Bush won. Not in a slam-dunk kind of way, but he won.

Some key moments:

1) When Kerry was trying to address the fact that we haven't had any major terrorist attacks since 9/11. This fact is one of his biggest weaknesses, and he knows it.

2) Kerry's handling of the stem-cell research question and the Federal funding of abortion question. In both instances he professed respect for life, and then essentially told the questioners to fuck off. With a lot of blah, blah, blah added in. This was one of the best opportunities for people to see through his lawyerly talk.

3) That moment when Kerry looked around the room and proclaimed that—from the looks of it—only he, the President, and Charlie made more than $200K a year among the people in that room. It seemed clear to me that he was making a classist judgment about what someone might look like who makes good money. As an Angeleno, I found it rather bizarre that one could presume to tell from someone's dress what sort of income they are pulling down. He might well have been correct, but his methodology was essentially a snobby one, and his outlook was very East Coast.

4) Bush's "timber" joke. It was the best line of the evening, and it broke through the audience's resistance to laughter (I suspect they had been instructed not to audibly react to what Bush and Kerry were saying).

5) The closing statements. Kerry stayed in one place and delivered some sort of little canned speech. In the background, a woman looked like she was slightly too bored to really be contemptuous of him. Very static.

When Bush gave his closing statement he walked around a little, and was animated. His entire demeanor was different from Kerry's.

The format, stilted as it was, played to Bush's strengths.

Posted by: Attila at 09:08 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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