Sean Hannity calls it for George W Bush. The visual flubberations? Just the natural reaction to the gall of John Kerry’s lies. As opposed to the natural reaction of someone stepping out of the cocoon of his own making — the ideologically straight yes-men of his administration, the true-believers who meet him at his rallies after signing a loyalty oath, and — in the afterglow of September 11 and the Iraq War — the pliant media.

Karl Rove calls it for Bush. The query is given to Rove, “You can say that with a straight face?”

Contrarians exist, and perhaps they have the signs of warning, but the murmuring is in. The campaign may just well have hit the sort of wall that it hit right off the gate when Bush appeared on Meet the Press. And Dick Cheney has some clean-up duty to do at the Vice-Presidential Debate.

Between now and that time, the RNC tries to pick out the Kerry sound clips to hammer their themes of doom, so as to change the general dynamic of what just happened.

For their part, Democrats, before the debate bemoaning the “Drama Criticism Coverage” of the 2000 debate, have seize on the look of Bush exasperation. The DNC splices together a video and sticks it up on their website. Lessons learned: things move fast in politics.

The evidence was there that something like this would happen. It swirled around in my mind when I read the Atlantic Monthly article about the Bush debate with Ann Richards and the Kerry debate with William Weld. The 1994 Bush was a superior version of himself than the 2000 version. The 2000 version of Bush was a superior version than the 2004 version. The trait that helped him in 1994, that “Brilliant Minimalist” where most important of all is the mantra Hammer home the message fell apart at the first debate in 2004.

Bush blanked out on us an awful lot… demonstrating He got nothing. “30 minutes of material”, a small bag of tricks that just… wasn’t … big enough to “do the job”.

If Kerry appeared to meander a bit too much, it’s possible to say that it was an apt, though awkward, offensive that he picked up on along the way: Overload Bush with facts.

Recall that Reagan faltered with his first debate. And he picked himself up at the second debate with good humour. A key difference between then and now: Reagan was some godawful number of points ahead in the polls anyway.

Transcript Excerpts of note, and I’ll try to pick up on some different things than some of the online fact-checkers who pointed out a number of items:

Kerry: That’s why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there.

Evidentally, the fact checkers say that it is an incorrect statement.

Bush: I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap and — anyway, that’s for another debate

We all want to keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists and to staff police and fire departments, but who’s going to pay for it?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Jim?
MR. LEHRER: New — all right, go ahead. Yes, sir?
PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it’s worthy for a follow, if you don’t mind?
SEN. KERRY: Sure, fine. Happy to.
MR. LEHRER: Okay.
SEN. KERRY: Sure, let’s change the rules, we can have a whole —
MR. LEHRER: We can do 30 seconds each here.

This year’s example of this.

SEN. KERRY: Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?

BOOL-YAH! I was wondering what Kerry’s answer would be… an answer designed to not sink him into explaining because the rule is that if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Bush: Well, actually, you forgot Poland.

Fodder for comedy.

Bush: Osama bin Laden isn’t going to determine how we defend ourselves. Osama bin Laden doesn’t get to decide.
The American people decide. I decided. The right action was in Iraq.

Okay. Notice the “American people decide. I decided.” Visions of grandeur.

SEN. KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and, frankly, very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said the enemy attacked us. Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us; Osama bin Laden attacked us.

BOOL-YA! That needed to be said… and this response needed to be aired out before a maximum audience.

PRESIDENT BUSH: — of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

Since polls show an ungodly percentage of Americans believe crap to that regard: BOOL-YA! Now Cheney, always a beat behind the rest of the administration in the warped-version of events category, can’t make that assertion / implication. And, by the way… something about this, the old Seymour Hersh story I have no way of verifying, become popular in some minds… repeated three or four times at yesterday’s debate.

Kerry: And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best-trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who only a week earlier had been on the other side, fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

Bush offered no rebuttal to what is a pretty lofty charge. Perhaps he was “not in the loop” on these matters, and perhaps Cheney has a response to this, but surely that New England Republican that played Kerry in his debate preps offered it up. (The “rational reason” being that we couldn’t risk destabilizing Pakistan’s government… but that would run counter to Bush’s “Tough Guy Unnuanced” demenor.)

SEN. KERRY: Thirty-five to 40 countries in the world had a greater capability of making weapons at the moment the president invaded than Saddam Hussein.

BOOL-YAH! I’ve wanted somebody to say that for so damned long it’s not even funny. (My thought-process always having been: Where’s a terrorist more likely to get dangerous material: on the black-market from ex-Soviet nations or perhaps from Pakistan or from Mr. Hussein?)

Kerry: But if and when you do it, Jim, you’ve got to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have the Kerry quote that Bush Campaign has seized on, and will treat as a “gaffe”, and indeed Bush replied to it in his response. But it’s more or less sound: name it a coalition only if it passes the “smell test.”

Bush: As well, we included South Korea, Japan and Russia. So now there are five voices speaking to Kim Jong Il, not just one. And so, if Kim Jong Il decides again to not honor an agreement, he’s not only — ah — ah — doing injustice to America, it would be doing injustice to China as well.

Bush the Multilaterialist. As Biden said, the problem here is that South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China are asking the US to have one-on-one discussions with North Korea.

…

As per the Billmon thesis that the blogosphere is being co-opted and tamed: the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee both disseminate talking points to their respective* corners of their blogosphere.

I probably should have said more nasty things about Kerry just to offset that effect. If I wanted to, I could feed myself into a self-aware storyline, raising expectations for the second debate to a preposterous level, by saying that he’s going to come in and give the performance of his lifetime… thereby transmuting any higher level of performance that comes with better preparedness on Bush’s part.

*Note: if you look up “respective” in the dictionary, you’ll find that I misused that word. But, I do believe in “common usage”, so screw George Carlin.

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