Beldar's take on the first debate

Neither candidate screwed up.  Kerry needed a Bush screwup, a huge gaffe, to change the dynamics of the race, and it didn't happen.  Thus in the big picture, Bush won.  That's true regardless of whether you grade Bush with a "B" and Kerry a "B+" or vice versa.  Both candidates crossed the finish line standing; and I think that means Bush will win the election, regardless of how you may "score" this debate on "points" and in isolation.

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Small pictures and impressions:

I think Sen. Kerry was at his very best tonight — much better than he was in any of the Democratic primary debates, and in the perfect, very formal and isolated-from-humanity environment to show off his strengths to their best advantage.  The format was one where the smartest kid in the class gets to show off, with nobody humming "Hail to the Chief" on a kazoo, and with none of the human interactions that make him look so robotic and inhuman.

Probably because of that, his mannerisms that annoy me the most were fairly muted.  But they could not be wholly extinguished.  Ask yourself this question:  Wouldn't it have been a huge home run for John Kerry if he could have gone through this entire debate with the self-discipline never to mention his Vietnam service?  To the extent that his combat service is going to favorably influence some subset of the voting public, hasn't he already gotten the full benefit of that history?  And yet, there he is — incapable of holding back the impulse to say, again and again, in effect, "Do you know who I am?  You realize, don't you, that I served in Vietnam?"  I don't know whether it's two percent or ten percent or thirty percent of the "undecided" or "swing" voters, but some percentage of those voters who are currently leaning Bush and might otherwise might have ended their viewing of this debate by saying, "Kerry's not so bad," were shaking their heads at every Vietnam allusion and muttering the word that I think will doom Kerry's chances for election:  "Phony."

Dubya was simply himself.  What is important — not shocking or surprising, but important — is how different today's Dubya is from the 2000 election version of himself; and of course, the transformation was 9/11.  In contrast to the candidate from 2000, this is a guy who has a very clear and consistent picture of what being the President is all about. 

He does not have, and never has had —  and has looked in the past (e.g., in 2000) at his worst when trying to pretend to have —  the Clintonian policy-wonk's command of subpoints and figures and verbal arguments with Roman numeral signposts going from III to III-A to III-A(4)(b)(vii).  When he makes successive supporting points, you can always count them on one hand and usually have a digit or two left over.  In fact, stylistically, I wish he would have transcended the format — not felt the need to keep talking until the yellow light flashed on — and repeated himself less.  (Man, what a contrast that would have been, because when Kerry speaks, you can see behind his eyes how he's doing a mental multitasking to plot how many more points he'll have time to score before the buzzer sounds.)

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Final aside:  What a difference this debate was from any of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, and from some of the run-up to this one!  Nobody's going to be writing tonight or tomorrow about anybody's audible sighs or invasions of personal space, or about Kerry's tan.  The Bush-is-a-chimp crowd are posting gleefully now about "moo-lahs" and "nukular," but that's an exercise of political masturbation for them at this point, a self-pleasing ritual they're bound to engage in that has no connection to the substance of anything that happened beyond the fact that Dubya showed up and spoke aloud for a while. 

For everyone else, this was a serious exercise appropriate to a nation at war, a nation from which 9/11 has banished, at moments like these, most of the frivolities that we had the luxury and innocence in which to engage ourselves back in 2000.  But I don't think this debate changed any votes that were already strongly intentioned, nor — despite what I think was an optimal performance, as good as Kerry's capable of giving, in the best possible format for him — do I think it is likely to have swayed many genuinely undecided folks in a different direction than they were already leaning.