All right, I’ll be totally honest, though it kills me. Bush just plain didn’t do as well in this first debate as Kerry did. I’m not sure why Bush seemed so flustered. He looked like he was getting steamed up over some of what Kerry was saying, and I thought he missed all kinds of opportunities to state his case better and really point out problems with Kerry’s points. Looking at other blogs and listening to TV spin, it seems like that’s about the consensus. I’ll also be honest and admit that I didn’t have the nerve to go find liberal sites and blogs and see if they were doing the happy dance. Probably they are.

Two thoughts:
* To be honest, if Kerry had been this guy a couple months ago, I wouldn’t have that much trouble about the thought of him winning. But where has this cool-headed, informed and somewhat consistent Kerry been hiding out? He represented his positions so well in this debate that the conservative bloggers and talking heads are stuck with repeating old sound bytes (”voted for the war, before I voted against it”) and making the arguments that Bush should have made better. Viewers that were paying very close attention might have noticed that Kerry reversed himself just in the course of the debate regarding whether Saddam was or wasn’t a threat … but people probably weren’t paying that close attention.

* My guess of the sound bytes that get lifted: (1) Liberals will just love that Bush pronounced the word ‘mullas’ like ‘moolahs’ not once but twice, and almost said ‘messed mixages’ once — oy vey. (2) Conservatives will be talking about Kerry saying that America ought to pass ‘the global test’ in considering our national defense. Who knows what Kerry meant exactly by that, but it’s just the type of ‘we just want to be popular’ type of thing that people hate to hear from a Democrat, especially one that has seemed soft on terror.