Morning After Thoughts

Maybe the veep debate didn't go as poorly for Edwards as I thought. In fact, since the winner of the debate is that candidate that the public thinks won the debate, it looks like Edwards comes out on top. A CBS poll shows Edwards winning 41-28 among uncommitted voters, and although ABC has Cheney winning 45-38, their sample was disproportionately Republican. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers crunches the numbers and finds this:

Because the 38% in the sample who were Republicans gave it overwhelmingly to Cheney, with only a few Repubs calling it a draw, and because a substantial plurality of Democracts called it a draw (approx 30%), you can figure out how the 32 percent of the sample who were independents must have called it. On my math, it comes out approximately 43 for Edwards, 34 for Cheney, and 23 a draw. That puts the ABC poll figures for independents awfully close to the CBS poll for uncommiteds.

Speaking of Andrew Sullivan, his reaction to the debate was the first indication that I might be an outlier:

If last Thursday night's debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate - just concluded - was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away. I have to do C-SPAN now, but stay tuned for more post-debate blogging in a little while.

Clearly one of us was watching from bizarro world (and I hope it was me). Sully goes on to say:

What I saw last night was a vice-president crumpling under the weight of onerous responsibility. My human response was to hope he'll get some rest. My political response was to wonder why he simply couldn't or wouldn't answer the fundamental questions in front of him in ways that were easy to understand and redolent of conviction...But, in fact, it was worse than that. He went down snarling. His personal attacks on Edwards were so brutal and so personal and so direct that I cannot believe that anyone but die-hard partisans would have warmed to them. Edwards' criticisms, on the other hand, were tough but relatively indirect - he was always and constantly directing the answers to his own policies. Edwards, whom I'd thought would come of as a neophyte, was able to give answers that were clear and methodical and far better, in my view, than Kerry's attempts to explain himself last Thursday. On substance, Cheney clearly had the better of the debate on Afghanistan; his criticisms of Kerry's record were strong and detailed; his brutal assessment of Edwards' attendance record was sharp - but too direct and brutal to win over swing voters. But on domestic policy, he was terrible. Again, he used the term "fiscal restraint," but he gave no explanation for the unprecedented slide toward debt in the last four years. When asked to respond to a question about young black women with HIV, Cheney might as well have been asked about Martians. He had no response to the charges (largely new to me) about Halliburton. He had no solid response to the question of sufficient troops in Iraq or the capability of the coalition to guarantee national elections in January. He was weak on healthcare; and said that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had ordered the legislature to change the state constitution! Huh? And, of course, he cannot disguise that he supports a president who would remove any legal protections for his own daughter's relationship.

Given time to reflect, Sullivan's analysis---that Cheney's attacks fired up the base but turned off moderates and swing voters---seems intuitively plausible to me. When Cheney, apropos of nothing, attacked Edwards for missing Senate votes, Edwards responded by saying that Cheney voted against Martin Luther King day and against a resolution calling for Nelson Mandela to be freed. It would be a cheap shot if it weren't true, but it is, and it certainly helps reinforce the Darth Vader image.

I'll also freely admit that I was between halfway and three-quarters tuned out by the final third of the debate, so I could very well have missed a major Edwards surge on domestic policy. I listened carefully to the closing remarks, and if the preceding statements were similar to them, then it's clear that Edwards feels the people's pain and Cheney simply doesn't. One point I failed to mention is that George W. Bush was, wierdly, almost entirely absent from Cheney's presentation. In fact, the only time that Bush was strongly invoked, and only implicitly, was when Cheney essentially disavowed the president's position on gay marriage.

In any case, I feel quite a bit better about things now than I did last night.

UPDATE: One clarification/correction: When I said that Gwenn Ifill asked Edwards "blatantly wife-beating" questions, I may have implied too strongly that she had slanted the debate towards Cheney. I didn't wish to suggest that. I am positively certain, however, that she was an abominably bad moderator. Almost all of her ridiculous leading questions were directed towards Edwards for some reason, whether they were wife-beating: "Aren't you too inexperienced to be vice-president?" [the answer Edwards should have given: I have more experience than George W. Bush did; and if Cheney had come back with "you're no George Bush," Edwards' immediate response was "damn straight I'm not and proud of it"--ed], "Aren't your foreign policy positions naive?"; or puffballs: "Aren't your opponents charges against you false?" Ifill should be ashamed of herself.