Just turned on the debates in the middle of them, and Bush is getting his butt whipped. Kerry is strong and forceful in calling for a stronger military with more special forces, while Bush is umming and ahhing and having trouble putting two phrases together without pausing as if he's reading his lines for the first time.
Bush finally starts talking clearly when he accuses Kerry of changing his "core values" on Iraq, an outright lie. Kerry did not defend himself against the attack until after Bush repeated the charge, instead at first choosing to retaliate by complimenting Bush's family.
Kerry scores again by making a forceful speech about nuclear proliferation, pointing out that Bush cut funding for nuclear containment.
Bush scores, or at least fails to give many points to Kerry, by talking clearly in opposing Kerry's proposal to establish disarmament talks with North Korea by claiming that this would exclude the possibility of multilateral talks including China.
Kerry starts to break up for the first time in talking about Russia, then recovers nicely by citing George Will and going on about foreign policy.
In sum, Kerry wiped the floor with Bush in the half hour that I saw, but a lot of that is the behavioural cues coming through on the television. Bush will look much better in a written transcript. Bush also gains the advantage of having the final concluding remarks (wherein he notably pledged not to hold a draft) and of obviously having rehearsed this part more than the rest of his lines.
An odd note: As Kerry and Bush went to shake hands, CNN showed a close-up for a split second before going back to alternating between a high-angle wide view and close-ups of the individual candidates. It's interesting that they would so quickly cut away from a good camera angle. Is CNN avoiding showing a close-up of the two together so that Kerry's height doesn't make Bush look small?
Posted by Warrior Tang at September 30, 2004 06:43 PM