The presidential debate on Friday night was the best I’ve seen in ages. John Kerry shed his wooden, patrician shell; for those 90 minutes, he was in a league with Bill Clinton.
Both candidates engaged each other; there was the kind of dramatic verbal parrying that most recent political debates in Canada have been constructed to prevent.
Compared to the previous debate, Bush sounded a little less like he was trying to run out the clock with each answer. But for the most part, facts evaded him; his trick this time was to learn more than one bumper-sticker-sized slogan per issue.
My favourite moment was what seemed like an attempt by Bush to catch Kerry in an error on taxes; the Democratic candidate referred to wealthy individuals like Bush being counted as a “small business” because, in his case, he’d made $84 one year as part owner of a timber company.
As Newsday columnist Paul Vitello put it: “As for Bush, who makes a fetish of talkin’ like the supposed common folk, any man too rich and too busy to know that he owns a piece of a timber company – a point Kerry mentioned in Friday night’s debate and Bush denied and the public record confirms – ain’t no common folk.”
We’ll see how other moments play out over the coming weeks, including Kerry’s (ironically unnecessary) “not necessarily” reference to Saddam Hussein and Bush’s phony “well-gosh-that’s-jes’-too-complex-fer-a-simple-fella-like-me” take on Kerry’s answer on abortion.
But as someone who finds it hard to sit still during these things, I ate that debate up. And I’m looking forward to the next one.
