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Originally Posted by mburbank
Kerry should have batted the environment question out of the park. I was really disapointed by that.
He also should have nailed W every single time he slipped back into saying terrorists could have gotten WMD and forced him to say 'we thought...' each time, becaue they couldn't have.
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Yeah. He should have nailed Bush several times but didn't. He should have nailed him on Supreme Court Justice picks and what type of judges Bush would pick given four more years and how that would dramatically change the balance of the Supreme Court, which is a much larger issue than is getting played in my opinon. He touched it, but didn't explain it or elaborate why this issue is important, which the majority of voters know little about. He should have nailed him on the Senate votes that Bush likes to use against him. Maybe explain why Bush threatened to veto the "87 billion dollars" proposal that Bush claims was all about supporting the troops, if 1.3 billion of additional funding went to provide medical benefits. Or how the 98 or whatever votes to raise taxes that Bush accuses, how a majority of those would actually NOT have increased taxes and others would have only increased the taxes ont he upper class. He should have nailed him for avoiding the question at the end where he was asked to admit a mistake. So many other times myself or some one else in the pub was ready to throw a drink at the TV when Bush got away with saying something we knew could be better defended. But that's the problem with the debates. They are just 90 minutes of attempts to get off the best sound-bite or reactionary facial expression so the media can replay that to the public over and over and out of context and undefended.
I think Kerry wants to run off Bush's popularity too much. Like when you hang around the cool guys in hopes that people will see you the same way. it's the same thing Gore did, hoping that he can be close enough to Bush that people will say "well, he's a lot like Bush and I like that...but he seems smarter so I'll vote for him." It's a bad strategy but it's the way he ran too much of his campaign and until these debates has seemed to me to be unable to tell the public, and most importantly his base, why he is diametrically opposed to Bush.
One more to go. I really think Kerry needs another landslide victory in this one like he had in the first, where he opened the door and caught Bush off guard, in order to pull it off.
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