We report, you decide. -- Being President Means Never Having to Say He's Sorry.
Excerpts from a 10-12-04 N.Y. Times Op-Ed:
We heard a lot about mistakes in the second presidential debate. Senator John Kerry declared that rushing to war in Iraq unilaterally without adequate plans to win the peace was a catastrophic mistake. From President Bush we heard, Mistakes? Not me. You can't lead the world if you say your country made a mistake.
How is that stance likely to be received by female voters? Democrats and Republicans alike have set their sights on winning women's votes come Nov. 2. Historically, more women than men vote (eight million more in 2000) and a larger percentage of women vote Democratic (in 2000, by 11 percentage points for Al Gore while men preferred Mr. Bush by 11 percentage points). To raise the stakes, a poll conducted recently by Time magazine found that 61 percent of undecided voters were women.
Perhaps it was not by chance that it was a woman who asked the president, at the town hall debate last Friday, to list three instances in which he had made wrong decisions since taking office. If women react to Mr. Bush's made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured. That's because it drives many women nuts when men won't say they made a mistake and apologize if they do something wrong.
The role of talk about "mistakes" in the rhetoric of the debate was particularly striking when Mr. Bush intoned, and repeated, that no one will follow a president who says the war was a mistake.
Will it work? Probably with fewer women than men, because most women don't regard admitting fault as a liability.
We heard a lot about mistakes in the second presidential debate. Senator John Kerry declared that rushing to war in Iraq unilaterally without adequate plans to win the peace was a catastrophic mistake. From President Bush we heard, Mistakes? Not me. You can't lead the world if you say your country made a mistake.
How is that stance likely to be received by female voters? Democrats and Republicans alike have set their sights on winning women's votes come Nov. 2. Historically, more women than men vote (eight million more in 2000) and a larger percentage of women vote Democratic (in 2000, by 11 percentage points for Al Gore while men preferred Mr. Bush by 11 percentage points). To raise the stakes, a poll conducted recently by Time magazine found that 61 percent of undecided voters were women.
Perhaps it was not by chance that it was a woman who asked the president, at the town hall debate last Friday, to list three instances in which he had made wrong decisions since taking office. If women react to Mr. Bush's made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured. That's because it drives many women nuts when men won't say they made a mistake and apologize if they do something wrong.
The role of talk about "mistakes" in the rhetoric of the debate was particularly striking when Mr. Bush intoned, and repeated, that no one will follow a president who says the war was a mistake.
Will it work? Probably with fewer women than men, because most women don't regard admitting fault as a liability.
posted by Sid Cottingham | 5:14 AM
1 Comments:
like edwards said, i'm paraphrasing here, "we'll make him think of all his mistakes after he loses on nov.2nd"
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