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Second presidential debate
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by David Sands: [QB] After sleeping on it, a few comments on the debate. A lot of my comments are going to seem critical of Bush, but I am going to try to make up for it by saying what I think he means, but knows it is too unpopular to say. The first thing that I thought was good was the questioning format. I thought the questions were far more straightforward than those Jim Lehrer or Gwen Iffil gave. There weren�t that many dependent clauses to imply evil motives. Examples of how it could have been are, �Mr. Kerry, since you have voted more times that I can count to raise taxes on every American, rich and poor, would you be willing to say you won�t raise taxes as President?� and �Mr. Bush, since rumor has it that you eat Spotted Owl every morning for breakfast, have you done anything for the environment that ought to make me vote for you?� I wish we could see such questioning more. It also has the side benefit of making the debate easier for someone to follow and gives the candidates more time to talk. Speaking of time to talk, I also loved how the moderator ran the format. I seldom heard him precisely laying out the amount of time each candidate had when responding (at least compared to Gwen Iffil). It made it move much faster. I think Kerry sidestepped a few important issues. Abortion was one. Charles is right that most Americans don�t see abortion in black or white, all or nothing, terms. There are probably about four groups along the spectrum of how illegal abortion ought to be. However, there was an important quote from Kerry: �you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.� That�s a very radical statement if he meant it precisely as I�m reading it. He seems to be saying that if someone has a right to an abortion, then because there is inequality of people�s means, the government should equalize those means by paying for them to exercise their rights. That sounds suspiciously like public financing of abortions to me. As for the partial birth abortion exception Kerry gave, he said there needed to be one for the life and health of the mother �under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother.� If he is abandoning the exception of harm to the psychological health of the mother, I wish he would have said so. But it that�s what he really meant, that would be an unequivocal move away from NARAL�s policy. That said, I still think Kerry is ultimately inconsistent since he has said that life begins at conception. If it really does, and you believe all lives are equally worthy, then your policies ought to reach more than just your coreligionists. TSN said� [QUOTE] So Bush is explicitly stating that, in his mind, if you vote for or against something, it unequivocally means you are for or against every single conceiveable aspect of it. [/QUOTE]I would disagree. The question that was asked did not refer to any exceptions for the life or health of the mother. Some room has to be given for common sense exceptions on most issues in a debate, but on an issue that has become so technical at its margins, like abortion, I think the better policy is to take a question like that at face value. Kerry�s yes or no answer to that question was he thought you should be able to have one. But he was being a smart debater by not playing into the questioner�s hands by saying yes or no because people would not have listened to his qualifications afterwards. Bush did surprisingly well on the environmental question. I was not expecting him to know so many programs that his administration had done. I doubt that answer is going to change many votes, but it was a trap laying wide open for him and he jumped clean over it. The drug reimportation answer was a good justification for not opening the floodgates to Canadian medicine. I don�t think it�s the most important justification (just like WMDs), but it�s the one that easiest to understand (again, like WMDs) and therefore was made the frontmost reason. On foreign policy, Bush followed up on a lot of lines of attack that I had been expecting during the first debate. He used the Duelfer report to make the point that the sanctions were not working, that Saddam was building a knowledge base for a WMDs program, with the intent of getting them eventually. While Saddam did not have them already, in time he would have. Bush made it clear (without using the word �preemption�) we had to stop him before he got his hands on him. He also went after Kerry�s vote to cut the intelligence budget in the early 1990s. One thing I wish Bush had said about foreign policy that he just can�t without sounding like a cold-hearted robot: in response to the question about protecting the homeland, what would each candidate do. I�ll admit Kerry is right that we�re not doing enough to be scanning containers. There are a lot of things we�re not doing. On the other hand, has anyone ever thought about how expensive it would be to plug every hole like that? People say they want economic growth, but a homeland security program that hit every vulnerability would plunge us into a recession! The better solution is to work on the worst vulnerabilities here and drain the swamps overseas of despotism. Plus, it has the added benefit of bringing the American Way (along with truth and justice, I hope) to a part of the world that has seen too little of it. There was one answer Bush couldn�t give to another foreign policy question. One person asked about North Korea and Iran and asked what he was doing about them. Ideally, Bush would have said that Iraq was the most doable of the three, and we were hoping to scare others into submission with a show of force. Moreover, [i]we don�t have the manpower to do all three at once. We have to choose our battles.[/i] Instead, Bush went with While we were handling Iraq we would keep the pressure on them with diplomacy (on Iraq, through the EU, France and Germany being prominent members of that team; on North Korea, through us, Russia, South Korea, China, and Japan). Bush I thought lightened up a lot this time. Body language was much more fluid. No looks of annoyance at having to put up with inanity. He made only two gaffes I noticed in the debates, �internets,� as Sol System pointed out, and a military that is more �facile.� Fortunately, there didn�t seem to be any disasters he felt compelled to attend to during the day. He was rested. And he made the audience audibly laugh twice. No such humor from Kerry. It�s a nitpicky point, but lots of people base their decisions on such features. The one question where both candidates made my skin crawl was Charlie Gibson�s followup about neither saying specifically what they would do to reduce the deficit. For me, it would have been sufficient for Bush to say he would lower taxes, stimulate growth, and let the economy grow itself out of the deficit a la the nineties. Bush mentioned tax cuts to stimulate consumer spending. But I guess supply-side economics has just gotten too pejorative a feel to say it explicitly. Kerry was caught between a rock (looking into the camera for no new taxes) and a hard place (Gibson�s followup) and tried to deflect the question by talking about tax cuts for the rich and Enron. Not the most cohesive message. I would give Kerry a slight edge on this question because Bush didn�t veto the farm bill, the steel tariffs, and the prescription drug benefit. Maybe he�s saving that for Term 2. Still though, Bush seems to have edged Kerry out on the debate. Realclearpolitics.com is saying the debate was probably a tie (being within the margins of error), but the pundits were much more impressed with Bush. The state-by-state polls won�t be out until after the weekend, but I would predict that Bush will bring the race back to the uncomfortably close lead he enjoyed before the first debate. Of course, I saw one poll saying that the number of undecideds was actually 0%. (!) By that they mean that the people leaning to, but not committed to, one candidate of the other now takes up the remainder of voters. If that�s the case, these debates would actually take on a very different dynamic, since debates reinforce perceptions in those who are leaning, seldom changing them. But trying my best to look at this debate realistically, I would put it as Bush by a lock of hair, as opposed to a mere shaft. The race has tightened once again. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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