Not that I ever watch Crossfire, but I wish I had caught this one. The “transcript”:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html is up for Jon Stewart’s guest appearance, in which he savages the show and Tucker Carlson. It’s glorious. I read about it first on “Wonkette”:http://www.wonkette.com/ — strangely enough, she was at the table next to me at the coffee shop when she “interviewed” Tucker Carlson, as described “here”:http://www.wonkette.com/archives/breaking-wonkette-calls-someone-tries-this-reporting-thing-023530.php.

Stewart has this great insulation to say some of the things he says because his own show is, by definition, a big joke. And that’s something that in the whole interview Carlson simply could not get. Though he was smart enough to drop a quote to Wonkette afterwards, I guess.

UPDATE: “Go read”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archive/2004/10/now_with_memeti.php Michael Hall on Stewart, Crossfire, and Wonkette. He’s pretty hard on Wonkette, but I think he’s basically right — her “look at me I’m not a real journalist!” schtick is now tired. She needs to take a page from Stewart’s book, which is her book too, or at least used to be.

Among the titles I scrounged off the tables at the State Department bookfair was _Backgammon: The Action Game_, by Prince Alexis Obolensky and Ted James. It was published in 1969, before Magriel’s _Backgammon_ and therefore by definition out of date, but it was only two bucks, and I thought it might be an interesting look at retro backgammon strategy.

The checkout was staffed by two very nice ladies, presumably wives of retired diplomats. “Oh!” one of them said. “I didn’t know Prince Alexis published a backgammon book!”

“Who’s Prince Alexis?” I asked.

“Russian nobility,” she replied. “His family fled here after the Revolution. Trying to live it up in exile — the White Russians, we call them.”

“Didn’t his brother work here?” said the other lady.

“Yes, I think so . . .” the first lady said. “And his son — no, it would have been his grandson — went to high school with Roger.”

Only at the State Department bookfair could such an exchange have ever taken place, I think. As it happens, the book has a good, quirky “history of backgammon” chapter, so it was easily worth the price. I don’t recall meeting any dignified old Russians at the backgammon club before, but I’ll be sure to keep a lookout the next time around.

I made the mistake of putting the most recent issue of _The Atlantic_ into the diaper bag and forgetting about it, so it’s taken me a while to read “Karl Rove in a Corner”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green and “Welcome to the Green Zone”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/langewiesche. Both are available online, and both are absolute must-reads. William Langewiesche is brilliant as always in his profile of postwar Baghdad, which is by far the most important article of the two. But Joshua Green’s profile of Karl Rove’s campaign tactics is particularly timely — I’m going to be gritting my teeth from here to election day wondering what his last-ditch ploy is going to be.

OK, so as it happens, I was able to watch the debate, I got your good ol’ unspinned insta-thoughts right here, baby!

I was surprised to find that my heart was beating quite quickly as the two candidates walked up to their respective podiums. It wasn’t excitement. It was, I realized on reflection, apprehension—the tension came from knowing what was at stake in the election, and the apprehension came because I was worried Kerry was going to screw up.

He didn’t screw up. He did all right. But so did Bush, who overall did a little better than he did in the second debate. I’ll still call it a Kerry win with my biased eyes, and I suspect the CW will evolve into something like a draw. There wasn’t any big moment in there that will shift things to a large extent.

Kerry was kind of lousy in the beginning but found his stride a few questions in. He stammered more often than in the previous two debates, and really nailed his responses less often than before. Of course, as a baseline he still did better than Bush on overall presentation, but as the last debate made clear, you can go a very long way on improving from low expectations. Bush replaced the sneer and slouch from the first debate and the whine from the second with a smarmy smile. It didn’t come off well either, but of the three it was the least egregious. At times during his responses, especially after he had pulled off what he clearly thought of as a zinger against Kerry, the smile reminded me of a seventh-grade bully proud at just having scored a diss on the class nerd.

I was really worried during Bush’s 30-second response to flu question that came second. He said “I want to remind people listening tonight that a plan is not a litany of complaints.” It was a perfectly-timed hit, and this was before Kerry had found his feet anyway, and I thought maybe it was all over. Kerry did fine on the tax question that came next, though—he went for a “pay as you go” line and Bush’s jabs in response didn’t amount to much. All in all, Bush trotted out “liberal” and “Massachusetts” a number of times, but it didn’t really amount of a wholesale attack like lots of people seemed to be predicting.

For Bush, the answer to everything was education. Specifically, the No Child Left Behind Act. At one point he even said “Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs act when you think about it.” He brought it up all over the place, and if Kerry had been just a little more on his feet he could have scored some points on that during the cheesy “women in your life” question that came at the end. Something like: “Before I get to that, Bob, let me congratulate you on posing a question that didn’t allow the President to bring in No Child Left Behind.”

Question #6—do you believe homosexuality is a choice?—was very important. Bush said “I don’t know.” Kerry came down (surprisingly) firmly in saying that it was not. I think it will serve him well, not simply because it’s right, but because the people who feel strongly about it an disagree with him are already voting for Bush, and those who are honestly unsure will respect the clarity, force, and confidence of his response. This question was one example, and there were others, also in the second debate, of Bush speaking to the base while Kerry goes for the middle. If I were a campaign adviser I’d have advised either of them at the outset to make motivating the base a first priority, but the fact that Bush has been the one to shift away from the middle lets Kerry go there much more easily.

It’s not in the transcript that I’m looking at, but after Kerry had referenced data from two news organizations in an answer on tax cuts, Bush started his response this way: -”It’s incredible to quote leading news organizations about . . . oh, never mind.”- “In all due respect, I’m not so sure it’s credible to quote leading news organizations about—oh, nevermind.” I would love to know what he meant to say there. I’m not sure he knew himself. The impression I had—and this was from his facial response as much as his words—is that quoting new organizations for data seemed ridiculous because, y’know, liberal media and all. Who knows if that’s what was going through his mind, but if it was, he had good sense to cut himself short.

I don’t have a url for it, but there was a NYT piece a couple weeks ago by Stanley Fish called “Kerry and Bush, As Seen from the Classroom.” In it, Fish talked about analyzing the rhetorical strategies of both candidates’ stump speeches with his undergrad students to see who they thought did better. And the answer, of course, was Bush—his communications team have always been great at rhetoric and style. Bush’s speeches clearly highlight his main points and use repetition to drive key ideas home. Kerry, by contrast, meanders. While he usually gets around to conveying the key fact or idea, by the time he’s there it’s been buried. Here’s a perfect example from Kerry’s response to Bush’s social security question:

You just heard the president say that young people ought to be able to take money out of Social Security and put it in their own accounts.

Now, my fellow Americans, that’s an invitation to disaster.

The CBO said very clearly that if you were to adopt the president’s plan, there would be a $2 trillion hole in Social Security, because today’s workers pay in to the system for today’s retirees. And the CBO said—that’s the Congressional Budget Office; it’s bipartisan—they said that there would have to be a cut in benefits of 25 percent to 40 percent.

The key piece of information here is “today’s workers pay into the system for today’s retirees.” That’s the heart of the matter and the hole in Bush’s plan. It is buried in a subordinate clause in the third sentence of his response. And it comes after a reference to a “hole” that only makes sense once you understand how the system works in the first place. So the “today’s workers” quote should have come first, followed by a description of the hole, and ending by calling it a disaster, once he’s actually communicated what he’s talking about. As it is, he creates steep expectations by putting “disaster” first, and then hides the key point that makes it all make sense.

Kerry does this sort of thing all the time. Bush sometimes does too when he’s speaking extempore, but never when he’s doing rehearsed speeches, because he has a killer speechwriting team. And the clarity of his speech rhetoric rubs off on him even in the debates—he’s used to making clear, forceful statements, and so they’re what he repeats on the spur of the moment as well.

Every time I thought Kerry was down for the count, he managed to pull himself up again, though. He got creamed with a lousy response to Bush’s succinct immigration answer, but lucked out with a minimum wage question to him right after that, which he nailed, followed by Bush’s grasping “NCLB is a jobs act” line.

My jaw dropped when Bush whipped out the “global test” line in his response to Kerry’s answer to a draft question. It wasn’t that he brought it up—that’s to be expected—but that he didn’t even bother to pretend to address what Kerry actually meant by it. He could have just dropped the phrase and let its associations squirm into people’s minds as they may, but he flat-out clarified the statement this way: “In order to defend ourselves, we’d have to get international approval,” and in doing so turned a perfectly weaselly insinuation into an easily refutable claim. But, again, he seems to be playing to his base now, so maybe in the long run it won’t matter.

Kerry’s closing statement was an all-too-familiar collage of the same old talking points. Bush’s started with “In the Oval Office there’s a painting,” at which point he had already won the closing statement exchange. See “killer speechwriting team,” above.

Looking back over it, I’ll be relieved if if the conventional wisdom ends up in a draw. Kerry was obviously up on substance, but only up on presentation if you factor out lowered expectations, which it seems you can’t really get away with. And Bush had his number on rhetorical style (I’d just go ahead and say “elocutio” if more of you had taken me for English 101).

Barring a big October Surprise, it looks like a dead heat straight on ‘till election day.

UPDATE: The insta-poll consensus (for what it’s worth, which ain’t much) gives Kerry a fairly solid win. Hey, I’ll take it.

Interesting contrast on Slate between Saletan (Kerry knocked it out of the park) and Suellentrop (it was close).

All in all, I’m warming up to the notion that Kerry won the debate (which I’m finding easy to do, go figure), but I still think it was Bush’s best performance of the three. It’s clear that his Osama bin Laden gaffe is going to haunt him big time, though. (UPDATE: The actual text of the OBL gaffe is in the comments.)

UPDATE: Kerry mentioned Cheney’s daughter during the “is homosexuality a choice?” question, and many conservatives, as well as Cheney’s wife, have been taking umbrage. Andrew Sullivan has some (UPDATE: many) words for them.

I’m not going to be able to catch the third debate live. Sorry to disappoint those of you who have grown accustomed to the instant commentary. Though there’s not too much point, out of habit I’m going to stay on media blackout until I’ve had a chance to watch the videotape and post some thoughts.

You don’t have to read far in Walden before you get to this:

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways … I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

When I read that on the road to Boston, I knew I was hooked, though my intention of getting through it before visiting Walden Pond turned out to be a pipe dream. Between one thing or another, I didn’t finish it for another couple of weeks, so all the beautiful nature prose didn’t wash over me until I was back in the big city. It’s easy to forget that Thoreau didn’t start his experiment out of a desire to frolic with the squirrels—it arose, rather, out of a touch of schadenfreude at the landed plight of his fellow townsmen.

The reason Walden’s opening sat so well with me is that it jives nicely with my own stuff-aversion, à la shelfworthiness. Thoreau’s message, translated into modern terms, allows those of us not burdened down with owning a house to feel pretty darn good about it. Sure, while romanticizing the life of the mind, he sometimes comes off as a little naive by romanticizing the life of the pauper, but if you’re like me and you’re occasionally consumed by the pressing desire to just throw away half of what you own, you’ll groove on passages like this:

At present our houses are cluttered and defiled by [furniture], and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

I do wonder what Thoreau would have thought if he could have had an iBook, though. He railed against the material responsibilities that demand our attention, but his concern was really one of time more than matter. His grand experiment would have looked very different if he were carrying it out today. For one thing, he’d be much less likely to have a friend’s piece of land he could conveniently squat on for free. Having grown up among the literati, he probably wouldn’t have that convenient set of handyman skills to bring to bear. And there’s that troubling matter of health insurance. In 2004, his best bet for getting by on $400 a month or so would be to live in a group house, work part-time at the co-op, and maybe write all about it on the weekend at the coffee shop with the free wi-fi. Which leads me to what, I’m afraid, is my sole stunning insight upon rereading Walden:

If Thoreau lived today, he would so totally be a blogger.

I’m not talking about Walden as it was published, but as it was first written. Thoreau started off with daily musings scribbled down over the course of several seasons, and only much later shaped the thing into a cohesive whole. But even in its revised and organized form, the seams of what was essentially a running journal constantly shine through. Walden is series of short vignettes and everyday observations, descriptive paragraphs and flippant rants. Heck, the guy could be downright snarky at times:

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

“Ambitious booby!” I’d link to that! Acerbic wit aside, Thoreau was also prone to making wild statements off the top of his head, sometimes spilling over with wisdom, but often highlighting his inability to see that his grand vision might not be for everyone. In one section he describes the visit he paid to a poor Irish farmer, and how he explained to the guy that if he just quit his job and went to live in the woods (with his whole family!) that things would be groovy. It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to imagine the farmer turning to his wife after Thoreau had left and saying “Jeez, what a jerk!” Which, again, has “blogger” written all over it—where would the blogosphere be without brilliant, eloquent people who are wrong as often as they are right?

I don’t know whether Thoreau’s day-to-day manuscripts are still available, but if they are, it would be quite easy to take them and post them sequentially, along the same lines as the Beatles Blog. Easy, but time-consuming, so I leave the task to some grad student studying American Transcendentalism with too much time on their hands.

Thoreau went to Walden loving simplicity, not nature, so it’s a little bit ironic that he’s best known as a nature writer and grandfather of the conservation movement. What he was was a writer, and his experiment in simplicity demanded that nature was what surrounded him, and so it was nature that he wrote about. Had he gotten it into his head that everybody should live ostentatiously instead of deliberately, he might have spent the time in Paris and written a very different book—though certainly one just as worth reading. Still, nature takes center stage fairly early on, to the benefit of a great many readers and nature lovers. I felt an unearthly tingle the whole time I was reading about his encounter with the loon, not least because I’ve played the very same game on Lake Anne-Marie in the Upper Peninsula. I’m tempted to quote the whole section, but it’s too long—go to the Gutenberg version, text-search for “As I was paddling,” and read on from there. Wonderful stuff.

Nature becomes Thoreau’s working material, but he’s ultimately interested in other things. Maybe it’s just as well that he wasn’t a blogger, because the necessity of somehow tying it all together is what made him think big. The call to heed our inner life never gets old, especially when the outer concerns are as shallow as they’ve ever been.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

When you’re thirty-two and the bulk of your day is spent attending to the needs and desires of a 10-month-old baby, the notion of hopping aboard a Santa Maria of the mind for some probing inner exploration sounds rather exhausting, frankly. But the real core of Walden’s message—live deliberately—still rings true, and I doubt its lustre will ever fade. Make choices about how you live your life. Strip it down and build it back up again on purpose. Don’t do something because society does it or your peers do it or the conventional wisdom says that it seems sensible—do it for your own good reasons. It’s stuff everyone needs to be reminded about now and again—I’m not going to let another fifteen years go by before I read Walden again.

Two of my favorite authors on the planet were in D.C. this weekend: Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman. They were both featured writers at the “National Book Festival”:http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/ on the Mall, and Stephenson also had a reading at the Olsson’s bookstore up the street from where I live.

Unfortunately I only had time to hit the book-signing line for Neil G. He signed _American Gods_ and the Midsummer Night’s Dream issue of _Sandman_ for me, and _Wolves in the Walls_ for Ella. He even drew a sketch of a wolf on _Wolves_, which he promised to make not so scary since Ella’s only ten months old. I was surprised at his accent, which is silly since I know perfectly well that he’s British. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t sound all that British on “his blog”:http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp. Or maybe he cranks up the ol’ Albion twang when he’s signing stuff.

Neal S. read and answered questions at Olsson’s and just did Q&A on the Mall. He behaved exactly as I imagined he would — a little reserved, but direct and articulate, and very smart. He didn’t start a sentence until he knew exactly where it was going to end up. “Not surprisingly”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000123.html, I asked him a “what do you think of the Pynchon comparisons” question, which for the most part he artfully dodged, though he did say he considered T.P. to be “one of the greats.” I’m only a little ways into _The System of the World_ right now, and there’s a very good chance that when I get to the end I’m going to go right back and read the whole Baroque Cycle over again. When I had him sign the Cycle books at the bookstore, I asked him to write the Liebniz quote, “Whatever acts cannot be destroyed,” in parts across all three books. He seemed quite pleased by that idea, but today when I asked him to write “ignoti et quasi occulti” on _Cryptonomicon_, he seemed more taken aback. He did write it, but followed it with a dash roughly crossed by an exclamation mark. I have no idea what that means, though now I know what I’ll put in the “draw our secret symbol” box of my Societas Eruditorum membership application.

If absolutely none of that made any sense to you, you’ve got some reading to do.

Bush was way better this time around. He faltered less often, he was clearly much more at home in the town hall style format, and he pulled off more slam-dunk responses, including an excellent closing statement. He often came closer to a Cheney-style presentation, that is to say, though he was speaking either total falsehoods or completely dodging a question, he did it with a measure of confidence and authority. But, as in the first debate, he was on the defensive nearly all the time. While he managed to shed some of the facial tics that plagued him then, his voice sounded downright whiny on a number of occasions.

And he got beaten, very soundly, because John Kerry was on fire. He was confident, direct, and managed to leap into each question forcefully and end them on a solid point as well. Both of them had their share of question-dodging and forcing things around to what they wanted to talk about instead of what had been asked—and Kerry seemed guilty of this a little more than Bush—but despite his diversions he managed to get back to the point when it really counted. He was the picture of composure, even more than in the first debate, and so, by contrast, left Bush in the dust. Because Bush improved so much from the last time, his supporters may think they have grounds to call this a better result, but they’d be deluding themselves.

And while I thought Bush improved overall, I couldn’t help but jot down some jaw-dropping gaffes of his. (I’ll freely admit partisan bias in not jotting down gaffes of Kerry’s, but I didn’t note any comparable ones.) On a question about the inevitability of the draft, Bush kicked off with “there’s rumors on the Internets …” Yes, that’s a plural. Not all that significant on substance, but’s fodder for the late night talk shows. On the same question, talking about the armed forces: “we need to be lighter and quicker and more facile …” I suppose it’s possible he was using the word’s second definition in American Heritage, “working, acting, or speaking with effortless ease and fluency,” but that’s certainly not how it struck me at first, and you can color me skeptical that he didn’t mean to say “agile” or something else.[1] Also on the draft question, the moderator tried to move on rather than allowing thirty-second rebuttals, but Bush rather brusquely brushed over him and started talking. That’ll probably impress some people, but it came off to me as a bit rude.

It was painful to see Kerry mess up what could have been a slam dunk, when Bush was asked about Kerry’s choice of a trial lawyer as a running mate. I was watching with my friend Matt, who said “All he has to say is that he has no problem with a lawyer who sues doctors that are genuinely guilty of malpractice.” His actual response was longer and more meandering. All in all, Kerry filled the clock every time when a brevity might have often served him better. No better example of that (and I’m jumping ahead in my notes here) is Bush’s totally incoherent response to a question about who he’d name to the Supreme Court. While he was figuring out what to say he tried to make light, and came up with:

1. “I’m not telling”
2. ”… plus I want them [judges who might be nominated] all voting for me!”

Then he segued into qualities of judges he wouldn’t pick, and in reaching for an example, he comes up with . . . the Dred Scott case. That’s right, in order to identify a specific bad judicial decision to indicate the sort of judges he wouldn’t pick, he had to go back to slavery.

Questions that neither candidate was able to answer directly, in large part because there is no good answer that Americans want to hear (both paraphrased): “If UN sanctions won’t work against Iran, what will you do about it?” “How can the U.S. be competitive in a global market when our quality of life demands such greater pay than other nations?”

Kerry nailed Bush on the reimportation of drugs question and the deficit question. When Kerry was asked if he’d raise taxes on those making under $200k, he took the asker’s bait and looked at the camera and said “no.” Then, as part of his response, he opined that the only three people who made that much in the room were him, the President, and Charlie, the moderator. Whether true or not, it got him a laugh from the audience, which Bush disastrously tried to talk over by whining (and it did sound particularly like a whine this time) “It’s not credible!”

Bush did very well with trotting out specifics when asked about environmental accomplishments, though he had a little gaffe in bragging about the creation of “three million wetlands.” Kerry very nearly botched the response by going back to a previous question and trying to distance himself from the word “liberal,” but eventually came around and hit back as good as he gave. Kerry missed a golden opportunity to absolutely destroy Bush on standing by the Patriot Act wholesale—all he had to do was recite a litany of cases of unjust imprisonment and other violations incited by an overzealous Attorney General. He did come up with one example, and came out on top in the exchange, but it could have been better.

The penultimate question was on using tax dollars for abortion, and while Kerry’s answer—that he couldn’t legislate for everyone on the basis of his personal faith—was good, Bush was at his plainspoken best in his response and got the upper edge. For a second I thought that if he could rally on the last question as well he’d be able to create a much better overall impression. But then he lost it in the 30-second responses. Kerry laid out a scenario for why he opposed the partial-birth abortion bill—a 16-year old raped by her father shouldn’t be required to get her father’s permission to get an abortion—and ended with “It’s never quite as simple as the President wants you to believe.” Bush came back with “He voted no! It’s that simple!” which carried no weight in the face of what Kerry had just said. Then the President said, and I am not making this up, “You can run but you can’t hide! It’s reality!”

Then, for the coup de grace, Bush completely buckled when asked to name three specific choices he made incorrectly during his Administration. He mumbled adrift for a while before coming up with a line about being right with respect to the big choices. He said, “When they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they really mean.”

And the more I think about it, the more I think that this is what will ultimately lose Bush the election. Let’s assume that the people in that audience are more or less what they said they were: undecided voters. (It was clear from the questions that many of them were very much decided on specific issues, like abortion, but they could still have been genuinely on the fence overall.) A woman asks Bush to identify some of his mistakes, and instead of looking her in the eye, he tries to tell her about “they” mean. I don’t remember the exact context of the question—if the “they” meant “when people ask about mistakes they really want to know about the big ones” or if they referred to the people (liberals, the media, etc.) trying to discredit him, but it doesn’t really matter, because either way he was discrediting the individual in front of him, presuming either to tell her what she really wanted to know, or assume she’d been hoodwinked by “them.” He cannot conceive that this woman from Missouri is perfectly self-composed and intelligent and undeceived and yet can’t decide yet whether to vote for him. (Off of substance and back to style briefly, Kerry did a great job of mentioning questioners by name and even referring back to audience members from several questions earlier.)

In response Kerry took the expected road of hammering on the Iraq mistakes again, which worked all right, but I wish he had—even though the question didn’t call for it—simply and briefly stated three mistakes he felt he had made in the last four years. They wouldn’t have to be whoppers, just simple, truthful admissions of small mistakes, without flim-flammery. He could have sewn up the election right then and there.

As it is, I’m more confident than I’ve ever been that he has sewn it up. He clearly scored another win in this debate, and as the last one has shown in the polls, these things do matter. There’s still a long stretch of weeks until November, but Bush has his work cut out for him—he will need to pull Osama out of a hat, or miraculously nail the third and final debate.

Thus ends my spin-insulated thoughts. I’m going to be really pissed now if everybody’s talking on the news about a draw . . .

¹ Complete sidenote here: “facile” seemed completely off because to my ears it carries a slightly negative connotation. That’s in the fourth definition, “readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth,” but in common usage it seems like that one should be bumped up from fourth place a couple notches.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, but was reminded by reading several others who said it: they were good questions. Yay Missouri, and yay Charlie what’s-his-name for picking them.

Josh Marshall thinks it was a draw, but thinks that a draw favors Kerry overall. It’s only a draw if you grant Bush way-lowered expectations, which is apparently what a fair number of people are doing.

It is without a doubt easier for bloggers than for professional journalists to stick their necks out by writing about and making judgments on the debate before hearing the spin or getting an impression of what other people think. Bloggers, all in all, aren’t risking near as much. But that doesn’t mean that more professional journalists shouldn’t be doing it too.

Sopping up shallow impressions from too many places to name, it seems that both sides have their partisans calling victory and others calling it a draw. But again, the only way I see a draw is if you grant Bush points for improvement and not Kerry. If the first debate had never happened and this was the first debate, the Kerry win would be a no-brainer—“Bush seemed agitated and confrontational, he talked over the moderator, he had no good responses on Iraq, he whined.” It only looks good by comparison to how he did before.

UPDATE: Why are we bothering reading anything else on the debates when we have good ol’ Fafnir?

As I mentioned a couple days ago, earlier this year I went through the process of getting my background checked for security clearance, though I ultimately didn’t take the job in question. Along the way, a number of my friends from various stages in my life were interviewed, and of course they all let me know how the interviews went when they were over. Of all the amusing stories that came as a result of that, this one is the funniest. (Apologies to those involved if there are minor inaccuracies; this one’s been retold a lot, and has no doubt drifted in the telling.)

So. Somebody called my friend M for a phone interview. I’ve known M since I moved to D.C.; we’ve been in the same gaming group for most of that time, meeting to play a roleplaying game (usually Amber) on a near-weekly basis. A portion of their conversation went something like this:

G-man: So, how do you know Nathan?
M: We’re in the same gaming group.
G: (quizzically) “Gaming group?”
M: Uh, yeah, we play roleplaying games …
G: (even more quizically) “Role playing games?”
M: (wondering how on earth to explain this) Well, there’s this game called “Amber,” and it’s based on the novels of Roger Zelazny …
G: Could you spell that?

… and so on. A couple weeks later, my friend N, who lives in Grand Rapids, had two people come to interview him about me in his office. It’s likely that these guys were retired government workers, probably FBI—that’s who they usually get to do out-of-state interviews. Apparently, a note about “roleplaying games” had made it into my file. N and I used to play a lot of different RPGs together, most recently the Star Wars RPG during high school.

G1: Are you aware of these “role playing games” that Nathan is involved in?
N: Sure. We used to play RPGs in high school.
G2: (scribbles furiously in his notebook)
G1: (in all seriousness) Do any of these games advocate the violent overthrow of the government?
N: (thinks about it for a second) Well, yeah. I mean, we used to play Star Wars, which I guess counts.
G1: Please explain.
N: Uh, OK. See, there’s the Empire, and it’s ruled by the Emperor, who serves the Dark Side, and then the good guys are the Rebellion …

Yes, it’s true. My dear friend N had to explain Star Wars as part of my background check. Your tax dollars at work!

Both Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer are hosts on the Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS. Both they and the show are highly respected, and yet, I can rarely bring myself to watch it (or listen to it on the radio) any more. The reason is that it devolves all too often into talking head situations where they put on two people on opposite sides of an issue and let them shout it out, without striving for deeper analysis. More generally, they fall into the all-too-common trap of giving equal time to both sides in a debate (usually Dems vs. GOP) and considering that to be “balanced.” This is a weak way to go under the best of circumstances, and it’s completely useless during the campaign season, when both sides are spinning out of control. What we need is a media that will ask tough questions and cut through the crap. What we need is a media that will let us know when one side or the other is just out-and-out _lying_, which happens under all Administrations, but has been especially widespread with this one.

Anyway, given all that, I can see why both sides figured the Newshour folks would be good moderators for the debates. They’ve got the journalistic pedigree, but they also have a solid rep for letting each side have its say and not getting in the way with a bothersome insistence on finding “the truth.” And while Lehrer asked hard, searching questions that got beyond this mold, Ifill’s questions last night reflected that very shallow sense of fairness represented on the Newshour — she often framed confrontational questions, phrased the way that the other side would want them phrased.

Here are some of Lehrer’s questions:

— As president, what would you do, specifically, in addition to or differently to increase the homeland security of the United States than what President Bush is doing?
— Speaking of Vietnam, you spoke to Congress in 1971, after you came back from Vietnam, and you said, quote, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” . . . Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?
— Can you give us specifics, in terms of a scenario, time lines, et cetera, for ending major U.S. military involvement in Iraq?
— Does the Iraq experience make it more likely or less likely that you would take the United States into another preemptive military action?
— Senator Kerry, you mentioned Darfur, the Darfur region of Sudan. Fifty thousand people have already died in that area. More than a million are homeless. And it’s been labeled an act of ongoing genocide. Yet neither one of you or anyone else connected with your campaigns or your administration that I can find has discussed the possibility of sending in troops . . . Why not?

Only rarely were the candidates able to rise to the level of these questions. More often they responded broadly to the topic but were short on the specific detail Lehrer was asking for.

Here are some of Ifill’s:

— Part of what you have said and Senator Kerry has said that you are going to do in order to get us out of the problems in Iraq is to internationalize the effort . . . Yet French and German officials have both said they have no intention even if John Kerry is elected of sending any troops into Iraq for any peacekeeping effort. Does that make your effort or your plan to internationalize this effort seem kind of naive?
— This one is for you, Mr. Vice President. President Bush has derided in John Kerry for putting a trial lawyer on the ticket. You yourself have said that lawsuits are partly to blame for higher medical costs. Are you willing to say that John Edwards, sitting here, has been part of the problem?
— Do you feel personally attacked when Vice President Cheney talks about liability reform and tort reform and the president talks about having a trial lawyer on the ticket?
— Flip-flopping has become a recurring theme in this campaign, you may have noticed . . . Senator Kerry changed his mind about whether to vote to authorize the president to go to war. President Bush changed his mind about whether a homeland security department was a good idea or a 9/11 Commission was a good idea . . . What’s wrong with a little flip-flop every now and then?

That first one is a good example of something she did often — ask a good question but end it with an inexplicable bit of baiting. Those middle two were the worst — first actually _fishing_ for Cheney to attack his opponent, and then, in essence, asking Edwards to say how he “feels” about it. The flip-flop question wasn’t as bad as I remembered, in that Ifill wasn’t just targetting Kerry with it. And at root there’s an OK question here: “Isn’t it all right for policymakers to change their minds when confronted by new information?” or something to that effect. But instead of asking that, she invokes the sound bite language of a shallow campaign ploy.

On Friday we’re out of Newshour land; the debate will be hosted by Charles Gibson of Good Morning America, of whom I know nuthin’. We’ll see how it goes.