Reply #10: Bush now on the defensive

[PATRICK]

His strategies will be safe and rigid. He can't take an uncalculated risk. Kerry should be ready for a new variety of this sort and hammer it immediately. Bush might try to draw first blood and attack aggressively this time(LOL). Kerry of course will keep his composure but he should work to dampen any essence of a comeback no matter how trivial the content. Oh yeah, this time knock him completely off message or whatever that parrot talk W was flailing about with.

Lay a BIG trap. Bush seized on one word like a drowning man lunging for a life preserver. He is vulnerable enough at a moment like that to do something fatally stupid, even more than his Poland remark.

Then make him mad.

The town hall format, phony as it is, gives Bush a different comfort zone and breathing space. Deny him that, again in the simple context of presenting Kerry as the better man.

But it also too too late for Bush to try to regain anything on the Commander in Chief image within the debates. Now it is his miserably unfair, reckless and ruinous economic misery- equally vacuous.

The best thing about Kerry is he doesn't need this advice.