More Post-Debate Thoughts (Now With 50% Less Smugness)

Last night I wrote that Kerry won convincingly on meta-points. By that, I meant that he was dominant in all the categories of non-substantive evaluation which (as the 2000 debates certainly proved) have a lot more to do with determining the winner than the actual content of the debate. Kerry looked and sounded far more like a president than Mr. Bush did. We knew going in that the Bush campaign had to find a way to counteract Kerry's considerable height advantage. So in all the side by side shots, the candidates were seen with their heads at the same level, while far more of Mr. Bush's podium was included in the shot. Hats off to the Bush negotiating team for pulling that off. Nevertheless, height became an issue, as the podium that was just tall enough for Kerry was uncomfortably high for Bush. The consequence was that Bush was forced to lurch over the podium, and look, as Mickey Kaus put it, "a bit like a gargoyle, or someone who needed the podium for protection." To be fair, Bush didn't really have any good options here. Having a podium at which he would have been more comfortable---i.e. a shorter one---would have been a disaster. It would have looked like the kiddie water fountain (or urinal) next to the grown-up water fountain (or urinal). Maybe he could have stood on something. Wait, scratch that. [Who's Dukakis now, bitches!--ed.]

In terms of presentation, Kerry was remakably (by Kerry standards) concise, and he appeared both calm and determined throughout the debate. It wasn't a magnificent performance, but it looked magnificent in comparison to Bush's atrocious slack-jawed cadences. Did someone coach Bush into thinking that was how to appear folksy? Neverending facial tics? Beginning sentences and then cutting them off midway through the predicate? Scribbling furiously, gesticulating awkwardly for time extensions, and then having nothing at all to say? Slouching over the podium? Reading from prewritten text? It was the oddest performance I've ever seen a sitting president give in a debate. George H.W. Bush glancing at his watch in 1992 at least had an air of "I'm above this bullshit." George W. Bush sounded like a cross between Bob Dole and Ross Perot, and somehow managed to pull off a rendition of the Al Gore sighs.

Somewhere in between meta-points and points were Bush's decision to exclaim "Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us," thus confirming that there might be reason to doubt that proposition, and his response to questions about systemic problems in the intelligence agencies: "There's a good man who comes into my office every day. You might have heard of him." In the 2000 foreign policy debate, which it is alleged that Bush won, the Bush strategy hinged on memorizing and then correctly pronouncing the names of foreign leaders. In a rare deviation from optimal play, it looks like Bush's coaches thought the same strategy would work this time. Instead, it made him look like a petulant gradeschooler getting a stern but polite talking-to from his teacher.

To go even more-meta for a moment, Kerry simply dominated the debate structurally. Bush was put on the defensive about his own record from the outset, and even when Kerry let up a bit or left openings, Bush didn't rise to the challenge, opting instead to reiterate largely incoherent justifications of his own policies. Kerry missed his big chance at a killing blow---which would have consisted of shifting the terrain just slightly from Bush's errors in judgement in going to war to Bush's errors in judgement in actually conducting the war (and hence, the abysmal condition of Iraq right now)---but the net effect of keeping Bush constantly on the defensive might well be a paradigm shift in the campaign. If my own theory is correct, then what we might have witnessed last night, in effect, was John Kerry surprisingly beating Bush in the all-important "who's got a bigger dick" stakes.

Kerry won on substantive points as well, though not by a huge margin. Both men passed up several opportunities to really drop the axe on their opponents. Kerry had the only one-liners (unless you count robotic repetition of "hard work" and "mixed messages" as one-liners), but in every instance, there was something just a bit off with them. Case in point: When Bush formulaically brought up Kerry's infamous "voted for it/voted against it" line, Kerry's responded "I may have made a mistake talking about the war, but the president...." In other words, Kerry started his comeback exceedingly well, only to falter. (In fact, it might be fun to see try and replace the conclusions to Kerry's comeback lines and see how much we can improve them.) Apropos of formulaic repetition, did anyone else get the feeling that Bush treated the debate as if it were a stump speech?

The truly shocking thing about this debate was how poorly Bush was prepared. As anyone knowledgable about game theory would explain, it's absolutely necessary in these sorts of situations to anticipate your opponents strategy, formulate a counterstrategy in response, and ideally, formulate a response to your opponent's response to your response to him. (Confused? Think about that a few times.) Kerry pulled that off efficiently. Bush, by contrast, seems to have prepared with flashcards of stock phrases and gone into the debate assuming that they'd be strong enough to hold up on their own (i.e., no counter-moves, and no counter-counter-counter-moves). But through nervousness, discomfort, or perhaps exhaustion, he managed to flub even the minimal operation expected of him. He seemed to have forgotten about all but two of his catchphrases until he finally recalled "transformative power of liberty" by the end of the debate, and the mental machinery with which he was supposed to connect each flashcard to the next was out of working order.

A glance around the blogosphere (tomorrow's CW today!) shows a pretty firm consensus about a Kerry victory. The Republican tactic now will be 1) accuse Jim Lehrer of bias, and 2) claim that Kerry's win was just in terms of "the debate itself" and hence unimportant. Point 1) is fairly irrelevant; Lehrer didn't drug Bush into embarrassing himself. Point 2) is the sort of thing that can become self-fulfilling prediction. So the more we start talking about how things are snowballing in Kerry's favor, the more things will snowball in Kerry's favor. That's all for now. Enjoy the weekend.

UPDATE: Check out Oliver Willis's first video link here. Someone needs to make a techno song out of this.