Optimism

The usually dour Noam Scheiber thinks that the third debate at least put Kerry in a strong position to win:

Meanwhile, if the story of the first two debates was that Kerry won by looking more in command even though he missed multiple opportunities to put Bush away, the opposite was the case last night. Kerry's repeated insistence that Bush chose to give a tax cut to the top one percent rather than fund homeland security or education or raise the minimum wage made Bush's priorities sound indefensible, which in fact they are. (After Kerry asserted that Bush had denied 9 million women several thousand dollars per year in higher wages while giving a $136,000-tax cut to millionaires, Bush could only feebly respond that Mitch McConnell once proposed a minimum wage bill he supported. Oh really? Well, you're the president, and your party controls both houses of Congress. Why isn't it the law?) When the candidates were asked about the recently lapsed assault weapons ban, Bush again absolved himself of responsibility, claiming he would have signed a bill but the Congress couldn't pass it. Kerry, on the other hand, invoked his experience as a prosecutor and hammered home the point that pretty much every law enforcement agency in the country backed the measure--and that the only people who opposed it were terrorists. (Kerry also took the opportunity to remind the audience he's a lifelong hunter.) Kerry, unlikely as it may seem, even managed to get off the best line of the night. When responding to one of Bush's charges--that Kerry couldn't pay for all his proposals--he opined that "Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country." It killed...

Throughout the debate, Kerry was the textbook definition of presidential--authoritative and forceful, but always magnanimous. This was never more true than when Kerry responded to a question pressing him about whether it was really fair to attack the president for poor job growth, since, in such a large economy, the president can only control so much. Kerry, poised as I've ever seen him, responded with a mixture of humility ("I don't blame them entirely for it. I blame the president for the things the president could do that has an impact on it"); candor ("Outsourcing is going to happen. I've acknowledged that in union halls across the country"); and ordinary good sense ("I will ... make certain that with respect to the tax system that you as a worker in America are not subsidizing the loss of your job. ... Today, if you're an American business, you actually get a benefit for going overseas"). Beautiful.

[Meta-note: Isn't the wonderful thing about blogging, really, that there's an automatic insta-cure to writer's block, i.e., cut-and-paste+link?--ed.]