On Sept. 30 President Bush and John Kerry will finally face off in the first of a series of debates.

The debates are the result of a series of negotiations between the campaigns. Vernon Jordan, a close friend of the Clintons, negotiated for the Kerry campaign. James Baker, former Secretary of State, Florida recount manager and consiglieri to the Bush family, negotiated for the president.

The debates, four of them total, will each have a unique format. The president and Kerry square off on foreign policy this Thursday, then the vice president and Edwards have a free-for-all debate. Following that there is a town hall-style debate with St. Louis residents asking the presidential candidates questions, and finally a debate on domestic policy.

Even the order of the debates was negotiated and one of the concessions the Kerry campaign made was to debate foreign policy first.

For some reason, the American public thinks Kerry is weaker on foreign policy than the president. I say “for some reason” because Bush’s disastrous foreign policy, utter failure to plan successfully in Iraq, and inability to garner international support for just about anything he puts his mind to has not registered with many Americans, or at least enough of them.

Bush feels he is strongest on foreign policy and since viewership of the debates goes down with each successive debate, he wants to hit hardest on the night with the most Americans paying attention.

So the last few weeks you’ve seen a much more combative Kerry on the war. He’s trying to get out in front of Bush and set the tone for the debate. This is a smart move but as we’ve seen with Bush before, outsmarting him is the first mistake.

In 2000 the Bush/Gore debates were like an exercise in absurdism. Bush would trot out a pat answer that rarely addressed what was asked of him, Gore would sigh and roll his eyes and the rest of us wondered what the hell was going on. Bush was declared the winner of the debates by the pundits because he didn’t say anything ridiculously stupid and Gore looked too annoyed (which is fine for us at home but doesn’t play well on national television).

Bush wins debates because everyone expects him to lose. It’s sort of a canard when people say Bush has never lost a debate (all three or so he’s been in) because by definition he can never lose. He goes into every debate with everyone expecting him to say “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” (said in La Crosse in 2000). When he doesn’t say anything that ridiculous, he defies expectations.

Well, aren’t our expectations too low? He wants to run the country. He already has for four years and we still award him honors when he doesn’t trip over his own tongue.

I remember reading that President Clinton finished the New York Times crossword puzzle every single day. That’s really impressive from Thursday through Saturday when it becomes harder than reading calculus backwards. Does Bush seem to have the same intellectual hunger? Not really. He chokes on pretzels watching college football.

The only way that Kerry can beat Bush in the debates is by knocking him off his stride, getting him flustered, getting Bush to crack his façade. Bush gets accolades for “staying on message,” which the rest of us understand as “not being able to think on the fly.” If Kerry can get Bush to start thinking for himself, Bush is sunk.

Kerry has been called the greatest debater since Cicero by the Bush campaign. This is a calculated move so that when Kerry gives one of his patented, long winded answers (and really he has to work on that) and then Bush fires off a one-liner and a smirk, it looks like Bush struck to the heart of the matter and Kerry just meandered.

It’s time to stop giving Bush credit for regurgitating Karl Rove’s focus groups tested answers and make Bush answer questions from his brain and his heart.

When that happens, there is no way Kerry can lose.

Rob Deters (rvdeters@wisc.edu) is a third-year law student.