DEBATE ROUND-UP

My summary of the first two debates.

Thursday night: A man-behind-the-curtain moment. This guy is our strong leader, running the war on terror?

Last night: Ah, NOW we get it. Bush is the curtain. The man behind the curtain is Cheney. Much better.

Most pundits on the right seem to be taking it as a big Cheney win. PoliPundit comes down hardest on this side. Dick Morris calls Edwards a "deer in the headlights." Ann Althouse calls it "a clear win for Cheney." Another commentator thinks "the big dog won." (That's Cheney.) This one is good too: he points out that Cheney "drove a sword into the man who wasn't there-- John Kerry" and showed that he (Kerry) is "supremely unserious about the most serious issue of our time." Yeah. And John Podhoretz is exhilarated:

Again and again on Iraq and the War on Terror, Cheney found ways to slap Edwards down. He put meat on the skeletal justifications offered by George W. Bush on Thursday night. And while Edwards spent much of the debate going after Cheney and his ex-company, Cheney used his time to go after John Kerry (with the exception of the pointed charge that Edwards hasn't performed his duties as senator, which Cheney knows because he is president of the Senate and never met Edwards until last night).

The key line of the evening was Cheney putting a name to the allegation that John Kerry's and John Edwards's shifting positions on Iraq are due to personal political considerations that do not bode well for his conduct of the war on terror:

"Now, if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al Qaida?"

Yeeeeaaaargh! And ouch. Now that's a bunker buster.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos attempts but fails to prove that Cheney is a "pathological liar." The supposed "lie," which Josh Marshall also alleges, is that Cheney said last night that he had never suggested there was a link between Iraq and 9/11, whereas, they claim, he once did. That sounds desperate. PoliPundit shreds that story. Cheney has always said exactly what he said last night: that there was a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda (there was) but not (as far as we know) between Iraq and 9/11.

An odd outlier, who thinks Edwards won, is Andrew Sullivan. Another is Will Saletan Sullivan thinks... what? Sometimes he says that Cheney's substance was right (e.g. it's not the government that creates jobs) but that Edwards answer was easier to understand; other times he thinks that Cheney sounded solid but people have lots of outside knowledge which makes them skeptical. Which is it? Are voters clever and well-informed, thoughtful, reading between the lines, or are they easily duped by empty promises? Sullivan wants to have it both ways: voters who shrewdly parse Cheney's words on Iraq but lap up all of Edwards' phony government-will-help-you rhetoric on the domestic side. If anything, the reverse is true: voters know the domestic side themselves but defer to leaders on foreign affairs.

Sullivan also thinks that Paul Bremer's recent complaint that there were not enough troops, thus confirming a long-held argument against Bush's war management, will be damaging. Earth to Sullivan: John Kerry is on the Democratic ticket, not Joe Lieberman. What Bush may have done wrong, Kerry would not necessarily have done right. In fact, whatever Kerry might have done differently, invading Iraq with more troops is almost surely not it.

As for Saletan:

If you watched this debate as an uninformed voter, you heard an avalanche of reasons to vote for Kerry. You heard 23 times that Kerry has a "plan" for some big problem or that Bush doesn't. You heard 10 references to Halliburton, with multiple allegations of bribes, no-bid contracts, and overcharges. You heard 13 associations of Bush with drug or insurance companies. You heard four attacks on him for outsourcing. You heard again and again that he opposed the 9/11 commission and the Department of Homeland Security, that he "diverted" resources from the fight against al-Qaida to the invasion of Iraq, and that while our troops "were on the ground fighting, [the administration] lobbied the Congress to cut their combat pay." You heard that Kerry served in Vietnam and would "double the special forces." You heard that Bush is coddling the Saudis, that Cheney "cut over 80 weapons systems," and that the administration has no air-cargo screening or unified terrorist watch list.

Yeah, tons of bad reasons to vote for Kerry. What is a "unified terrorist watch list?" Do we need one? Why? I'll leave it to the experts, of whom Dick Cheney is obviously one, and Edwards is not. None of these details will change anyone's mind, particularly since they're random this-and-that and don't point any particular way or show any particular pattern. And pounding drug and insurance companies? The left will like it. But most Americans are favorably disposed towards business.

It seems to me the elections in Afghanistan next week will play all over the news and give people more hope about Iraq. Victory in Samarra should help too. Here's William Safire's mischievously partisan conclusion to an op-ed praising Afghan progress:

Welcome, then, to the world's interrelated four-month, four-nation election cycle:

Afghans, fighting their unaccustomed way to the polls through feudal fundamentalists and Arab terrorists, will be the most closely watched. But Australians also vote this weekend. Prime Minister John Howard has reaffirmed the traditional Australian-American alliance; he is opposed in the elections by Labor's Mark Latham, the bring-the-boys-home-from-Iraq-by-Christmas candidate.

Then come the U.S. elections, about which you heard plenty last night.

Finally, Iraqi elections are scheduled for January. These will be influenced by the Afghan electoral example, and by the Australian decision signaling the breadth of future coalition support. Most of all, the U.S. election outcome will tell Iraqi voters to expect U.S. help in building a new life in a federal system - or to worry about helicopters hurriedly leaving the roof of the U.S. embassy.

Hehe. Allusion to Saigon 1975. Oh yeah. Will you get out of Iraq, Senator Kerry? That is the question. We still don't know. But maybe. And if the Afghan elections are successful that will really undermine the appeal of Kerry's cut-and-run noises.

Bush never lost his lead in the electoral race even after the first debate. He's still ahead 264-221 in the electoral college, according to RealClearPolitics.

And there may be a silver lining to the loss in the first debate. First, Hugh Hewitt (one of the few who thinks Kerry lost the first debate) emphasizes that Kerry expressed a lot of foreign-policy positions that will come back to haunt him. "Global test" has done so already and will keep echoing, especially since Cheney used it last night to put Kerry's Senate record on the table. Second, the "expectations game." The Bushies, in the past, have always spread the word that Bush was a bad debater so that he would beat expectations. It didn't work this year because the opponents knew about it and the press said he was actually good... but now, expectations of Bush really are low.

The dynamic from earlier this year seems to be repeating itself.

1) Kerry makes headway by sounding strong on foreign policy, though at the same time sounding weak on foreign policy, but people don't notice at first. (Democratic National Convention; first debate.)

2) The Republicans pound him on foreign policy and re-claim that issue. (Zell Miller; veep debate, maybe.)

3) Bush shows that he also has a "compassionate conservative," sensible and centrist yet rather ambitious domestic agenda. This brings in a chunk of swing voters and gives him a significant majority.

So a lot rides on these next two debates. It's the opposite of foreign policy: here Bush is the dark horse, because he described a lot of plans at the Republican National Convention that voters haven't entirely sized up yet, just as Kerry broke news with his emphasis that the Iraq war was a mistake. What I'm afraid of is that he seems on the road to win, but could certainly still lose, he might avoid taking risks. But I think his domestic-policy goals are in the right direction. I hope he presents an expansive agenda in the next debates, and wins himself a powerful new mandate.

Conservatives are happy...