More Post Debate Spin

There seem to be two ways to handle John Kerry's triumph on last Thursday for the Democrats. One is to ignore the President's poor performance and emphasize where you disagree with John Kerry. The other is to acknowledge the President's poor performance, but claim that he had more substance. We saw some examples of this response yesterday.

Rich Lowry takes the first approach, and gets points for rewriting the debate. He takes statements by John Kerry (out of context in some cases) and he puts them in a nonsensical order to make Kerry look extra stupid. He then provides what he thinks should have been said in response. Kind of like those old radio gimmicks where the radio announcer would ask a question and then play a snippit of song to answer (So, what's your ambition in life? "I wanna be Jessie's girl.") Yeah, kind of like that.

Dennis Prager also takes the first approach, suggesting that John Kerry's debating skills allowed him to appear to be all things to all people. So if you heard something you agreed with, than you should be extra suspicious of John Kerry. Dennis Prager's technique is also to take snippits of John Kerry's words and set them in such a way as they seem to contrast sharply with one another. For example, Senator Kerry apparently believes that invading Iraq was a mistake, but he also believes that now that we are in Iraq we need to win the war. But if you cut out the element of time, you can make it look like he both supports and opposes being in Iraq.

Robert Novak, on the other hand, offers this strange analysis--President Bush may actually be in trouble.

The gap in performance here between President Bush and Sen. Kerry hardly seemed wide enough to reverse the popular tide that had been flowing in the president's direction. Nevertheless, it was enough to still the exuberant optimism in Republican ranks. With two more debates and a month to go before the election, Bush has serious problems to solve.

One of President Bush's big strengths was his inevitability. The Republicans were excited, the Democrats depressed. That's obviously very good for President Bush. If nothing else (and I believe there is a lot more to the debate than this), the first debate broke that momentum. For now, at any rate, the Democrats are excited and Republicans nervous and jittery.

We'll have to see what happens next. (How's that for going out on a limb? I don't make the no money for not taking chances!))