talking points, the after-party
i haven't gotten around to too many other blogs yet, i want to write my own synopsis before i disappear for another week.
dick cheney, as the man says, is mean. however, i think that (unlike alot of meanness in politics) this time around it will be more of a plus than a minus. sure, it was mean to smack edwards around, but edwards took it. kerry made bush his beyotch with the cutting remarks last time around, this time it was cheney weilding the pimp-slap. and the man is a past master at the pimp slap.
edwards still came across as intelligent, professional, eloquent; he made some substantive points and got in a few jabs of his own. however, cheney came across as all those things, if perhaps a bit rougher, with a healthy dose of casual superiority to his opponent that was displayed when he rough-handled him that made him seem the obvious best man for the best job.
there are a few points that i wish he had handled a bit more effectively; you would think he would know how to respond to halliburton comments by now, he could have more effectively explained what the repealing the tax cuts for those above 200k would do (small business, two-income couples, and maybe pointing out that that probably wouldn't be the end of raising taxes under kerry), he obviously has no desire to argue for the family marriage amendment (which, neither do i, so i don't really care),
i think cheney pretty much owned the foreign-policy section, and the domestic section didn't really reveal anything new for either side, it mostly just yeilded more talking points.
hopefully, this will go a ways toward repairing some of the damage done after the first presidential debate. it is, of course, up to bush to really fix that this friday, but this is a good lead in.
ultimately, while both men handled themselves very well, this was a debate to see who could do a better job standing in line for the presidency. edwards looked like he would make a pretty good senator. cheney looked like he would make an effective president. and more importantly, he looked like he knew it. perhaps more importantly, edwards seemed at times like he knew it as well. that set the dynamic for the debate: cheney treated edwards like an inferior in a company argument, and edwards, for all his courtroom skills, didn't know how to be the superior in such a situation.
UPDATE: For the folks coming over from Allah's, thanks for coming by. Just wanted to mention that I liveblogged the event down below; it's a bit messy but I like how it turned out, so I wanted to point it out. Comments and arguments are, of course, encouraged.
And thanks to
Allah for the linky.
