Month: October 2004

Glenn isn’t in the mood to make a judgment, and I don’t blame him. Jeff Jarvis says Edwards won. Mickey says it’s a draw. Polipundit says Bush won big. Drezner kinda cops out on his own view but says most people will think Cheney won. All the online polls show a huge Edwards win – but they might be hijacked.

THE BALANCE SHIFTS: More and more readers are coming to my defense. Here are a couple of emails:

I certainly don’t think that Cheney looked like road-kill (at least not until the end when he seemed too tired to get out of his chair), and Cheney had some zingers, but I thought Edwards completely held his own. I don’t know, maybe part of it is not believing many of the patent untruths that Cheney was stating believing that the audience would just take everything he said at face value, but I’ve now seen many people say Cheney won demonstratively (including, shockingly enough to me, the entire Hardball crew) and I just don’t see it.
Yes, I’m a Kerry-Edwards supporter, but I’ll give Cheney his due. But that big moment of Cheney’s when he started hammering Edwards about his Senate record, that wasn’t in response to anything except for the fact that Edwards had gotten Cheney riled and angry. Who knows what the question even was at that point, but Cheney left the subject completely to simply talk about Edwards record. He didn’t demonstrate physically the discomfort that Bush had last week, but you could see it at some point.
I’m as baffled as you are, because Cheney by the end looked sick and tired. Edwards started getting weak at the end, and maybe that’s why people are bothered. But I just watched Chris Matthews talk about how Edwards looked like he just kept getting face-slapped and I didn’t see that at all. I’m just baffled.

Don’t be baffled. You’re right. Here’s another:

I’m with you 100% on this, and I think most average americans feel the same way. Cheney looked like a cadaver, mumbled, and did a poor job of defending his positions. If you didn’t already loathe the Kerry/Edwards ticket (disclaimer: I’m an unenthusiastic Democrat), the punches he landed wouldn’t stick. Edwards was clear, conversational, and spoke about the issues with such clarity that I wish he had a longer resume so we could be voting for him instead.

That was my impression.

ABCNews’ poll gives the debate to Cheney – by a margin of 43 to 35 percent, with 19 percent calling it a tie. That may end up as the conventional wisdom. But the viewing public made it skewed, because 38 percent of ABC’s viewers were Republicans, 31 percent Democrats, and the rest independents. Adjust for that and it’s almost a tie. CBS’ poll – dismiss it, if you will – of only uncommitted voters found that 41 percent said Edwards won the debate, versus 28 percent who said Cheney won. Thirty-one percent said it was a tie. That makes more sense to me. In the ABC News poll, Bush supporters were particularly emphatic that Cheney won big. That makes sense to me psychologically – and it may help explain why so many conservatives viewed it as a huge Cheney win. They need to believe that right now, to keep their spirits up after last Thursday. The pundits also want to keep the interest alive and so may want to back Cheney to keep the race more interesting. My view is that Cheney undoubtedly fired up his base; but I doubt very much that he made any headway with swing voters, and may well have alienated many. Edwards helped Kerry tonight. I didn’t expect it; but I’m sticking with my judgment. My view is that Republican bias is making many believe Cheney did much better than he actually did. I’d already discounted the Daddy factor. But we’ll see, won’t we?

Well, I’ve now received dozens and dozens of emails and no one agrees with me. Many are offensive; most are just bewildered. Here are two of the more cogent:

I don’t know Andrew. As a registered Democrat here in Ohio, I agreed with you on the outcome of the first debate, but I thought Vice President Cheney mopped up tonight. I missed the roadkill that you apparently saw. I saw the common harbinger to roadkill; a deer in the headlights. That deer in the headlights was Senator Edwards. I don’t think this debate will matter much in the end, but it was clear to me that Edwards was destroyed. Is it too late to get Dick Gephardt on the ticket?

Then this one:

What debate were you watching? Cheney destroyed Edwards/Kerry on foreign policy, helped I must say by Gwen Ifill’s questions about Kerry’s “global test” and pie in the sky plan to convince Chirac to send troops to Iraq. When Cheney hammered at Kerry’s senate record and twists and turns, Edwards could say nothing except that Kerry had stood strong in a debate last week. This set up the body slam that a 90 minute debate can’t make up for a bad 20 year senate record! The first 45 minutes of the debate created a great platform for the rest of the week — focus on Kerry’s senate record. Apparently Bush will give a speech on Kerry’s record tomorrow. What will Kerry/Edwards talk about?? Haliburton?
Money Quote: “If you can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can you stand up to Al Qaeda!”
The second 45 minutes was more diffuse. I must say that the questions were not conducive to a good debate. The first question was about “poverty,” and not jobs or growth. There was no general question about health care. I felt sorry for Edwards who kept trying to shoe-horn health care answers into questions on legal reform, etc. Nor was there any general question about education, leaving Cheney to talk about it under the heading of poverty and Edwards to talk about it 15 minutes later. Two ships, a luxury liner and a speedboat, were passing in the night.

Obviously, I’m as bewildered as you are by this response. I’m in a tiny minority. But I wrote what I thought I saw. Can’t do anything else. Some of this – most of it, actually – has to be subjective. I should repeat: I expected Cheney to win easily. Maybe that prejudiced me. But I see little doubt that Edwards came off as by far the more appealing, persuasive and eloquent figure. No, it won’t matter much. But I’ll stick with my assessment.

WHEN CHENEY MET EDWARDS: Here’s a pic.

From the beginning of the debate, it seemed to me that the contrast was fundamental. Let’s start with superficials – because they do matter in debates. The only way to describe Cheney’s performance was exhausted. He looks drained. And you can see why. One of the least understood and reported aspects of the current administration is simply the enormous strain of the past four years. They have endured some of the most testing times any modern president and vice-president have had to encounter. And you can see the strain and exhaustion in both the two principals. I’m not criticizing; in fact, I’m empathizing. But the result is obvious: when confronted with the major issues they have been dealing with day in day out, issues they know intimately and have worked on endlessly, their response is simply what Cheney himself kept saying: “Where do I start?” They have become so enmeshed in running a war that they have become almost unable to articulate its goals and process – and at times seem resentful that they even have to. There was a tone of exasperation in much of Cheney’s wooden and often technical responses to political and moral questions. I can’t explain the incoherence except fatigue and an awareness deep inside that they have indeed screwed up in some critical respects, that it’s obvious to them as well as everyone else, and that they have lost the energy required to brazen their way through it. What I saw last night was a vice-president crumpling under the weight of onerous responsibility. My human response was to hope he’ll get some rest. My political response was to wonder why he simply couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the fundamental questions in front of him in ways that were easy to understand and redolent of conviction.

SNARL, SMILE: But, in fact, it was worse than that. He went down snarling. His personal attacks on Edwards were so brutal and so personal and so direct that I cannot believe that anyone but die-hard partisans would have warmed to them. Edwards’ criticisms, on the other hand, were tough but relatively indirect – he was always and constantly directing the answers to his own policies. Edwards, whom I’d thought would come of as a neophyte, was able to give answers that were clear and methodical and far better, in my view, than Kerry’s attempts to explain himself last Thursday. On substance, Cheney clearly had the better of the debate on Afghanistan; his criticisms of Kerry’s record were strong and detailed; his brutal assessment of Edwards’ attendance record was sharp – but too direct and brutal to win over swing voters. But on domestic policy, he was terrible. Again, he used the term “fiscal restraint,” but he gave no explanation for the unprecedented slide toward debt in the last four years. When asked to respond to a question about young black women with HIV, Cheney might as well have been asked about Martians. He had no response to the charges (largely new to me) about Halliburton. He had no solid response to the question of sufficient troops in Iraq or the capability of the coalition to guarantee national elections in January. He was weak on healthcare; and said that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ordered the legislature to change the state constitution! Huh? And, of course, he cannot disguise that he supports a president who would remove any legal protections for his own daughter’s relationship.

EDWARDS’ WOBBLES: Visually, Edwards’ face was neutral or smiling. Cheney barely cracked a smile in the entire debate, and, at times, seemed positively angry and bitter. The split-screen contrast made this even clearer. Edwards made little sense on Afghanistan; he wobbled on the “global test” issue; and he was completely at sea when asked to respond to the question that he was too inexperienced for office. Of course, that’s a hard question to answer without seeming defensive. But Edwards still failed. But he was brutally repetitive in making the Saddam-Osama contrast; he was equally strong in pinning the failure to find bin Laden on the administration; and he was the only candidate to speak in any meaningful way to the anxieties of ordinary people. I watched the debate again with a crowd of college students, at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. Maybe their flummoxed response to Cheney and obvious rapport with Edwards influenced my take. But I have to say I thought this was a more lop-sided victory than Thursday’s. And I write this without reading anyone else’s response or anyone else’s spin. On C-SPAN, Mickey just informed me that mine is not the conventional wisdom. I’ll be looking at the transcript soon and will be fisking some of it for tomorrow’s TNR. Stay tuned. Now to your emails …

Boy was I ever wrong. If last Thursday night’s debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate – just concluded – was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away. I have to do C-SPAN now, but stay tuned for more post-debate blogging in a little while.

More evidence that John Kerry’s wife is a political disaster. Here are several quotes from her yesterday about the war on terror. My favorites: “The Taliban is back running Afghanistan.” Huh? And then her argument against the war to depose Saddam: “No American boy or girl should lose their lives for oil.” Is this her husband’s position? Shouldn’t he be asked? Shouldn’t more people be aware of how far left the potential president’s wife is? Well, now they are.

Belmont Club does its best to rescue the Bush administration from Jerry Bremer’s gaffe – hastily retracted in a subsequent email. (Bremer was hoping for a big job in a Bush second term, after all. I’d say the chances of that just diminished.) Their point is that Bremer was only referring to the troop levels at the very beginning of the conflict – not the levels subsequently. The quote could be interpreted either way, so perhaps we should give Bremer the retroactive benefit of the doubt. Wretchard blames the Turks and the State Department for not allowing the Fourth Infantry Division to invade Iraq from the north. But it’s odd that this talking point has not been made today by the Bush people; amd wasn’t made at the time. Ken Mehlman was on CNN this afternoon, for example, arguing that the reason for the low troop levels was that the military commanders never asked for more. Even over at the Corner, no one has tried to spin the Bremer quote away (although Ledeen takes a swipe at Bremer himself). At the time, Rumsfeld’s response to the looting and chaos in Baghdad was not: “Wait till the 4ID gets there.” It was: “Stuff happens.” So you either blame the Turks, the military, the State Department, or Bremer, or, like Rumsfeld, you claim that nothing was awry and so there’s no reason to blame anyone. The important thing in this war is never, ever hold the president to account for anything. Remember? Somehow, I forgot.

I’ve been anticipating “Team America” for months and months. It may be even better than I’d hoped for. Hey, guys. Give me an ad!

More evidence of the corruption behind the U.N.’s food-for-oil program in Iraq. Saddam never had it so good – thanks to the French and Russians.

BULL MOOSE FOR KERRY: Marshall Wittmann, who ran the website ‘Bull Moose’ before leaving to work for John McCain, is now working at the DLC. And, as a Teddy Roosevelt fan and McCain Republican, he’s voting for Kerry. Here’s why. Money quote:

Anyone who was involved in the 2000 McCain campaign, as I was, knows exactly who is responsible for the “Swift boat” slime attack on Senator Kerry — in Bush World, all low roads lead to Rove.
When I was at the Christian Coalition, I witnessed first-hand the alliance of the deregulation, no-tax crowd with the religious conservatives. Ironically, the rank and file of the religious right are hardly the country club set. They are largely middle-class Americans who don’t rely on trust funds or dividend checks for their livelihoods. But the leaders of the religious right have betrayed their constituents by failing to champion such economic issues as family leave or access to health insurance, which would relieve the stresses on many working families. The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment. The religious right has consistently provided the ground troops, while the big-money men have gotten the goodies.
The realization that the religious right had essentially become a front for the money men of the Republican Party was a primary source of my disenchantment with that movement. And without a doubt, the GOP has merely become a vehicle for unbridled corporate power. Such a party cannot provide a home for a movement that strives for national greatness.

Deep down, this is probably what McCain believes as well.

The main criticisms this blog has directed at the conduct of the war have been the insufficient troop numbers and allowing the looting and disorder to spread after the liberation. Now comes Jerry Bremer to say exactly the same thing:

“We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground.”

That’s a big admission. Why doesn’t Edwards bring that up directly tonight with Cheney? And since it was so obvious so soon, why didn’t the administration do anything to change that policy once its failings had become so glaring? Pig-headedness? Ignorance? Hubris? Or merely Rumsfeld – shorthand for all three?

47 PERCENT: That’s Bush’s approval rating. It’s about as low as it can possibly get if he has a decent chance of getting re-elected. The first debate did for Kerry what 1980’s first debate did for Reagan: it reassured waverers that he has the ability to be president, especially in a national security crisis. The reason for Bush’s weakness? Money quote:

Asked what kind of job Mr. Bush had done in anticipating what would happen in Iraq as a result of the war, 59 percent said he had done a poor job and 34 percent said a good job. A slight majority, 52 percent, said the United States had been too quick to go to war in Iraq, compared with 37 percent who said the timing was about right.

A majority believes that Bush was wrong in the timing of the war and wrong in its execution. And the war is the pre-eminent issue in the campaign. Unless Bush reverses those judgments, he will lose.

PREDICTING TONIGHT: Well, I could easily be wrong, but I have a feeling Cheney will crush Edwards tonight. The format is God’s gift to Daddy. They’ll both be seated at a table, immediately allowing Cheney to do his assured, paternal, man-of-the-world schtick that makes me roll on my back and ask to have my tummy scratched. (Yes, I do think that Cheney is way sexier than Edwards. Not that you asked or anything.) Every time I’ve heard Edwards talk about foreign policy, I’ve winced – not because he’s some kind of U.N.-style liberal, but because he’s obviously winging it, hasn’t thought much about foreign policy, and seems miles away from thinking about anything like, er, strategy. Then again, Cheney’s record so far in this war has been unencouraging. I’ll be drinking a shot every time Edwards says Halliburton. And I’ll be fascinated to see how and if Cheney grapples with his president’s war on his own daughter’s dignity. (Stay tuned later tonight. I’ll be commenting for C-SPAN by phone from Philadelphia, and then doing my usual blog summary – and on TNR.)