Do I think GWB won this debate? Yea, I do.
He seemed relaxed and Presidential. Many times after [[wp:John Kerry|Kerry]] would put forth a “plan” [[wp:George Bush|Bush]] would respond and you got the impression that he knew the people, players and personalities involved and he knew that the Kerry plan wouldn’t fly though it seemed good on paper.
The Kerry campaign relies on a single message. They want you to believe that GWB is too ignorant, too much of a hick and too much of a cowboy to see the obvious answers. They need you to believe that he has consistently made the dumb choices while there was a simple, obvious and “right” option.
What the country saw was a President who far from being ignorant of the options Kerry proposed knew them, and knew why they wouldn’t work. GWB gave the impression not that he was a stupid gunslinger that keeps ignoring the “obvious” answer but rather he is a man who knows the options and has made unpopular choices.
Once that happens, Kerry has problems. Once someone looks deeper than the sound bytes or has to look into the issues and not their dislike of GWB they see that Kerry is lost. Three examples come to mind:
- The “world court”. Kerry loves that one. He says over and over that the President is pissing off the world by not joining it and that we should have. It sounds like a good idea … till you think about it. Once you do you see what GWB means when he says he has no intention of putting American servicemen subject to the decisions of non-US law and a court that is unaccountable and politically driven. Once you look past the sound byte you see the problem is complex.
And once the problem is acknowledged to be complex Kerry looks less and less like the right choice to me.
- North Korea – the idea of “bilateral talks” sounds so good if you’re a Senator who desperately (it seems) wants to get the world to like you. But the reality is that it’s a bad idea. Kerry tried to make it seem like Bush was to stupid or arrogant to do it and Bush simply said “I know what would happen, the Chinese would walk out and we need their leverage”. That is the answer of a thinking man who understands the people and the situation – not a cowboy.
- The most telling in my mind. When President Bush mentioned that “the enemy attacked us” Kerry tried to “zing” him by saying “Iraq didn’t attack us, Al Queda did” as if Bush was too stupid to knw this. Bush responded that of course he knows that – but that a war on terror is a complex thing that is fought on many fronts.
In other words, the idea that Bush doesn’t understand the situation and is to arrogant to see the obvious solutions feel apart totally.
I think the next 12 hours will be a lot of talk form the media about how well Kerry did – but they are for the most part desperate to try and support him (CBS is only the most obvious example) and the fairly rabid Democratic Underground folks have a pretty well organized system to flood the online polls and call into talk shows. It will certainly SEEM like a win for John.
It isn’t… time will tell.