Round Two

I wanted to blog about the debate last night, but I didn’t have much time. It seems almost pointless to post about it tonight, since by now almost everyone in Blogistan has had their say, and probably have said much of what I’m about to say. But here goes. Never let it be said that I know when to shut up.

First, the format. Some people liked it. I thought it tended to allow too many softball questions. There were a few that I thought were good, but most were just too non-substantive. And then there was the guy who basically asked Kerry if he could dumb down his talk by, “looking into the camera and speaking in plain, non-equivocal language.” Have Americans really gotten to the point where they prefer a monosyllabic president? I’ve never found Kerry that difficult to understand. What was that guy’s problem? Then there was the woman toward the end who asked the question about abortion. What is me or did the beatific look on her face while Bush was speaking betray her not-so-undecided status, in an audience of “voters who haven’t made up their minds”?

The other thing that concerned me about the format was that it might play to Bush’s strengths (whatever they are), or at the very least play less on his weaknesses than the first debate. However, there was also the likelihood that facing an audience that wasn’t hand-picked by his staff and that wasn’t made up entirely of ardent supporters might cause Bush to come unhinged.

My initial impression was that someone forgot to give Bush his medication before last night’s debate. Compare to what I saw last night, I almost prefer the nearly-comatose Bush of the first debate. He was a lot more animated. Unfortunately, for Bush, animated also seem to include angry. And an animated, angry Bush is just annoying. If nothing else, waiting until the day after allows me to verify that I’m not the only one who thought so.

Several answers brought Bush’s emotions to the surface, for better or worse, as he sought to curb Kerry’s momentum.

The question that hung over the second of their three debates was whether Bush’s aggressive, hyper style was an effective tool or a damaging habit — an extension of his disastrous first debate performance. Reviews were mixed.

Bush “seemed wound a bit too tight. He was a little like Nixon — sort of jumping out of his suit,” said David Niven, political science professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. “He looked bad on the TV close-ups.”

Bush cut down on the antics Friday night, but didn’t eliminate them.

Early in the debate, Kerry quoted Republican senators expressing concern about Iraq. Television cameras caught Bush laughing to himself, then smirking, and finally giving a quick wink to somebody in the crowd.

…He and Kerry repeatedly jumped from their stools to respond, wandering the red-carpeted stage to make their points. Bush was the most aggressive, at one point overrunning moderator Charles Gibson’s attempt to pose a question after Kerry said he was “not going to go alone like this president did” in Iraq.

“I’ve got to answer this,” Bush said, cutting off Gibson, then indignantly responded to Kerry. “You tell Tony Blair (news – web sites) we’re going alone.”

Often, Bush’s voice rose to nearly a shout. Was is too much? That’s in the eye of the beholder.

If you don’t believe that, you can see an example of your president nearly flipping out, via Oliver Willis. At some point I asked myself, “why is this guy so pissed off?” Of course, I’d be pissed off to if it’d been proven that I took the country into a disastrous war when I was either dead wrong or lying about the reasons for going. And, by the way, what is his fixation with Poland about?

That near explosion wasn’t the worst of Bush’s performance. One of the best questions of the evening came from a voter who asked Bush if he could name three mistakes he’d made during his term in office. Guess what. He couldn’t. This was the best he could do.

Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV.

(LAUGHTER)

But history will look back, and I’m fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration, because the president makes the decisions, the president has to take the responsibility.

And again, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

One of the uncommitted voters in the audience sensibly asked President Bush to name three mistakes he’d made in office, and what he had done to remedy the damage. Mr. Bush declined to list even one, and instead launched into an impassioned defense of the invasion of Iraq as a good idea. The president’s insistence on defending his decision to go into Iraq seemed increasingly bizarre in a week when his own investigators reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and when his own secretary of defense acknowledged that there was no serious evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Even worse, the president’s refusal to come up with even a minor error – apart from saying that he might have made some unspecified appointments that he now regretted – underscores his inability to respond to failure in any way except by insisting over and over again that his original decision was right.

Kerry, to his credit, jumped right on it.

“Do we want leadership as it’s called that can’t face reality and admit mistakes or do we want leadership that sees the truth and tells the truth to the American people?” Kerry asked, shouting in a hoarse voice in a performance a world removed from the prosecutorial style he adopted in the debate.

“For me, the most stunning moment of the whole evening was when George Bush (news – web sites) was asked to name three mistakes that he has made … and the President couldn’t even name one mistake.”

That’s not to say there weren’t Kerry moments that made me wince a bit. I was particularly concerned with how he handled the questions on stem cells and abortion. What worried me was that there was no way he could answer these questions without losing a few people, but then it occured to me that in the grand scheme of voting Americans, the people Kerry might lose on the questions are ones he isn’t like to to get in the first place. In politics there are three kinds of voters: the ones on your side (the ones you’ve got), the ones not on your side (the ones you’re never going to get), and the ones that are still gettable. Anyone who is going to make their decision based on those two issues is probably in one of the first two categories already.

The other Kerry moment that had me holding my breath was when he was talking about his plan to give a tax cut only to those making less than $200K annually. He paused and said something like “from looking around this room, I can guess that…” and I thought he was about to look down his nose and declare the qudience a roomful of blatantly obvious bumpkins. But, fortunately, he cleaned it up and said the only folks not getting a tax cut on his plan would be the president, himself, and the moderator.

There was one moment when I was practically trying to feed Kerry lines through the television, including one question in which he was asked, or perhaps it was that Bush stated, that if Kerry had been president Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Kerry began his answer by saying “not necessarily,” but I wanted him to follow that with “but there are more than 1000 young American men and women who would probably be alive and with their families right now.” And I might have added 10,000 Iraqi civilians for whom the same might be said. But Kerry let that one go.

The other thing that worried me about Kerry’s performance was something the hubby mentioned as Kerry was rattling off his list of supporters from the military. Quoth the hubby, “he can’t quite surpress his inner ‘A student’.” There were moments when that worried me, even though Kerry managed to restrain himself on the “nuance thing” and kept it simple most of the time. If polls are any indication, there are a lot of Americans who prefer that their president not be too smart. So far, it looks like in the debates he at least learned his lesson from Al Gore’s exasperated sighs in the 2000 presidential debate — he’s avoided looking like an exasperated know-it-all, which seems to irritate a nation made up largely of “C students.”

Overall, I think Bush helped himself a little, but not much, and not enough to completley regain the ground he lost in the first debate. On the other hand, Kerry held the ground he gained from the previous debate, and may have even gained a little more ground simply by continuing to look presidential. So, while it comes close to being a draw, I’d still have to put this one down as a win for Kerry.