Posted on 10/01/2004 3:09:50 PM PDT by Steven W.
Hugh on fire with the correct analysis on last night's debate.
Kerry on the stump said to be on the offense. Yes he seems to be. He will get cocky and exagger-no I mean lie about something in a moment of self agrandizement. We will be watching.
By the way will someone please tell me if I heard Kerry correctly when on 2 occasions last night he critisized the President for first securing the oil refineries and left nuclear facilities unguarded. I heard him make this reference twice. What NUCLEAR FACILITIES?
Also what kerry will bring to the next 2 debates is an even larger vision of grandeur. He's too elitist to realize that humble is the name of the game right now.
This is why people are frustrated with Bush - he failed to take Kerry to task for his glib and superficial treatment of the monumental world responsibilities faced by the presidential office.
It's like the difference between all the dot.com business plans blithely predicting huge sales increases vs. people who actually have been there now how hard it is to run a business.
Kerry should have been reprimanded for his immature and emotional play to sentiment, as if words mean more than deeds.
Bush missed his chance in front of 60m people. Now, we all have to pitch in and make sure the election is framed by Kerry's comments.
Beldar's take on the first debate
Neither candidate screwed up. Kerry needed a Bush screwup, a huge gaffe, to change the dynamics of the race, and it didn't happen. Thus in the big picture, Bush won. That's true regardless of whether you grade Bush with a "B" and Kerry a "B+" or vice versa. Both candidates crossed the finish line standing; and I think that means Bush will win the election, regardless of how you may "score" this debate on "points" and in isolation.
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Small pictures and impressions:
I think Sen. Kerry was at his very best tonight — much better than he was in any of the Democratic primary debates, and in the perfect, very formal and isolated-from-humanity environment to show off his strengths to their best advantage. The format was one where the smartest kid in the class gets to show off, with nobody humming "Hail to the Chief" on a kazoo, and with none of the human interactions that make him look so robotic and inhuman.
Probably because of that, his mannerisms that annoy me the most were fairly muted. But they could not be wholly extinguished. Ask yourself this question: Wouldn't it have been a huge home run for John Kerry if he could have gone through this entire debate with the self-discipline never to mention his Vietnam service? To the extent that his combat service is going to favorably influence some subset of the voting public, hasn't he already gotten the full benefit of that history? And yet, there he is — incapable of holding back the impulse to say, again and again, in effect, "Do you know who I am? You realize, don't you, that I served in Vietnam?" I don't know whether it's two percent or ten percent or thirty percent of the "undecided" or "swing" voters, but some percentage of those voters who are currently leaning Bush and might otherwise might have ended their viewing of this debate by saying, "Kerry's not so bad," were shaking their heads at every Vietnam allusion and muttering the word that I think will doom Kerry's chances for election: "Phony."
Dubya was simply himself. What is important — not shocking or surprising, but important — is how different today's Dubya is from the 2000 election version of himself; and of course, the transformation was 9/11. In contrast to the candidate from 2000, this is a guy who has a very clear and consistent picture of what being the President is all about.
He does not have, and never has had — and has looked in the past (e.g., in 2000) at his worst when trying to pretend to have — the Clintonian policy-wonk's command of subpoints and figures and verbal arguments with Roman numeral signposts going from III to III-A to III-A(4)(b)(vii). When he makes successive supporting points, you can always count them on one hand and usually have a digit or two left over. In fact, stylistically, I wish he would have transcended the format — not felt the need to keep talking until the yellow light flashed on — and repeated himself less. (Man, what a contrast that would have been, because when Kerry speaks, you can see behind his eyes how he's doing a mental multitasking to plot how many more points he'll have time to score before the buzzer sounds.)
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Final aside: What a difference this debate was from any of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, and from some of the run-up to this one! Nobody's going to be writing tonight or tomorrow about anybody's audible sighs or invasions of personal space, or about Kerry's tan. The Bush-is-a-chimp crowd are posting gleefully now about "moo-lahs" and "nukular," but that's an exercise of political masturbation for them at this point, a self-pleasing ritual they're bound to engage in that has no connection to the substance of anything that happened beyond the fact that Dubya showed up and spoke aloud for a while.
For everyone else, this was a serious exercise appropriate to a nation at war, a nation from which 9/11 has banished, at moments like these, most of the frivolities that we had the luxury and innocence in which to engage ourselves back in 2000. But I don't think this debate changed any votes that were already strongly intentioned, nor — despite what I think was an optimal performance, as good as Kerry's capable of giving, in the best possible format for him — do I think it is likely to have swayed many genuinely undecided folks in a different direction than they were already leaning.
Posted by Beldar (bledarblogs.com)
The average unpolitical voter very likely didn't bother watching last night, at least not entirely. They'll make there judgement on the spin. Fortunately, Kerry talked out of both sides of his mouth as much as expected last night. That, along with all the 'true Kerry crap' like 'global test, nuclear fuel for Iran, the list goes on, should provide plenty to hammer him with.
The one mom was so excited to tell me about all the Bush/Cheney yard signs she was seeing in the burbs outside of Philly *L*
Now, if only I could get my 74 yr old Mom's light bulb to come on....sigh...
LVM
" Krauthammer has been wrong before and is wrong this time, too."
CK was adamantly opposed to the Swift Vets, when they first appeared.
Good point. I think they'll do the ol' good cop-bad cop. Bush, in his quiet, gracious way, will be the good cop. He will compliment Kerry, disagree with Kerry's stance, but mostly talk about all of the successes of his presidency thus far.
Cheney will kick a** and take names. My only concern, not being overly familiar with Edwards (who is?! he's INVISIBLE!), is that Edwards' background as a(nother) lawyer will allow him to slither out from under the truth Cheney will try to hammer home.
On another note, what *lawyer* have we in the US ever elected or run for president that WASN'T a complete tool?
Yes, but stupid people don't know that.
To play devil's advocate here, I assume that Krauthammer was looking at it from the perspective of how the average viewer who was undecided or open to switching a vote might have seen it -- not necessarily how he saw it.
I find it hard to give an honest assessment of that, to put myself in those shoes, because there is absolutely nothing W could say or do to make me vote for Kerry. I can't even listen to the man, it's like fingernails down a blackboard. So I think I am completely incapable of giving a realistic assessment of that debate.
That rule only applies to the DNC and the RNC. An independent 527 group is perfectly within its rights to use those clips.
Thanks for the impressions. I think I'll and print those out on a homemade sign to put in the back window of my truck.
This debate will be forgotten by Monday, but "global test" will live larger than Kerry until November 2. Bet on it. Ultimately substance trumps style.
Knowing sKerry he MISSED the vote, because he was off getting a manicure.
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