prog | (no subject)

I need to go to sleep, but I'll note that, as I'm writing this, most of the mainstream media seem to be handing this one to Kerry. I hope this is still true when I wake up tomorrow morning.

In format, it seemed better than I was expecting. Both candidates nudged the rules aside to make rebuttals (though GWB did it far more often) and the moderator (Jim Lehrer) rolled with it, giving them 30 seconds if they chose to start in. And on two or three occasions, he'd ask both candidates to confirm his own understanding of how they stood on a particular issue, and clarify if needed. So, thankfully, it wasn't quite the interleaved stump speeches that I had been fearing.

Bush's main point, as far as the C-in-C's role, seems to be: Conviction is more important than truth. It felt like he said "mixed messages" at least a dozen times, and at a couple of points seemed to talk down to Kerry, implying that it was simply mathematically impossible for him to lead any armies or make international alliances because he's already on the record as doubting current U.S. policy, and therefore nobody will ever want to be his friend. I wish that Kerry had isolated this point and attacked it straight-on.

Bush stung Kerry good at one point, I thought, playing off his "global test" line (whether or not you agree with that). But later, I was expecting him to smash Kerry's surprisingly strong words about dismantling new U.S. nuke programs right back in his face, but he let that go.

The lowest point in the debate for Bush, where I bet he lost a lot of people, came when the president of the United States leaned into the camera, visibly upset, and told his audience -- us -- "You'd better elect a president who..." Whoah. You have no place to take that tone with me, dude.

Maybe the most interesting point involved Kerry and Bush seizing the very concrete issue of how best to treat with North Korea and pulled in opposite directions, with both parties clearly stating why they felt the way they did. I sort of wish more of the debate were like that.

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You know what this has come down to, for the insane undecideds?

Is it stubborness or conviction?
And is it flip-flopping or intelligent reaction to a changing world?

This it tangential, but I feel it's worth mentioning: I sleep with one of those insane undecideds, and while I won't necessarily defend either his sanity or his undecidedness, I want to point out that he's not undecided between Bush and Kerry; he's undecided between Kerry and not voting/some write-in candidate. His issue isn't that he can't decide who he likes more; it's that he can't decide whether he likes Kerry enough to bother actually voting for him (and not because he's a flip-flopper, but simply because he's a politician, with all the schmoozing and game-playing that implies). I suspect that's true of a lot of undecideds, and it makes Kerry's challenge of convincing them rather different.