My Take on the First Debate
I think both Bush and Kerry did pretty well, both had especially good moments, and I wouldn't call one a clear winner. Kerry surprised me, early on, with his focus and his eagerness. He was ready for the charges of flip-floppery, and he met them rather effectively. Later in the debate he started to fade. He reverted at moments, mostly later on, and in his closing remarks, to that long-faced hollow cartoon of a statesman whose body seems to break into several elongated polygons, each obeying some different keplerian principle of motion while his voice bobs up and down on predictable little waves of inflection, conveying equally predictable truisms.
[One wonders at those moments when Kerry goes "bland cartoon" whether there isn't some quick, Gallic intelligence that he is suppressing—some great ball of nuance, the knowledge of some inscrutable web of causality that he sees but knows, in his brain of brains, that he can't tell us about; because if he were to try, the good ole boy at the other podium would smirk, and then smash his opponent's little menagerie of subtle thoughts with the blunt instruments of "faith" and "resolve."]
But there were many moments when Kerry, alternatively, looked younger than I've ever seen him, and hungrier, and sharper. He will never have that good ole boy cache of course, but he broke down his responses into trenchant points, hitting them again and again, and at moments the president seemed to be reeling.
Kerry used much more action-oriented language, more verbs and less verbiage than I've ever heard from him. He seemed smart without seeming wonkish or pedantic (Al Gore). One thing seems certain to me—the American voters have never heard Kerry's Iraq position defended with this gusto, and at times he made Bush's critique of that position (the flip-flop charges) sound downright "political."
Kerry did indeed "charge the beach" as some had predicted. He took Bush to task on the very issues (strong on homeland security, on hunting down terrorists, on nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea) that Bush sees as his issues. At moments Kerry managed to make Bush seem less like a strong commander in chief, a notable feat. By invoking the current and formal generals and civilian officials who oppose Bush's way of waging war, including a reference to why Bush pere refused to go into Baghdad over a decade ago, Kerry made Bush fils sound, as my friend Jim just IM'd from Austin, like "it's just him and the Rove machine." And Kerry's line about how the president had "outsourced the job [of catching Bin Laden] to Afghan warlords" was a cheap rhetorical gut punch that even Rove must have admired.
Now to Bush. Bush started slowly, faltering and stopping to recover his place. We all expected this; doesn't usually hurt him in the view of his core audiences for reasons that are well known. I thought that his expressions while listening to Kerry were vintage "exasperated chimp." One wonders what goes through his mind. He looks incredibly vulnerable to me in these moments, but then he takes the floor and the language comes...haltingly, but it comes nonetheless, and he recovers his cadence and confidence.
I think he got stronger as the debate moved to its latter stages, and his closing statement easily trumped Kerry's. Even the "word searches" that Bush performed several times (pausing, looking down, awkward silences) don't seem to hurt him much. In fact, we hang on his every word because we don't know what's going to come next, or if he's going to be able to maintain coherency. Of course he usually does. While he's not capable of those nicely nested clauses that Kerry windsurfs across with his baritone warble, he does find a word that fits his purposes; and even if it's an alternative word that injures eloquence, it rarely does harm to his meaning.
Bush sounds sincere because it is sincerely hard for him to focus and produce connected sentences. The edges of his sentences and clauses are not well shaped and one suspects something similar of his thoughts. His arguments don't flow from premises to evidence to conclusions. He starts not with an assessment of the empirical data, but with a scrutiny of his own "heart"; or his "heart of hearts" where reside his "core beliefs." What arguments there are circulate around that heart.
Neither speaker can display empathy convincingly, like Reagan or Clinton. Kerry is smart to not even try. Bush tries, and he may score points with evangelicals for his conspicuous remark about praying with a bereaved widow, but he doesn't get any points for telling the story in a heartfelt way. It seems to me that Bush's heart, which he invokes often, is not the malleable heart of one who feels what others feel, but the resolute heart of a warrior who knows his cause is just. He is passionate, more so than Kerry (before tonight anyway), but it is a passion more apt to display sanguinity than sympathy.
- My advice for Kerry for next week:
- Keep up the pace and the focus (make that water a "smart" water—it's all clear in the bottle). And don't ever, ever, ever, give Bush ammunition like "pass the global test"! Using phrases like that plays to one of Bush's strengths. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says it best:
Where he [Bush] was strong were those few times in which he mobilized what I think is one of his true strengths: an ability to keep his ears open to turns of phrase which can be used against his opponent, ones that allow him to cast himself as a no-nonsense tough-guy and his opponent as either feckless or weak. To me, it's an ear for the cadence of a rancid populism. But that's a subjective view. The relevant point is that it is a strength.
So again, don't give him the ammo!
- My advice for Bush for next week:
- Keep hitting the points about Kerry sending mixed messages to both troops and terrorists. Also, the public doesn't expect you to be perfect, but people do expect you to level with them. And the standard refrains of "the world is safer without Saddam," and "we must never forget the lessons of 911" (and variants of that), are not going to always satisfy the public's desire for argument and justification. There are smarter arguments for why you did what you did. Use them.
