I think that the president tried to bring the “Good Ol’ Down Home Georgie Dubbya” thing to the table last night and it didn’t work as well as it should have and normally does. I’m not sure why, exactly… but, it seems that several times he tried to project “I’m going to skip this bullshit and speak right to you Mr. and Mrs. America… ” Perhaps it did get past the Budweiser mist and Marlboro smoke and into the wriggling brains of his core constituency. But, it’s agreed by all that that isn’t who he really needs to reach right now. I also think that the enraptured, Christian, charismatic, religious zealots caught his “We’re on the sacred mountain of justice and there will peace in the valley, if it kills all of the evildoers” thing… it was a thinly veiled message intended just for them, to let them know he’s still planning on “The Rapture.” too. But, again those are the people that have and will continue to bring him into elected offices and he knows it. He needs to figure out a way to reach the others instead of just saying “Your either with us or, your with the terrorists” again and again. His reactions to Kerry were not surprising and indeed predictable, classic W. whom is like an A.D.D. afflicted kid fidgeting and twitching at all times. We know that about him and have pretty much accepted it. He needs to stop acting as if “I’m right and I don’t need to explain anything to anybody.” I feel that will undo him.
Meanwhile, Kerry tried to play the “I’m far more intelligent and sophisticated than he” angle and I’m surprised that it seems to have worked but, only barely. If he mentions his veteran/combat status one more time, I think the V.V.A. is going to excommunicate him. He may as well appear in am O.D. green uniform of the era. As with many veterans his age (hell, my age for that matter) It’s abundantly clear that he’s so far removed from the young, hardened combat soldier he might have been, that its impossible, nay amusingly uncomfortable, to think of him that way again. He was also regurgitating rhetoric that he’s used again and again for weeks. He didn’t actually listen to W. much, I watched his reactions closely and saw that after he thought W. was going to say something he had already heard, he shut his ears off. I think that if he’d actually listened to what W. said and replied directly to it, he quite possibly could have completely devastated him. As for his ability to answer a direct question, I’m increasingly alarmed that he cannot do this. I really didn’t hear a good answer to any direct question from Jim Lerher, in fact if he answered them at all, it was lost in the high rhetoric Kerry draws from a seemingly inexhaustable supply.
I was sorely disappointed by the candidates unwillingness to become incensed enough to be passionate about the issues discussed last evening. If they can’t get emotional about American lives lost on foreign soil during a time of war, then they are obviously far too self-involved to notice the emotion that is occurring across the country about the matter. This disturbs me deeply since while we were watching the debates, 41 civilians, 35 of whom were children, were killed and 139 people were wonded in a bombing in Iraq.