Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Vice Presidential Debates

I didn't hear all of them, but my impression is that Cheney won.
When he came out and said that we had only spent $120 billion rather than $200 billion, and explained why, and then Edwards could only respond with "no, it WAS $200 billion," it became obvious that Cheney had a much better command of the facts.
Also, Edwards failed to make the biggest point he needed to make: Why Kerry (and Edwards, if he had also voted against it, I'm too lazy to check right now) had voted against the $87 billion. He needed to say:
"Yes, Kerry (and I) voted against the package. But not because we wanted to deny funding to the troops. We knew that the bill was bad, and that we could do better. If the bill had failed to pass, you now darn well that a revised version would have appeared within days; when something is that urgent, people work fast, remember the call-waiting list? It took, what, two days after it was struck down before it was re-submitted. I voted against the bill because there was no mechanism to pay for it. If we are to win this war, we need to be honest about the sacrifices it requires. And borrowing money to fund the troops while we cut taxes just won't do. We needed for other spending to be cut or for tax breaks to be repealed. And we hoped that if we voted it down, we'd get a new version where the new spending was actually funded from new revenues or from cutting other spending. As it was in the bill that Kerry voted for - before he voted against the bad one."
But he didn't. And so Cheney trounced him.
Edwards didn't come across as poorly as Bush, but he did come across poorly, IMO.
Cheney offerred some surreality, though. The idea that as soon as elections are held, that the insurgency will go away, is ridiculous.
As for the idea of counting Iraqi Security Forces as part of the coalition, I think Cheney is wrong, but I can't figure out exactly how yet.
UPDATE:
"At one point, toward the end of the foreign policy discussion, he went off on a tangent about Cheney voting against head start and the MLK holiday. Unfortunately, this had nothing to do with what they were discussing.
"Edwards wasn't as bad as Bush, but Cheney was better than Kerry, so I think this debate reverses what happened in the previous one."
From GNXP.
In any case, this was far more interesting than the Cheney/Lieberman Mutual Admiration Society Debate of 2000, where the candidates were so nice to each other that everyone went to sleep.

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