Thoughts on the 3rd debate, trying to keep it short (and failing)...

Outside of Fox News, where they think Bush was more presidential, defeated Kerry on substance, and that magic pixies are going to descend on Iraq and hand out unicorns to the Shiites... we all know who won.

But.

Kerry floundered in the first half hour, just as he did in the last half hour of the second debate.  Why?  He wasn't engaging Bush; instead, he was returning, again and again, to talking points and campaign themes, most specifically the Bob Shrum-advised pose of being a Fighter For The Middle Class.  Which, longtime readers note, I predicted months ago over on This Modern World, and with much fear, because it's a tack that Shrum always advises... and which always loses.  (If you're curious as to why, click the link.  I won't get into it here.)

And I'm seeing footage of Kerry and Edwards surrounding themselves with big red and blue signs, with their names and the words "Fighting for America" and some such as far as the eye can see.

That said, go back over the debate transcript, and you'll notice that about 30 minutes into it, Kerry stopped with that shit, and went back to speaking about not what he would fight to do, but what he will do -- putting himself not in the second-class adversary position, but framing himself properly as the best-case fait accompli.

By my count, Kerry hit the "fighter" meme eight times in the debate's first half, and not once thereafter.  I don't know if this was a conscious decision or not, but that's when he began to take command again.

Fortunately, Bush handed the DNC a spectacular ad opportunity, this year's equivalent of Gerald Ford asserting in 1976 that eastern Europe wasn't under Soviet domination: his outright lie that he never said he wasn't concerned about Osama Bin Laden, which is on tape, ready-made for 30-second ads.  This will be especially powerful, because it reinforces three extremely powerful anti-Bush memes -- that he's a liar, that he took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and that he's disconnected from responsibility for his own actions -- all at once, visually, and in less than ten seconds.

Unbelievable.  An amazing thing to hand the Democrats.  It's already airing on CNN (whose reporter asked the question).  If the DNC puts together an attack ad -- and I'm sure they're already working on it -- and then uses it as a cudgel in swing states for the next couple of weeks... game over.

So for those of us concerned about giving the absolutist right four more years of stacking the courts, gutting our rights, savaging the environment, and increasing the world's instability... this is all good news.

But.  (Again.)

I'm also saddened by what the most powerful nation in the world still requires, with few dissenting voices, from anyone who could possibly be its leader, and beyond the obvious stupid entrance ticket of being rich, male, white, and gray. 

An American president can't possibly state the obvious, demonstrable fact that health care in the entire rest of the industrialized world is comparable and often better-administrated than in the U.S. -- and usually through explicit, even proud socialism.  (Mere use of the word is instant disqualification from office.)  And this is even while both candidates promise to defend existing government programs which are socialist on their face, without acknowledging the obvious hypocrisy.  (The fact that one of them is lying through his teeth doesn't exactly make this better.)  And so one entire set of useful solutions to certain societal problems is still discarded out of hand, for purely ideological reasons, with all the blind adeptness of a fanatic religious state.

An American president must declare his avowed willingness to kill anyone, anywhere, and with explicit disregard for the standing of international law.  That's what John Kerry has been saying ever since his "global test" slip.  This is not reassuring to my ears.

An American president must also profess a powerful faith in the Christian deity.  In the manner of a religious theocracy, any expression of religious doubts would have killed either candidate tonight.

And an American president can never, ever challenge a provable falsehood (like, say, that Social Security is in grave danger, necessitating immediate reform -- when in fact the trustees have repeatedly showed it to be solvent through at least 2041, in reports typically squashed by the Bush administration) if that false belief is shared by the majority.   In short, Americans continue to prefer -- no, insist -- on being spoken to as children.

Kerry did well tonight, and I am cheered, because when your house is on fire, you don't quibble about who's bringing the hose.

But once the fire is out -- and that may take a generation -- we still have a long task of building (and re-building) a just and humane society ahead.