"My opponent wants to empower government," Bush said last week in a new campaign speech. "I want to use government to empower people."
Bush wraps the "ownership society" theme around his proposals to reduce taxes, to create new tax incentives for savings and investment, and to allow workers to divert part of their Social Security taxes into accounts they could invest in the stock market.
Bush now uses his ideological argument perhaps most aggressively on healthcare.
The president portrays Kerry's healthcare plan as a dramatic expansion of government control -- an assertion the Democrat says misrepresents his proposal. And Bush presents his own plans, centered on tax-favored accounts that individuals could use to pay more of their healthcare expenses out of pocket, as a means to provide individuals more control over their medical decisions.
After Bush's responses on domestic policy questions in Friday's debate, conservatives are optimistic that the president can take the offense in the final encounter. Many conservatives viewed Kerry as defensive and unsteady in his answers on social issues -- a view shared privately by some of the senator's advisors. And many Bush allies think the president is striking a resonant chord with his arguments about ownership and individual control.
"There is a thread running all the way through [the domestic agenda] for the president: that you can trust ordinary people to make wise decisions if you give them the opportunity," said Stuart Butler, vice president for domestic and economic research at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Butler said that contrasts with "the Kerry vision that the purpose of government is to redeploy resources on behalf of ordinary people to help them."
Many Kerry advisors remain convinced that Bush won't succeed in framing the choice that way, partly because the trends on jobs and healthcare have hurt his credibility.
Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg said Bush was driving away independent voters by emphasizing his conservative views on government's role and social issues. And tonight, Kerry is likely to attack Bush's "ownership" ideas -- particularly his Social Security proposal -- as an attempt to shift not control but risk from government to individuals.
But other senior Kerry advisors acknowledge the senator must do a better job than at Friday's debate at escaping the big-government box Bush has sought to construct around him, especially on healthcare.
