I haven't checked in to see what the Big Pundits are saying about the second presidential debate. I'm guessing that Bush will get high marks for showing up, not being drunk, speaking in complete sentences and not visibly drooling on himself. That should be enough for our Potemkin press corps to consider the thing a draw, more-or-less.
The press corps' general approach to comparing the candidates was beautifully illustrated in this Tom Tomorrow cartoon. An interviewer bearing more than a passing resemblance to Tim Russert asks Kerry if light is a wave or a particle, and Kerry explains that according to quantum mechanics, it has the characteristics of both. The Big Pundits then trash him for flip-flopping and not being able to take a stand.
Then the interviewer asks Bush to spell "cat," to which he replies "Oh gee -- you're really putting me on the spot! Lot of pressure here! Wish you'd given me this on in advance! Let's see ... K-A-T?" And the Big Pundits rush to put the best face on it, with things like, "The important thing is that he says what he believes! That's real leadership!"
I should point out that this cartoon is from last July; people who were paying attention didn't need the debates to see this contrast. But I was reminded of this cartoon last night when I heard this exchange, as they were responding to a question from audience member Sarah Degenhart on abortion, including the ban of so-called "partial birth abortion" (a polemical description successfully introduced by the anti-abortionists):
KERRY: Well, again, the president just said, categorically, my opponent is against this, my opponent is against that. You know, it's just not that simple. No, I'm not.
I'm against the partial-birth abortion, but you've got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother. ...
KERRY: Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I'm not going to require a 16-or 17-year-old kid who's been raped by her father and who's pregnant to have to notify her father. So you got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn't have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help, I voted against it. It's never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe.
GIBSON: And 30 seconds, Mr. President.
[BUSH]: Well, it's pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no?
And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no. And that's just the way it is. That's a vote. It came right up. It's clear for everybody to see. And as I said: You can run but you can't hide the reality.
(That last Bush quotation is erroneously labeled "Kerry" in the Washington Post transcript I linked, but it was Bush that said it.)
This is an issue that calls for "nuance," and most people who aren't dyed-in-the-wool Christian Rightists realized that it is a complicated and difficult issue. But our pitiful press corps decided after the 9/11 attacks that they needed to portray the president as a Strong Leader. And so they learned to portray his simple-minded, dogmatic and even false declarations as evidence of strength and determination, while "blipping" over some important changes of position on his part, as on the Homeland Security Department.
There were a number of issues covered in the debate, including terrorism and Al Qaeda, the Iraq War, North Korea and Iran (Bush used his "axis of evil" phrase again), relations with European allies, health care, jobs, taxes, abortion, the appointment of judges.
Viewing it from the perspective of a Kerry partisan, I was satisfied with the results. Kerry made strong points about the Iraq War being a mess and offering himself as a more plausible alternative to finding a solution compared to Bush's "more of the same." It's hard to imagine how anybody in their right mind could want "more of the same" in the Iraq War, so I think that's a very effective point.
Bush was more articulate than in the first debate, and didn't sound quite so mechanical in repeating his preferred talking points. But Iraq is a mess. The occupation is a mess. It's hard to see how Bush's defensiveness and repetition of imaginary factoids from Republican Party press releases is going to be reassuring to anyone but committed Republicans. And, as Kerry took pains to point out more than once, a number of leading Republican Senators are calling Bush on his shortcomings in the Iraq War.
This comment was characteristic of Bush's approach, including the attempt to reassert that Iraq War=terrorism=9/11:
I don't see how the Iraqis are going to have confidence in the American president if all they hear is that it was a mistake to be there in the first place.
This war is a long, long war, and it requires steadfast determination and it requires a complete understanding that we not only chase down Al Qaida but we disrupt terrorist safe havens as well as people who could provide the terrorists with support.
The first part comes off as whiny, especially since everyone but Fox News addicts knows that the information about Iraqi WMDs was mistaken, to put the most generous interpretation on the WMD fraud.
The second part is a reminder of how desperately Bush is trying to morph the Iraq War into the GWOT (global war on terrorism) in people's minds. But when he was speaking about the Iraq War, as he was here, and pops out with, "This war is a long, long war...", I'm sure many viewers experienced it as a jarring statement. The Iraq War is going to be a long, long war under the Bush approach. But it probably wasn't the cleverest thing to toss that concept out there in the way he did.
It was odd, though not terribly surprising, that Bush didn't make more of an attempt to address the findings of the Duelfer report on the non-existence of Iraqi WMDs and just try to bluff his way through it. If he were capable of addressing the American people and saying that he realizes that the WMDs that were the justification for the war were not there, and that this raises legitimate questions in the minds of many voters and our allies, and then address that in some kind of credible way, I think people would respect that more than his "charge straight ahead" attitude.
On the other hand, it's such a big screw-up, maybe there is no credible way he could address that and still hope to be elected. So maybe bluffing it out is the best he can do. It didn't help in that regard that the very last question to Bush was asking him to admit if he had made any decisions that he thought in retrospect were mistakes. To anyone but those who already adore him, his answer had to come off as narcissistic and defensive:
But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions, because I think they're right.
That's really what you're -- when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about. They're trying to say, "Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?" And the answer is, "Absolutely not." It was the right decision. ...
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.
Anyone less convinced than Bush of his own infallibility would have been able to come up with at least a vague statement about how, knowing what we do now, that he wishes he had done this or that to move more aggressively against Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 or something like that.
It seems to me that overall, Kerry managed to raise some key questions about Bush's mishandling of the Iraq War and the fight against Al Qaeda, and to call Bush's credibility on major policy issues into question. I'm convinced that the Iraq War is the key issue in this campaign, but Kerry's statements on health care and jobs were no doubt helpful to him, and a basis on which he can build for the domestic issues slated to be the topic for the third and final debate. Being able to remind the voters that he is pro-choice on abortion while Bush tries to portray himself as rigidly, dogmatically anti-abortion was also a boost for Kerry.
Bush defended himself forcefully. But this debate illustrates the weakness of the "flip-flop" argument against Kerry which Bush's campaign has emphasized so much. Kerry has come off in the debates as strong, sensible and very confident in throwing the "flip-flop" charges back into Bush's face.
The point of that charge was to invite voters to interpret Kerry, who is really a new face to most voters, as being vague, uncertain and too weak to defend America against The Terrorists. But Kerry doesn't lend himself well to that interpretation. And it put Bush in the position in the debates of constantly having to ridicule Kerry, and to do it with forced interpretations of his positions.
The result is that in both debates, he came off as defensive, although he was obviously an aggressive and articulate campaigner in the second one. But in neither of them did he look like the heroic Bush the Magnificent, Liberator of Peoples and the Mighty Sword of Justice, that his campaign wanted people to see.
The two debates in which national security issues were featured were his best chance to do that. In the final debate, he will have to be a partisan trying to convince the voters why protecting crooked doctors and incompetent HMOs from lawsuits by patients who have been hurt by malpractice will solve every health care problem of the country. And how prosperity and more jobs are just around the corner when the wealthiest Americans get around to spending more of their huge tax cuts. Kerry has a home-field advantage on those issues.
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