“I agree with your blog on the debates. On the one hand Kerry is getting through with the wedge of his argument: hey, I didn’t break this thing, you did! That said, this still leaves Kerry’s problem: his critique of the war really does imply unilaterally bugging out unless you take seriously that the UN and France are going to magically calm the situation over there. Plus, Kerry might be forced to concede more succinctly that, yes, he really would have been OK with continued containment (not removal) of Hussein and show how that might have been pulled off. But Bush did show up with his squinty hat on–even if his talking points represented the last word in wisdom on the debate over Iraq and terrorism. Repeating them isn’t enough.
It was an “enlightening” debate, though, as you said. Kerry should have been here at the convention, including recognizing without apology (rhetorically) that he DID protest the war in Vietnam and making his claim that this did NOT mean he hadn’t fought honorably in Nam, thus framing his service/dichotomy before the easily anticipated Swifties-or-something-like-it thing.The Dem pols get so cynical that they start relying on tactical dirty-tricks stuff or cleverly playing different messages in different towns.
All in all I think Bush is very fortunate that a lot of folks have locked in their vote already–I would guess that this is a 2-3% bounce for Kerry. As someone who distrusts the impulses of the Dem base (way more lefty and anti-Israel than the Kerry on view) this doesn’t make me happy but there you go. I don’t think the center of gravity of America cottons all that much to intellectualist rationalizations for enrolling terrorists in self-esteem summer camps, but people also don’t want a President who comes off as auditioning for Dumb and Dumber.”
EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “I got home late and didn’t see the debate on its first run, and just as I sat down to watch the rebroadcast on C-SPAN, I got a phone call that I had to take. So I put the TV on mute, and spent the next hour or so talking on the phone and just watching the candidates. It was pretty interesting, actually. It’s often said that part of what people look for in the debates are facial expressions, posture, body language and just relative poise, and at least on that measure, Kerry won in a landslide. Watching on C-SPAN’s split screen there was a stark contrast between the candidates. Kerry looked confident, stood fully upright throughout, even looked commanding. Even when being criticized (and you could guess when that was happening), Kerry just smiled, nodded and took it. Bush on the other hand often looked irritable, kept oddly twitching his lips (which was pretty noticeable on mute), rolled his eyes, hunched over the podium, sighed (that horrid crime Al Gore was convicted of), and basically looked insulted that he had to be there-as if he was thinking “but I’ve already TOLD you that talking point.” I know that stuff doesn’t count for much, but Kerry scored whatever posture points there were to be had.
The Dish 