Here's a good website, run by a pretty conservative, anti-neocon Republican, Steve Sailor:
http://www.isteve.com/
He has some good analysis on the debates. In these debates, it's not so much what you say, but how you say it. Kerry came off as very confident last night, and Bush came off as a frustrated, whiny half-wit:
- This was more of a true debate than most Presidential "debates," which are usually just a couple of guys giving short, stock speeches while they happen to be standing on the same stage.
The Republican Convention worked well for Bush because there was nobody to point out that Iraq wasn't the War on Terror, it was the War in Error. In contrast, the first debate had some real punching going on.
BUSH: ? But the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us?I was hopeful diplomacy would work in Iraq. It was falling apart. There was no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was hoping that the world would turn a blind eye...
KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."
Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other. That's the enemy that attacked us. That's the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That's the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits...
BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.
Ouch.
Bush should have loftily changed the subject, but Kerry had gotten under his skin with that accurate accusation, causing him to snarl back in an un-Presidential snit.
Bush was exposed as having one of those grandiose but fragile egos that responds violently to perceptions of being dissed, that kind that cause so many bar fights:
GWB: "Hey you! Are you lookin' at my girlfriend?"
You: "No, not at all."
GWB: "Well ... whazzamata with her that you ain't lookin' at her? Are you sayin' she's ugly? Is that what you're saying? You wanna a piece of me?"
- While it made better than average television for debate viewers, I wouldn't think this debate's feistiness works to Bush's advantage. If you are the incumbent and hold the lead in the polls, you normally don't want to get down on the floor and wrestle with your challenger. You want to maintain the Presidential aura around yourself by only occasionally deigning to notice this non-Presidential lifeform with whom you have graciously condescended to temporarily share a stage.
At a campaign dinner Monday, President Bush identified incumbency as the key issue in the upcoming presidential election. "Look at my opponent's record on incumbency," Bush said. "John Kerry is not the president at this time. That's an indisputable matter of public record." Bush added that the American public should seriously consider whether it wants to risk electing a president who has no experience heading a nation, has never resided in the White House, and does not have even one State Of The Union address under his belt.
Okay, that's from The Onion, but you get the point. There are a lot of people out there who, deep down, superstitiously regard the duties of the President as somewhat akin to those of the Aztec priests who somehow kept the sun rising every morning by ripping beating hearts out of human chests. These voters think to themselves, "Well, look at all the bad things that haven't happened during the incumbent's four years in office, like ... well, like... the Earth hasn't crashed into the Sun. He must be doing something right!" And they are uneasy about the challenger's abilities to handle the Presidency's mysterious but no doubt challenging Orbit Maintenance duties.
- Kerry looks like the President that central casting would send over if you told them you needed a minor star to play a generic President. If this President thing doesn't work out, Kerry could star in "The James Brolin Story!" Seriously, after the debate, it's certainly easy to visually imagine Kerry as President for the next four years, which has to work to his advantage.
- The Kerry people must be celebrating how peeved they made the President look. I would think that Kerry won the debate by making Bush look small and nasty. But what do I know? Karl Rove has lots of polls and focus groups to tell him about how to appeal to the swing voters in the swing states, such as, perhaps, this gentleman.