If Kerry does manage to pull off a defeat, political scientists and historians will cite the first debate as a turning point. Kerry needed to introduce himself to all of the regular people who still didn’t have a clear idea of who he was. He needed to appear direct, firm, and presidential. In other words, he needed to sell himself to the people who were fed up with Bush but not ready to buy Kerry. I think he did that. He had a commanding presence and never seemed on the defensive. Bush oftentimes seems befuddled and sometimes at a loss for words. And he relied heavily on pat phrases from his stump speech. Until tonight, I had no idea that it would be “hard work” to rebuild Iraq.
\nAnd what was up with Bush’s curious fixation on Poland? You could have played a hell of a drinking game based on the number of times he mentioned Poland.
\nNow, the Dems need to control the spin game. The Republicans will try to portray this as a draw and the Kerry camp needs to fight that. And while I have ambiguous feelings about polls, it would be nice to see Kerry move in the polls.
\nAfter the debate, we all tuned to The Daily Show. They did a brilliant piece on undecided voters. Quoth Samantha Bee to a group of undecideds: “How do you fucking dress yourself in the morning?”
\nNow to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If Kerry does manage to pull off a defeat, political scientists and historians will cite the first debate as a turning point. Kerry needed to introduce himself to all of the regular people who still didn’t have a clear idea of who he was. He needed to appear direct, firm, and presidential. In other words, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-9W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}