Verdict on the first debate: The format didn’t kill the confrontation. Kerry won on
points, for substance. If he’d had the wit to shake off his image as a stiff, he might have scored a
knockout. He had the prevaricatin’ prez on the ropes, but never finished him off. The prez’s “jes’
folks” style worked well enough to keep him on his feet, though he stumbled badly in the late
rounds.
Since nobody’s mentioned it, he went into a weird, cocktail-party crouch about him ‘n’
Vlad. (“I’ve got a good relation with Vladimir … Russia’s a country in transition.
Vladimir’s going to have some hard choices.”) Hey, they’re first-name buddies.
That’s international diplomacy, eh?
Yeah, we know, bein’ prez is hard. Dealing with Iraq is hard. “It’s hard work,” he said.
“It’s incredibly hard.” He’s jes’ a hard-workin’ fellah. If you don’t believe it, you
weren’t listening. He told us it was hard work 17 different times. That came to once
every three minutes. It sounded like a whine.
Postscript: I like Ciro Scotti’s take in
Businessweek. “He looked like a hapless teen called on the carpet as Kerry channeled Poppy and
termed the Iraq invasion a ‘colossal error.'” Tim Grieve is excellent on the debate, in Salon, and so is Sidney Blumenthal.
