Debate notepad

Got caught up in the debate and burned the lasagna. Here's some of what I jotted down on the marinara-stained legal pad.

Overall, I was impressed with the questions — they were more focused and direct than those from Lehrer or Ifill. Kudos to the folks in St. Louis and to Charlie Gibson for that.

Kerry came out hammering Bush with the Duelfer report and it took Bush a while to gain his comfort level. The CSPAN split-screen still showed a lot of the smirking and grimacing from last time. I never realized how much the president blinks before — hook his eyelids up to a turbine and we've got energy independence at last.

* BUSH: Says we'll have 125,000 Iraqi troops fully trained by the end of December. The odds of that happening are not good.

* BUSH: "I recognize I've made some decisions that have caused people to not understand the great values of our country." Um, yes. Exactly.

* BUSH: (On Iran) "We're doing what he [Kerry] suggested we do." OK. A lot of voters may do what he suggests as well.

* BUSH: (on the draft) Yes, the "Internets" plural was amusing. But do you really want to say, "We don't need mass armies anymore" this week? Just days after Paul Bremer pointed out that we have never had enough troops in Iraq to accomplish the task there?

* BUSH: Blowing up on Gibson again looked more petulant than presidential. When the moderator is offering you a chance to speak, it's probably not necessary to jump from your stool, wave your arms, and demand the chance to speak. And then it turns out all this excitement was just so he could remind us, again, of Poland and it's president, Aleksander "we were taken for a ride" Kwasniewski.

* KERRY: "If Missouri, just given the number of people from Missouri who are in the military over there today, were a country, it would be the third largest country in the coalition, behind Great Britain and the United States. That's not a grand coalition." A hit — a palpable hit.

* BUSH: Repeated the assertion from the first debate that he has tripled "homeland security" funding from $10 billion to $30 billion. I still have no idea what the baseline for this is. Does that increase represent new funding, or does it only reflect the swallowing up of other budgets — such as those of the Coast Guard and the INS?

* BUSH: "Is my time up yet?" Conveyed: Please say yes, because I'm out of talking points.

* BUSH: He repeated the "Kerry raised taxes 98 times" canard, then says, "These aren't make-up figures." That's like some kind of meta-lie.

* BUSH: Attacking Kerry's "credibility" on fiscal responsibility seems perilous. I'd want to, you know, sign at least one budget that wasn't hundreds of billions in the red before attacking on that point.

* BUSH: "I am a good steward of the land." That came at the end of a rapid-fire litany of clear-cutting proposals with pretty names. Wow. Just … wow. There's audacious and then there's … wow. (And no, you don't get extra points for brightly boasting that you remembered the name of the Kyoto Treaty you helped shoot down.)

* LADY WHO ASKED THE QUESTION ON MANUFACTURING JOBS: Good question. Tough question. It's no surprise they both shied away from her precise focus on the future of American manufacturing in a global economy. In their defense, she probably asked a question that has no answer other than the list of mitigating factors and near-answers Kerry provided.

* LWATQOMJ: Kerry gets partial credit for raising four valid items in his list o' ways to provide hospice care for American manufacturing: reduce health care costs; education; energy independence; tax incentives. Bush's followup echoed three of those, and sounded like he was so relieved that Kerry had blazed a trail away from the heart of the question that he didn't seem to mind looking like he was cribbing off his test.

* BUSH: He brought up the 900,000 small businesses in the top tax bracket BS and Kerry called him on it. His response to this was humorous, joking about the timber company — but it'll come back to bite him just like Cheney's zinger about never meeting Edwards. Problem with Bush's joke: He was lying. See Cheney's favorite site on the Internets — Factcheck.org. It's possible he wasn't lying — that he just is a part-owner of a timber interest and forgot about it. You know, just like most of us average Americans forget what small businesses we do and do not own. And if you forget about your timber interests when crafting an industry-friendly "healthy forests" bill, then no one can accuse you of a conflict of interest. (Cheney should try this line with Halliburton. "I was a CEO? Who knew? Gee, can I overcharge your troops for rancid food?")

* BUSH: I'm glad to hear, on the record, that President Bush disagrees with the Dred Scott decision. But wow did he lose the map while trying to describe it. (Bonus question: Would a "strict constructionist" of the sort Bush favors have been for or against Dred Scott in 1857?) I did think Bush sounded very presidential when he shared that quote from Potter Stewart … oh wait, that was Kerry.

[At this point there was a frantic fanning of the smoke detector and opening of windows, followed by the eating of a slightly burned lasagna and very little note-taking. More commentary when I see the transcript.]

* BUSH: The president began his closing statement by saying that presidential elections are "about the future." If I were responsible for the past four years, I wouldn't want anyone looking back at them either.

Update: LWATQOMJ's name is Jane Barrow. Good job Ms. Barrow.

After seeing Bush in these two debates, I really think Southwest Airlines needs to hire him for one of their "Want to get away?" commercials. The trapped/cornered/please-tell-me-I've-used-up-my-90-seconds look of panic he gets would be perfect for one of those spots.