Month: October 2004

Go see Dean’s World’s interview with Van Odell.

Charlie Cook is one of our most astute political analysts, and he was not impressed by John Kerry’s debate performance:

Personally, I thought that Kerry sounded like Thurston Howell III, the snooty and condescending millionaire from “Gilligan’s Island,” but more people were comfortable with that than they were with the President’s stammering and halting delivery and repetition of same phrases and arguments. Kerry’s strongest argument was on certainty, and he did get better as the debate progressed.

Equivocating with conviction is the new Kerry hallmark.

French prime minister tells the truth:

[Note] the recent bizarre phrase from French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The head of the Figaro press group went to see him about the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq; Raffarin assured him they would soon be freed, reportedly saying, “The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies.”

You can’t make this stuff up. From Winds of Change.

Gallup Poll on the specifics of the debate:

This isn’t a win for Kerry.

Marty Peretz points to the shaky foundations of the Kerry “plan” for Iraq

In an editorial in last week’s New Republic, we wrote that “to win reelection, Bush is lying” about Iraq. I have no qualms about that assertion. But now Kerry has spoken definitively about Iraq as well, at New York University and elsewhere. His speeches have produced a flurry of hosannas. Tnr put a headline on its cover, echoing a phrase in Kerry’s address, that proclaimed there was, “finally, a real debate on iraq.” But only Ryan Lizza, in last week’s issue, termed Kerry’s prescriptions what they really are: “fantastic,” used in its correct meaning–that is, extravagantly fanciful, capricious, grotesque. So, if Bush is lying about Iraq, so is Kerry. It’s not just that he has exaggerated what has gone wrong in Iraq. His entire speech was premised on the assumption that there were European troops and Muslim troops and United Nations gendarmes who would have gone to war with us against Saddam had Bush only waited another few days, weeks, months in the spring of 2003. That is a lie. And now, he holds out the same false promise. It is true, he admits, that there is a Security Council resolution calling on U.N. members to provide soldiers and trainers and a special brigade to protect the U.N. mission in Iraq. “Three months later,” he admits, “not a single country has answered that call.” Of course, Bush is to blame. And what should Bush do? He should “convene a summit meeting of the world’s major powers” and “insist that they make good on that U.N. resolution.”

There is something risible in Kerry’s faith in these hopeless transactions brokered by Kofi Annan and in the United Nations itself, which is staging yet another tragic, do-nothing performance on Darfur.

We saw a stark contrast in last night’s debate between the Kerry fantasy and the Bush plan for Iraq: Bush wants to continue training the Iraqis to take over their country, while Kerry wants to replace American troops with French and German ones.

How can anybody take Kerry seriously when France and Germany have both said they’re sending no troops to Iraq regardless of who wins the election? And if they did, is prolonging the foreign occupation the key to victory in Iraq?

Wrong war indeed; Kerry’s still fighting Vietnam but he’s doing it in Iraq:

If Kerry had not had such a tortured history on Vietnam and on Iraq, he might have run as a straightforward antiwar candidate and simply said: We are getting out.

Instead, Kerry is offering to magically get allies to replace us while accelerating Iraqification. (Does he imagine the administration is operating at anything less than breakneck speed to transfer the burden from U.S. soldiers to Iraqis?) In 1968 Richard Nixon ran and won on a similar platform — Vietnamization — and got us out of Vietnam almost precisely by the end of his first presidential term.

Nixon, remember, was vilified by Kerry and his antiwar colleagues for prolonging the suffering and dying in Vietnam for four unnecessary years. Yet here is Kerry, after 30 years of torturous reexamination of Vietnam, coming full circle and running as Nixon 1968: mysterious plan, Iraqification, out in four years. A novelist could not have written this tale. It would be too implausible.

That was Krauthammer.

There’s no question that John Kerry’s a much better debater than the President, and that he did much better in tonight’s debate. The President was over-prepared, sticking to his talking points instead of taking Kerry down on his many lies, distortions, and sheer flights of fancy.

But the larger question is whether the undecideds who watched were looking for a captain for the school debate team or for a leader of the free world. On that score, it seems to me that when the dust settles in the next few days most of them are not going to feel any more comfortable with Kerry than they were yesterday. His plans for Iraq are impossibly vague and fanciful, his position on North Korea is obviously wrong, and his relationships with world leaders, if he has any, aren’t going to reap him the kind of bonanza that he got from marrying a pair of rich heiresses.

But we’ll see. The snap polls are telling one message pretty clearly: Kerry won the debate, but he didn’t move ahead in the polls. ABC in particular showed him taking the debate by ten points while remaining 4 points behind the President, as each candidate gained one point.

ABC now has the President leading 51-47.