I’d like to jot my thoughts down before they are skewed by the slew of analysis and instant polls that is sure to follow.
I’m more or less a political nut, and even I found the debate boring. The stakes were much lower, and it was more or less a rehash of previous arguments against each other. I wasn’t expecting a “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment. In fact, given the gravitas this series of debates has taken, I think such a line would sound inappropriate and be ineffective. But the night did more to reinforce the themes for each party (e.g. “John Kerry isn’t a capable leader”; “George Bush isn’t honest with the public”) than establish any new ground.
As a performance, I think Dick Cheney did better than John Edwards, particularly in the first 1/6 of the debate where I thought he was crushing Edwards. The debate reminded me of the first one between Kerry and Bush, except it was Cheney landing the jobs and putting a new spin on old arguments, and Edwards looking inexperienced and repeating the same stock phrases.
What happened is that Cheney would give a two-minute answer, lie or misrepresent the facts five or six times in his answer, and then the question would be passed off to Edwards, who had 90 seconds to respond, challenged zero to one of Cheney’s statements, and repeated the same phrases Kerry said in the debate. Edwards came off in the beginning as not having confidence in his own words. Cheney looked knowledgable and better prepared.
But after the first 15 min. or so, Edwards collected himself and began responding to Cheney’s attacks with good rebuttals and attacks on his own. He did a few smart things in the debate. One, and some people may poke fun at Edwards for doing this, he referred a few times to how Kerry did in the debate last week.
Maybe I’m deluding myself with a rationalization, but I think this was a good move. Cheney is a better debater and probably more intellectually sharp than Edwards. He’s like the evil John Kerry. The best Edwards could hope for is a tie, which I think he did well enough to have the media call it as such, that is, until 17 minutes from now when the absolutely accurate instant polls come out.
But in case people view Cheney as having put on a more convincing performance, Edwards rightly reminded people that the real question isn’t which of them is the better debater, or would make the better Vice-President. It’s, “Does John Kerry have what it takes to become the next President of the United States?” and the last debate reflected very favorably towards Kerry in regards to this question. It’s kind of like mentioning 9/11 every minute, except for a positive effect rather than a negative one.
Bush’s approval ratings are around 50%. On some level, I have to hope that even dumb people realize that the reason he is attacking Kerry so ferociously is because he can’t run on his own record. The main thing stopping undecided voters who aren’t satisfied with Bush from switching to Kerry is the question, “Can Kerry do the job?” and reminding that Kerry answered that question in part in the first debate is a good strategy.
The second smart think Edwards did was hammer home the issue of being honest with the American people and the Bush administration’s failure to acknowledge the current situation in Iraq. While I think it’s detrimental to the long-term interests of any politician to claim he or she will tell the truth, it’s great in the short run because there is a real disconnect between what has been happening in Iraq for the last year and what the President has been telling us.
Furthermore, Cheney lied his ass off during the debate. Much more so than Edwards. I’m too cynical to think that your average undecided voter picked up on it during the debate, but perhaps if the media does a decent job fact-checking and the Democrats in publicizing Cheney’s misleading or false statements, the coverage will lend support to the idea that the Bush Administration has a problem with telling the truth.
I’m not hopeful this will be the case. What Cheney said was mild compared to previous and amazingly recent claims of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 9/11 and Iraq, and he’s received little backlash for those statements, so I don’t think this time will be much different.
On a side note, I’d like to toot my own horn for pointing out in a previous post why the Kerry campaign has taken to repeatedly saying there is no operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, as John Edwards did during the debate.
To sum up, I think Cheney’s natural speaking abilities and ability to lie in a believable way gave him an edge, but John Edwards for the most part held his own and definitely did much better than Lieberman in the 2000 VP debate. The best news for the Kerry campaign is that Bush is back on stage this Friday (although Bush typically excels at town hall meetings, similar to how they were Clinton’s best arena).