I thought Kerry won it. He did a much better job of debating, simple as that!
Bush missed a grand opportunity do what Kerry did well (I.E. counter punch) when he didn’t jump on the lame Michel Moore point that ten times the troops sent to Iraq vis-a-vis Afghanistan showed that Bush felt that Saddam was ten times the threat of bin Laden. What he should have done was question whether MM would become Kerry’s Secretary of Defense. Then he should have destroyed that idea as being totally ignorant of military strategy. As Napoleon learned at Waterloo, you do not project massive force into a limited space. Afghanistan, where the bad guys hang out, is a series of valleys between steep ridges. Large numbers of troops would have had to amass in the valleys and get strung out on the mountainous trails. Even small bands of misfits (AKA Taliban) would have cut them to shreds. So, Bush missed a chance to make Kerry look like a fool.
Bush almost never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Kerry rolled his eyes when he realized that, immediately after the 10:1 remark, he contradicted himself by saying we didn’t send enough troops into Iraq. Had he seen Kerry reeling, Bush could have knocked him down by saying how sorely we’d come to miss the 750,000 troops lost to the Clinton administration. Similarly, he failed to suggest that had Carter not been a girlie man, we wouldn’t even be talking about nukes in Iran. (Hey! That rhymes
So, Kerry won the debate – hands down!
I hereby nominate myself for Couch President. It’s a whole lot easier to debate sitting down.
PS:
If we were in a debate with bin Laden & Co., then I’d say, go ahead – elect Kerry. I lived through a time, fresh out of high school, when the politicians thought they knew best how many troops to deploy, which days of the year to drop bombs, which targets were militarily significant, and that body count ratios were the metrics of war. I can still see the American evacuees hanging from helicopter skits as the result.
I also recall that the peace talks in Paris began with months of debate over the shape of the table and ended with some of my friends abandoned forever in Nam. So, with what I know now and given the choice between a motor boat skipper turned politician who believes he’s an Admiral and a less polished orator who believes Tommy Franks, I would not choose to live through that again.