Post-Debate Analysis

1) I thought Kerry did a really great job tonight. Not with reference to the elusive "swing voter" that will decide this election. But with me. Kerry already has my vote locked up just by virtue of being an alternative to George W. Bush. But I have often felt that he doesn't "get it." Of course there were still answers which seemed less perfect than I would have given... but isn't that always the way with us pathologically self-righteous folks?... but on balance, Kerry made me feel much better about supporting his candidacy. I do have reservations and qualms, but Kerry's arguments struck me as clear, forceful and (most importantly) correct. He already had my vote, but Kerry won my esteem this evening.

2) I don't know what others will think of it, but I thought Bush was not at his best this evening. He seemed flustered and aggravated. I thought Kerry did a great job of taking the "flip-flop" criticism head-on and defusing it. I thought Bush did a mediocre job of acknowledging it. Kerry would claim, "there's no inconsistency here" and then articulate a critique of the president's policies which both acknowledged his apparent inconsistency, but made his argument comprehensible (something he often fails to do). I really liked his line, "I may have talked about the war poorly, but that's far different than fighting it poorly." Not only does this reverse Bush's m/o ("Hey, I may talk bad, but I lead good") it also directly acknowledged Bush's criticisms and defused them. But Bush kept levelling the same charge as if he wasn't even in the same room as his opponent. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I hope his failure to even engage the words of a man twenty-feet away from him highlighted the hollowness of his campaign's slurs against Kerry. Given a chance to prove himself, Kerry took the criticisms head on and faced them. Bush was left spinning his wheels. I may also consider that a metaphor for larger issues, but I hope it resonated and, as one of my fellow debate-watchers put it, "defused the flip-flop question."

3) Since I was watching through the marvels of TiVo (great service) I got to see various post-debate commentary as well. CNN was absurdly off-base, and by comparison Fox was a model of journalistic integrity. CNN provided a "fact-checker" who cited three Kerry "factual inaccuracies" but only one Bush inaccuracy. However, the "fact checks" were bizarre. One, for example, was "Kerry claims we're not searching for Osama bin Laden with enough manpower in Afghanistan, where he's likely to be, when in fact, he's in Pakistan." Now, if CNN knows bin Laden's whereabouts, then I want to know why they haven't told anyone else. Otherwise, I presume his whereabouts are unknown and the reason why we do have 20,000 troops in south-eastern Afghanistan looking for him is that we presume he might be there. Then, they got feedback from Mike McCurry for the Democrats and Karen Hughes for the Republicans. Hughes was perfectly miked while Mike McCurry couldn't be heard, and they were forced to abandon the interview and offer no Democratic counterpoint. Surely there was nothing more sinister than a technical error. But it was a technical error that shouldn't have been deemed excusable. They had a journalistic obligation to give both sides airtime, and just cutting off McCurry without finding a way to mike him so he was audible strikes me as inexcusable. Tommy Franks was given twice as much airtime as Wesley Clarke and asked several leading questions about his response to Kerry's charges of his own personal incompetence (a highly leading way of framing the question) by Wolf Blitzer. All in all, I found it outrageous.

4) By contrast, FOX seemed far more grounded in reality. Four commentators gave feedback, two Republican, two Democrat, all audible. Bill Kristol, not exactly a faux conservative was quite frank in his assessment of Bush's performance - "frankly, he can sell his policies better, and has in the past." Sure, there was spirited debate about the relative merits of each candidate's performance. But it was at least grounded in reality.

5) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had a great post-election episode. I especially liked the interview with Rudy Giuliani, in which Stewart made the great, maddeningly unspoken point of the evening, as Giuliani talked about the need to "disarm Saddam." "Given he turned out not to have any weapons, wasn't he already, y'know, disarmed?" Giuliani's response was an outrage that makes a mockery of the very idea of reasoned democratic debate - "Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction." I'm sorry to break this, but when Bush argued that the threat of WMD from Saddam was so grave we were forced to invade immediately, nobody in their right mind believed he was talking about the blood in Saddam's veins. He was talking about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Saddam was a madman who would have had to be dealt with eventually. But to say we "disarmed" him is to stretch the meaning of the term to the breaking point, then snap it in two.