"Now I know that there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities," he acknowledged in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "And I do, because some issues just aren't all that simple."
Bush and Kerry, according to some scholars of leadership, both have a rhetorical problem: Their style of speaking often highlights the defects rather than the advantages of their different approaches.
James MacGregor Burns, a presidential biographer and the namesake for the Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, said many of the successful presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, have been improvisers. But Kerry, unlike Roosevelt, has not been able to articulate that his occasional shifts rest on a "set of broader principles," he said.
The result is what Burns regards as an unfair perception that Kerry is motivated by "expediency and shiftiness."
Renshon believes that Bush suffers from the same problem in reverse. The biographer strongly rejects the view held by many Bush critics that the president is simply not very intelligent, but acknowledges that he is not drawn naturally to the details of policy in the fashion of Clinton or Kerry.
Bush is "much more interested in leadership than governing," Renshon said. But he speaks in a staccato style that sometimes relies on stock phrases. "He does not articulate his premises well," Renshon said.
The great surprise of the Bush years, perhaps, is how ideologically charged this national argument over leadership and war has become. After a long and sullen campaign, and years of hearing commentators talk about "red" and "blue" America, it is easy to forget how recently most analysts assumed that American politics had entered an age of consensus. Clinton was personally controversial, but for most of his presidency his centrist policies commanded support levels of 60 and 70 percent in polls. Bush himself, after Sept. 11, enjoyed approval ratings of 90 percent or more. Historically, war has more often united Americans behind presidents.
Bush shattered the consensus by prosecuting a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq that flowed directly from a leadership style that valued action above all and brushed aside the warnings of skeptics. A war that was controversial when it began became only more so as its main assumptions -- about the presence of weapons of mass destruction, and the difficulty of the post-invasion phase -- were undermined by events. Kerry took a nuanced but sometimes confusing middle ground, saying he supported confronting Iraq, but not a "rush to war" without a "plan to win the peace."
Not surprisingly, this has left the closing days of the campaign as a continuation of a national debate that has echoed for nearly two years.
Kerry last week in Florida was lambasting a "president who's unwilling to admit the mistakes he has made, and says he would do everything all over again exactly the same."
Bush in Ohio was assailing his challenger as a man who "has taken a lot of different positions, but he rarely takes a stand."
