More on Last Night's Debate
James Lileks was at the blogger party that I attended last night, but left early, so I didn't get his reaction until reading this morning's Bleat. Briefly put, James was not impressed:
Ask yourself this: you’re a dictator who has violated the terms of a peace treaty over and over again, and frequently shoots at the planes enforcing the treaties. Who do you fear the most? A) The magnificent concert of allies in the UN, some of whom you’ve bought off, who are desperate to prove their legitimacy by prolonging the process into the 22nd centuryB) The United States, Britain and Australia, who have several hundred thousand troops on your border and frankly are in no mood to put up your crap any longer
What would you want in this situation? The answer starts with “S” and ends, five letters later, in “T.”
Polls are suggesting that most people think Kerry "won" the debate. I can't really disagree, but I think we should be cautious in assessing what this means. For many people (including me), there is a big difference between assessing a candidate's performance in a debate and deciding whom to vote for. There may well be people who thought Kerry performed better, but who were nevertheless moved to vote for Bush because they distrust Kerry's constant deference to the U.N. and other international groups.
The only way to assess the debate's impact, if any, is to wait four or five days and look at the polls.
UPDATE: A reader pointed us to this post-debate Gallup poll that illustrates exactly what I was trying to get at. Gallup's respondents said that Kerry "did the better job in the debate" by a decisive 53% to 37% margin. But if you look at the internal numbers, they give Kerry very little comfort. The only area where people actually say Kerry did better was in "expressing himself more clearly," by 60% to 32%. The candidates were tied in having a good understanding of the issues. By 49% to 46%, respondents said Bush "agrees with them on the issues they care about." By 50% to 45%, Bush was more believable; by 48% to 41%, Bush was more likable; and by a whopping 54% to 37%, Bush demonstrated he was "tough enough for the job."
Equally important, the Gallup poll indicates that watching the debate had almost no effect on respondents' assessment of who can best handle the situation in Iraq (Bush, by 54% to 43% post-debate) or who would be the better commander in chief (Bush, by 54% to 44% post-debate).
So unless the media succeed in spinning the "Kerry won" story so that it takes on a life of its own, it looks like the debate advanced Kerry's cause little, if at all.
