasion, Bush needs to respond that Kerry’s ideas would have led to even more US casualties, not fewer. And so on with every prescription Kerry offers.

Bush needs to make the American people scared. Not necessarily of Kerry, but of what Kerry is selling.