I watched the debate with my friend Rob “Get Donkey” Humenik. Afterwards, I thought that I’d better get home and start rooting for the home team, but… it looks like Kerry did just fine without my little squeakerbox.
I think that both candidates made our democracy look good. It was a serious debate for serious times, without leaning on cute punchlines or gimmicks. Bush was gracious enough to sidestep a direct invitations to attack Kerry’s character, and another invitation to say that Kerry’s going to get us all killed. Kerry was smart enough to immediately say that the most serious security threat to the nation was nuclear proliferation.
I wish that there was some discussion of torture, and more discussion about North Korea and Iran. I wish that Kerry had pointed out that he did not get to look at the same intelligence as Bush. I wish that he had taken the opportunity to explain the $87 billion. I wish, I wish, I wish. But in the end, I’m basically another Kerry hack who’s very happy with the way the debate played out.
Matthew Yglesias has assembled some of Bush’s misleading statements, and Julian Sanchez asks, “Yeah, what about Poland?”
Personally, this was my favorite part:
KERRY: 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.
Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X- rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.
Does that make you feel safer in America?
This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren’t my values. I believe in protecting America first.
And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut — and that’s who gets it — long before we do, I’m going to invest in homeland security and I’m going to make sure we’re not cutting COPS programs in America and we’re fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants…
Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union — former Soviet Union for 13 years. I’m going to do it in four years. And we’re going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.
LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.
BUSH: I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap.
Kerry was unwilling to say that homeland security came for free. He framed the trade-off as tax cuts that primarily benefit the rich vs. more effective homeland security. And Bush agreed!
{ 29 comments }
bad Jim 10.01.04 at 7:40 am
Bush crashed.
dsquared 10.01.04 at 7:57 am
Iowa Electronic Markets haven’t moved a lick. Tradesports traded Bush down maybe a spread.
John Quiggin 10.01.04 at 8:32 am
DD, the IEM/Tradesport movement is relative to market expectations, which I would guess were for a Kerry win.
Nick 10.01.04 at 10:52 am
Well, on the Betfair markets Kerry’s price has come in from around 3 last night to 2.74 this morning.
Ben 10.01.04 at 12:01 pm
dsquared – or one of CT’s other esteemed contributors – can you take a stab at explaining why the IEM or Tradesports has Kerry so far down, but the polls have him at least still within contention in most swing states (as evidenced by daily electoral college vote predictions).
Is it simply that the likelihood of Kerry managing to win *all* the swing states he needs is considered slight, or, for example, do encumbents tend to stage late rallies at the polls, meaning Kerry probably won’t get any better than this?
Given how many analyses of polls are undertaken by the media and the campaign teams, why isn’t anyone doing more analysis of the discrepancy between the polls and the IEM to address what is driving movements in each. Especially given how accurate the money tends to be, compared to the polls.
yabonn 10.01.04 at 1:06 pm
Kerry won, and most decisively on “body language” and “attitude” bollocks, precisely where the democrat was supposed to suffer.
He won too by confronting directly the flipflop thing. He did it with a clintonesque trick (something like “i made a mistake in my _talking_ about it”) but that acknoledgement, and the question that followed (about bush’s mistake of going in irak, “which one is worse?”) will hopefully help to blunt the flip flop charges in the future.
Lastly, i liked the allusion to other presidents. Jfk and reagan were metnioned, but bush the elder too. As this president seems to be fourteen in his head, it might be a good idea, as far as “earth tones” election rethorics go, to push him back in his daddy’s shadow.
Kerry mentionned de gaulle about the problem of having a president the world doens’t trust. Maybe a more pressing even question is the problem of having an administration that a significant part of the world hates. Do you think that the u.s. could find, as of today, enough favorable muslim factions in a war somewhere to pull another afghanistan?
jet 10.01.04 at 2:12 pm
Maybe someone here can answer this question. If de Gaulle was simply “mistrusted” by most of the world and Bush and CO are “hated” by most of the world, how do we explain this? In muslim Algeria, de Gaulle ran blantant, unfettered torture camps. The French Foreign Legion massacred and rampaged. Does anyone know why de Gaulle gets off in the history books as mistrusted while Bush and CO are more hated than de Gaulle ever was on his worst day?
jet 10.01.04 at 2:31 pm
Besides saying he would give nuclear fuel to Iran, besides saying he would end multi-lateral talks with N. Korea and go back to the failed policy of unilateral engagement, besides misunderstanding how N. Korea broke their promises and that the problem is over their creation of highly enriched uranium, not what they did with their plutonium, and besides some factual errors in his attacks on Bush (the NYC subway was never shut down during the Rep convention), I think Kerry won.
Kerry gave so much ammo to the Rep campaign that one more debate victory like this will assure a Bush presidential victory.
yabonn 10.01.04 at 2:47 pm
If de Gaulle was simply “mistrusted” by most of the world
Besides […] I think Kerry won
I have a problem here, because your second post implies that you have seen the debate or read the transcript.
So i’m left with two possibilities : wether i misunderstood what kerry meant with his de gaulle/cuba example, or you’re projecting your francophobia.
Sadly, and despite my very relative mastery of the english language, i presently lean towards the second explanation. It’s because i, you know, read you.
Sam Dodsworth 10.01.04 at 2:58 pm
Does anyone know why de Gaulle gets off in the history books as mistrusted while Bush and CO are more hated than de Gaulle ever was on his worst day?
Personally, I’d like to know why Bush seems to be more hated than the Emperor Vespasian. What does that say about the Bush haters’ attitude to the Middle East?
In the case of de Gaul, though, I would guess some combination of:
– Algeria was the last gasp of the old colonial era, so de Gaul got the usual free pass from the old colonial powers.
– De Gaul was a Cold War anti-communist and got the usual free pass from the western powers.
– Algeria was an internal French matter, and de Gaul didn’t go out of his way to damage existing international institutions.
– De Gaul actually was widely hated and we’re both working without evidence.
marcel 10.01.04 at 3:03 pm
The de Gaulle reference is misunderstood above. During the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy sent an envoy (Salinger?) to France to explain the US position and actions. He brought with him spy pictures to prove that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba and asked de Gaulle whether he would like to see them. de Gaulle’s response, according to this story, was that he had no need to see the pictures. If the president of the US believed that there were missiles in Cuba, that was good enough for him.
The question is not whether de Gaulle was mistrusted, but whether someone, especially a prickly ally who did not just roll over for the US, trusts the US president. In the past, this was common. It is now rare. Bush referred more than once to Poland as one of our allies in Iraq. President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland was recently reported as saying, “They deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride.”
David 10.01.04 at 3:17 pm
A lot of commentary on the debate has focused on how Kerry seemed so much more familiar with the issues and tended to use facts to back up his claims. Kerry gave reasons for his assertions and Bush gave assertions without reasons. But that’s why people like Bush: He doesn’t give reasons, so his views don’t depend on anything in the real world. He just stays the course no matter what. So it seems to me that those of us who value justification and argument are prone to overestimate the extent to which this debate really was a victory for Kerry. Many voters actually like the fact that in general, Bush is unwilling to try to justify his assertions and policies.
jet 10.01.04 at 3:22 pm
Yabonn, I think you read too much into my question. Or maybe I should have qualified that I was going off topic. My question wasn’t in relation to anything Kerry said, although given my past statements, I understand your defensiveness, but it was an honest question about the different standards applied to world leaders.
Sam Dodsworth put forth what I myself thought was true, but as most people do, he put it much better than I could have. Although I think it is a hard arguement to make that Bush actually went out of his way to damage international institutions. If Bush would have given Iraq the Serbia treatment and simply ignored the UN, the fallout might have been much less. Bush was certainly a fool for thinking that countries making billions of dollars off of Iraq would ever vote to allow a US invasion. And even a bigger fool for given them the UN gun to shoot him with.
Sam Dodsworth 10.01.04 at 4:04 pm
First off – thankyou for the compliment. Second… I think it’s hard to argue that ignoring the UN and getting away with it _doesn’t_ damage the authority of the UN. In fact, I think this point was made in support of the invasion of Iraq, back when WMDs were the raison du jour?
I also think that this is one source of the disconnect on the invasion between the US and much of the rest of the world. To any nation less powerful than the US (or at least, less powerful than Americans perceive the US to be) trading the rule of international law for an unexceptional, if nasty, dictator doesn’t seem like such a good deal.
(And third, I was also thinking of the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Agreement – although I’ll freely accept that the first could be lumped in with the UN and that the second doesn’t really count as an institution.)
Jet 10.01.04 at 4:30 pm
I wasn’t arguing that he didn’t damage the UN’s credibility. I was just arguing that he didn’t go out of his way to do it. But like many in America who view most of the world as slightly insane (what was the number of Germans who believed Bush created 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq for oil? Something like 30-50%?), I think that when it comes to the UN’s credibility and the US’s credibility, the US interests should always trump.
As for the international criminal court and the Kyoto treaty, I certainly hope Bush goes out of his way to damage them. That court has already attempted to try US soldiers for using depleted uranium in Iraq. And the Kyoto treaty would stave off global warming by maybe 7 years over the next century while incurring 10 times the cost of the actual warming. But I digress, as those are arguments for an entirely different thread ;)
Sam Dodsworth 10.01.04 at 4:30 pm
I’ve got to go now, but I’ll just offer a couple of belated thoughts in favor of the “de Gaul was widely hated and we’re both wrong” alternative – the “events” of May 1968, and a vague recollection that public reaction to the use of torture was the last straw that led to the Fench getting out of Algeria.
Russell Arben Fox 10.01.04 at 4:47 pm
I concur Ted that this debate was actually, unlike so many other staged and structured events in any given modern campaign, of real benefit to our democracy. I was genuinely surprised at how revealing I found it to be. There were several exchanges where talking points had clearly been left behind, and the candidates were actually thinking about how to respond to one another. Of course, this hurt Bush a lot. I don’t think he came out destroyed, but he did come out seriously pecked and pushed around. Kerry, gloriously, actually managed to keep him on the defensive almost the whole way through. (More thoughts from me here.)
Regarding their exchange on North Korea, there’s an important point which I wish Kerry could have made (and he might of, because that back-and-forth was one of the less scripted ones of the night). Kerry is the one talking about “bringing the world in” whereas Bush wants “stay on the offensive”; however, in the case of Kim Jong Il, Bush insisted on talks with everyone involved, while Kerry focused on taking talks straight to North Korea. There’s a real opportunity here to see a meaningful difference, and not just to policy wonks–just observe that part of the reason Kerry seems to be, to the superficial and mostly uninformed voter at least, borrowing from Bush’s “directness” playbook in this case is the simple fact that the South Korean government and people, who have the most at stake in resolving the crisis on the peninsula, want talks to directly include the North Koreans. So in other words, in being “direct” in his approach to North Korea, Kerry is still being “global.” Which is a simple but important enough point that, who knows, it might have even changed a couple of minds.
dsquared 10.01.04 at 6:58 pm
can you take a stab at explaining why the IEM or Tradesports has Kerry so far down
Take a look at the historic chart of Gore vs. Bush. The current situation looks scary, but it isn’t really all that far out of the line of general volatility of this market. The IEM doesn’t really make its mind up until after the debates; at this stage, I think that even its proprietors would think of it more as a bit of fun than anything else.
Uncle Kvetch 10.01.04 at 7:04 pm
But like many in America who view most of the world as slightly insane (what was the number of Germans who believed Bush created 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq for oil? Something like 30-50%?)
In other words, approximately the same as the percentage of (perfectly sane, apparently) Americans who think Saddam Hussein had a direct and personal role in the 9/11 attacks.
Paul Orwin 10.01.04 at 8:46 pm
About the IEM/Tradesports stuff above. Is it possible that they skew toward Bush because the population involved is somewhat skewed toward the libertarian right? People who think a market like that is interesting are probably not a broad cross section of the American voting public. They may well process the information in ways that presuppose a likely Bush victory, which may skew the numbers. Just a thought (Perhaps we need a poll of IEM participants; how meta)
Paul Orwin 10.01.04 at 8:47 pm
About the IEM/Tradesports stuff above. Is it possible that they skew toward Bush because the population involved is somewhat skewed toward the libertarian right? People who think a market like that is interesting are probably not a broad cross section of the American voting public. They may well process the information in ways that presuppose a likely Bush victory, which may skew the numbers. Just a thought (Perhaps we need a poll of IEM participants; how meta)
jet 10.01.04 at 9:19 pm
Kvetch,
I’ve seen many people talk about that, but I have yet to see the source. The source for my poll, I believe and am perfectly open to correction, was Gallup in Germany approximately 2 months ago.
I really am interested in the source because I want to see what the question was and what was the breakdown on who answered how.
There was a similar poll floating around about the percentage of Americans who believed that WMD’s had been found in Iraq. It was used to show how gullible Americans were. But in reality it was a trick question. Do 20 bombs, several years old qualify as WMDs? Technically, they probably were. But in the spirit of the question, probably not.
Perhaps the poll you are referring to might not be the same type of trick question, but is still a trick question.
Uncle Kvetch 10.01.04 at 10:23 pm
Kvetch, I’ve seen many people talk about that, but I have yet to see the source.
It was the Newsweek poll of September 2-3, 2004. Here’s the link to detailed results:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040904/nysa058_1.html
And here’s the question as it was asked…I’ll let you be the judge as to whether there was a “trick” involved:
18. Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was DIRECTLY involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, or not?
BASED ON REGISTERED VOTERS
Yes / No / DK
Current Total
42 / 44 / 14
Republicans
55 / 32 / 13
Democrats
32 / 54 / 14
Independents
37 / 48 / 15
Trends
(1/29-30/04)
49 / 39 / 12
(9/18-19/03)
47 / 37 / 16
Ray 10.01.04 at 11:33 pm
“(what was the number of Germans who believed Bush created 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq for oil? Something like 30-50%?)”
Bollocks. There has never been any such poll. Come up with something vaguely plausible next time.
jet 10.02.04 at 12:09 am
Kvetch, thanks for the info. And just as a majority of Americans over the age of 50 who think exposing a tumor to air during surgery will cause it to spread and grow, those who believe Saddam was directly involved 9/11 scare me. The world is slowly trudging forward even with all this ignorance. Imagine the world if people took a few hours a week to actually become informed.
Ray, I searched and searched for th e link and all I could find were links and quotes to the original. None of those links worked, so maybe I was fooled and the Die Zeit never ran that poll. But I certainly wasn’t smoking crack and imagining it. Here a quote from the “original”. I tried googling key phrases from it, but no luck.
#
German disbelief over 9/11 – One-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, according to a poll. – And about 20 percent of Germans in all age groups hold this view, according to a survey of 1,000 people conducted for the weekly Die Zeit. –
msj 10.02.04 at 1:43 am
Regarding IEM/tradesports how did they do on the Iowa primary? I remember seeing a huge Dean crash/Kerry surge after the caucuses, which means they were pretty poor predictors.
On 18 Jan, the last price for Kerry was 0.154. On 20 Jan, the last price for Kerry was 0.349. Dean went from .510 to .209. Why should anyone pay attention to a market that’s demonstrably reactive, not predictive?
Uncle Kvetch 10.02.04 at 2:38 am
And just as a majority of Americans over the age of 50 who think exposing a tumor to air during surgery will cause it to spread and grow, those who believe Saddam was directly involved 9/11 scare me.
Does it scare you that the Bush administration has subtly hinted at such involvement, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq? It does me.
JPed 10.02.04 at 5:06 am
M. Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to be doing quite good business in Europe when I was there earlier this summer. While I am not a Bush fan, I think there were some charges there which … how shall I say … were rather aggressively made without much aim to fairness or completeness of reporting. Moore’s not a reporter — this I understand. But many who see his movie and may not understand the highly polarized context in which it was made may find it more convincing than I did. Not that I didn’t enjoy it… cheap shots are often entertaining, even to those who know better.
dsquared 10.02.04 at 11:15 am
Is it possible that they skew toward Bush because the population involved is somewhat skewed toward the libertarian right?
Not obvious from the data; the IEM has been perfectly happy predicting Democrat victories in the past. Also note that the “libertarian” right (as opposed to the “hanging chad libertarians” like Glen Reynolds) pretty much hates Bush more than the democrats do.
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