I need to clear my head of political and logical thought before I go back to writing Groo today so…
I'm not surprised that polls say Kerry did well with "undecided" voters last night. I'm surprised there are any undecided voters but not that they would have preferred Kerry. Bush went a long way to reassuring his supporters that he is not that frantic, testy little man that he was in the first debate. (There was some of that but not so much that if you're already on his side, you couldn't ignore it.) But if you weren't already for Bush, who is a known quantity, I can't see that he gave you much reason to suddenly decide for him. I think Kerry is winning by seeming presidential and quite unlike the caricature that his opponents have been trying to pass off as The Real John Kerry. I can imagine a lot of Americans looking at the mess in Iraq, looking at the staggering deficit and all the Bush predictions of job growth that have not come to pass…and thinking, "Bush doesn't even think those things are problems. At least the other guy will try to fix things."
I loved Bill Maher's opening joke on Real Time last night…
The last question, a lady said "Name three mistakes you've made," and Bush said, "This debate, the last debate and the next debate."
(He and his staff came up with that less than a half-hour after the debate. This is a good example of what I was talking about when I said that talk shows can and should have more immediacy, and why Leno and Letterman are wrong to tape ahead on nights like this. Maher had a very good show, by the way. It reruns many times throughout the week.)
Bush has set himself up for the talking point, "He thinks he's infallible and won't even consider changing course when the evidence changes or his plans just plain don't work." He couldn't name one thing and could only allude to having hired some of the wrong people, which is another way of saying, "I trusted a few people and they made mistakes." I think the question was a bit unfair but the answer probably lost some folks who might like to vote Republican but don't think everything's gone as well as it should have.
Okay, back to work.