It's impossible to say how many viewers were willing to have their vote decided by anything that happened on the stage last night, and, of those who were, we can't know how many will make their decision based upon what was said rather than upon the image that the candidates projected. In our post-modern world, unfortunately, people are persuaded more by style than by substance, more by how one says what they say rather than by what they say. A smooth, eloquent delivery covers a multitude of sins against logic and coherence.
Consequently, for the fashionably po-mo John Kerry is very appealing, but for the remnant of modern thinkers who believe that character counts and that substance should trump style, George Bush would've been awarded the laurel last evening and should be granted it on election day as well. Hugh Hewitt tells us why:
In the past eight days, John Kerry has:
*announced to a national audience that American actions in defense of national security must pass a "global test";
*announced that he would sell nuclear fuel to Iran;
*could not answer, and badly filibustered a question on what he would do if Iran continued to push towards nuclear weapons acquisition;
*denounced as unilateralism the conation that George Bush put together to overthrow Iraq, and called for unilateral appeasement of North Korea;
*compared Iraq to Lebanon, but insisted a summit could entice other countries to join the effort in Iraq, even after the French and the Germans announced they would not do so even if Kerry was elected;
*twice identified the most pressing proliferation problem as the American effort to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons capable of destroying deep bunkers, thus equating the United States with rogue states like North Korea and Iran and proclaiming hostility to modernization of the American arsenal - vintage Kerry defense thinking;
*announced plan after plan for which no details exist;
*"absolutely" pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 annually, a pledge that even his most ardent admirers know is either a bald lie or a repudiation of most of his spending plans;
*ignored the creation of 1.9 million jobs over the past 13 months and ignored the economic consequences of the Clinton recession and 9/11 attacks while attacking Bush's tax cuts;
*while calling attention to his Catholic status, defended his vote against banning partial birth abortion, called for taxpayer support for abortion, argued that "parental notification" was connected to dads raping daughters and defended the wholesale harvesting of frozen embryos for research purposes --four positions completely opposite of Catholic Church teaching and far outside the American consensus opinion on abortion;
*actually said "John Edwards and I are for tort reform," and told the American people that lawsuits against doctors are 1% of the health care problem;
*defensively denied being "wishy washy," a "flip flopper," and a "liberal," while complaining about being branded such by the president;
*embraced the Kyoto Treaty and called for its resuscitation with amendments;
*told America that General Shinseki had been fired by Bush and that the firing had a "chilling" effect on all generals, and one day later said Shinseki had been "retired" --not fired-- and left off the "chilling effect" argument --a record one day flip flop;
*saw his running mate get woodshedded and his campaign try to reverse that blow by arguing that the Vice President should have remembered meeting Edwards;
*heard his wife assert that American troops were fighting for oil and many other stunning things;
*watched as Bush did not make a single memorable error in two debates while effectively underscoring Kerry's "global test" pratfall, focusing on Kerry's did-nothing time-serving two decades in the Senate, wrestle the ISG report to its appropriate place in the discussion of the Iraq War, persuade by repeated argument (which the Vice President also helped along) that coalitions can not be led or maintain by derision or democracies built by indecision;
*watched as Bush effectively and accurately branded KerryCare as an expanded form of HillaryCare;
*watched as Bush simply and devastatingly branded Kerry as not credible on taxes, spending and most important of all, defending the United States.
Against all of this and more, Kerry backers point to his debating skills in round one and George W. Bush's expressions from the first debate. If this was a good eight days for Kerry, then November 11, 1864 was a fine day for Atlanta. In fact this stretch has been a disaster for Kerry as all the set-up work Bush-Cheney had performed for eight months came home in eight days as Kerry cooperated in his unmasking as a candidate far from the country's center of political gravity on nearly every issue, comfortable only in ambiguity and a champion of every one of the left's pet domestic causes from partial birth abortion and taxpayer funded abortions to Kyoto and federal delivery of health care.
The relentless focus on his hard left posturing on foreign affairs through 20 years in the Senate hasn't even begun yet. Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke wondered aloud last night why the president didn't make use of Kerry's 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, and I wonder when we will hear about Kerry's mini-Munich in Managua in April 1985 or his nuclear freeze pedigree and opposition to many of the major weapon programs on which our military now relies, but there is still three and a half weeks and one more debate left in which these and other points have opportunity to surface.
The clock has almost run out on Kerry, and his little gust of momentum - called a hurricane by his backers because they hadn't felt a breeze for months - is spent.
We're not as sanguine about all this as Hewitt is because, as mentioned above, too many people who will go to the polls on November 2nd don't really care about facts or argument. They'll cast their vote on the basis of "presence" or physical attractiveness or verbal eloquence, all criteria which are absurdly irrelevant to picking a president but by which Kerry will score high. Even so, Viewpoint certainly hopes that Hewitt is right.