What do you think of this debate strategy?

[monarch]

Blame everything on Cheney and say that Bush should have been man enough to drop him from the ticket.

That approach has a number of advantages. In the first place, every single unsavory aspect of this administration has Cheney's fingerprints on it. The guy is as unpopular as Bush is popular, and, although even Bush's supporters don't think he's smart enough to be evil, Cheney comes across as plenty sinister. Bush campaigned as the CEO candidate and no responsible CEO would tolerate the screw-ups by the "dancing in the street" crowd.

Using this type of approach, Kerry could still hammer a theme of, at least, gross negligence without having to criticize the "likeable" Bush and the foreign policy issues could be framed in terms easily understandable to the average voter. Kerry could further say that, by keeping Cheney on the ticket, Bush passed up the opportunity to seek new foreign alliances.

[progdonkey]

1. I like it

Kerry can call this administration the most economically irresponsible since Hoover, the most secretive since Nixon, and the most corrupt since Harding.

Kerry can liken the Halliburton deals to the Teapot Dome scandal (which involved illegal no-bid contracts, to boot), saying that, just as Harding was completely unaware of his cabinet's corruption, Bush is ignorant of the problems of his own. This would put Kerry in the same position as you wrote above: he will create the image in the voters' minds that, while Bush may be a nice guy (:puke:), he just doesn't have the competence to handle his own Cabinet, let alone Iraq.

I'm sure there are plenty of Bush voters who would accept that he's out of his element, even if he is such a nice, down home guy.