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Edited on Wed Oct-06-04 04:02 PM by calimary
My new column is finished. I'd love your reaction...
OOPS - forgot to say Thank-You in advance. So, Thank You!
10/6/04
He Coulda Been a Contenda.
I must confess I needed help with this one.
I watched. Took feverish notes. Yelled at my television (as usual). But I was yelling at John Edwards this time. Don’t get me wrong. I love John Edwards. I think he’s terrific, and so loaded with potential at this young age that it’s not even funny. But Dick Cheney left enough holes for him to drive a battering ram through, and Edwards didn’t take advantage nearly as often as he could have. He did well enough, though. Obviously, EVERYBODY got the body language memo this time. Cheney was smooth, silky, didn’t give Edwards the Patrick Leahy treatment, certainly didn’t smirk, and didn’t snarl too frequently (although I’m not sure what he’ll ever be able to do about those scary, ever-present bottom teeth that growl up at you like Darth Vader’s death mask). He even spoke in complete sentences. And he seemed to have lots of facts and figures at his fingertips, didn’t he?
Only one problem: they were WRONG. Repeatedly.
My straight-outta-the-gate reaction was, frankly, to give the race to Cheney by a hair. But then, once the dust settled and the postmortems began, and the cackling republi-CON spinmeisters left the room, the fact checking began. And Cheney failed. He failed on the facts so badly that some pundits have almost literally sent him to sit in the same corner with Dan Rather. This more than wipes out any style OR substance points he may have garnered on first, wholly-unwashed glance. Yep, even I initially thought he coulda been a contenda. Until his statements are put to the test, and wash out the same way Cheney did from Yale.
The most glaring would be the one caught straight away by Aaron Brown’s troops on CNN. You never met John Edwards til you were both onstage tonight, Dick? Brown surprised more than just a few GOP loyalists (including his legions of brothers and sisters in the media, one of whom was sitting across from him from the New York Post at the time) with a photo they dug up of Cheney and Edwards at a prayer breakfast, with their wives sitting side by side next to Cheney. Brown’s basic observation could easily have summed up Cheney’s entire performance – not just during this debate, but throughout his and Bush’s collective stewardship: “Good line. Not true, but a good line.” Shortly thereafter, there came yet another photo of Cheney swearing in a number of senators with Edwards clearly in the center of the picture, plus testimony from Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, that when they’d escorted Liddy Dole to her swearing-in (by Cheney), Dole had done so using Elizabeth Edwards’ Bible.
Cheney seems to me like a guy from one of David Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks – with the Velcro suit, sticking to the Velcro-covered wall. The poor old dude just can’t get off the Iraq-Was-In-Bed-With-Al-Qaeda treadmill. You’d think, by now, he would – just for the sake of his bad heart. But he just can’t. The very night after his own Secretary of Defense concedes he’s never seen solid evidence to link the two, Cheney can’t give it up. He certainly didn’t during the debate. But when you’ve staked so much of your power, authority, fortunes, manhood, and future in public office and future consulting fees on a statement like this, I guess it’s kind of hard to disengage.
His attempt to portray Edwards as a liar blew up in his face, too, with the quoted percentage of Americans in Iraq, who’ve had their lives blown up in their faces. Edwards clearly referred tothe “percentage of coalition casualties.” Cheney insisted that this was just completely wrong, it’s not 90 percent. Well, okay, Dick. If you say so. The facts actually speak of 88.5 “percent of coalition casualties” being American. But Cheney doesn’t bother to explain that he’s not counting in the same category as Edwards. HIS count is, of course, different, but it doesn’t stand up to the specified yardstick of “coalition casualties.” If you’re going to nit-pick, Dick, then at least pick your nits more carefully.
And, by the way, Mr. C., please pick your websites more carefully, too. When Cheney made the grand swipe at Kerry/Edwards’ “untruths,” he endorsed a visit to www.factcheck.com. Hey, go ahead. Make my day! When you do, you’ll be taken directly to a George Soros site whose banner headline blares “Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush.” Ouch.
They both had quotable lines. Cheney did have another one about Edwards’ Senate record not being very distinguished. At least that didn’t glaringly get the snot kicked out of it as his “I never met you before tonight” clunker did. But Edwards came up with two, at least one of which ("Mr. Vice President, I don't think the country can take four more years of this type of experience”) got lots of instant replays. Point Edwards.
Another Point Edwards: I’m glad he brought up the much-villified votes Kerry cast against various big-ticket weapons systems, that Cheney never bothers to admit he himself wanted canceled. But that, too, needed to be said more forcefully, AND more frequently. It was also an excellent score to list a litany of Cheney’s votes as a congressman against everything from Meals on Wheels to Martin Luther King Day and Nelson Mandela. So much for the “compassionate conservative,” but at least Cheney knew better than to haul that old bag-o-barf back out to stink up the room again.
I was hugely gratified to see Edwards bring up the “H” word. Halliburton. That one should be repeated after every breath. But when Cheney did snarl that this was just a smokescreen, Edwards could, and should, have shot back with harder jabs than he did. I’m glad he mentioned that Cheney, as CEO, was trading with countries like Libya and Iran that were being sanctioned by the world. But Edwards treated that almost like a throwaway line, instead of a main point to hammer home several times throughout the debate. In fact, when Cheney waxed near-poetic about how Bush’s war-on-terror had convinced Libya to cough it up, Edwards could have stepped in immediately with “that’s the same Libya you were wheeling and dealing with when the law told you and Halliburton that you couldn’t, isn’t it? Trading with the enemy, weren’t you?” And he could have added another truckload of “you say ‘smokescreen? I got yer smokescreen RIGHT HERE!” But then again, if Edwards had started down that road, he’d still be ticking items off the list even now.
Another exquisite moment that, so far, both Edwards AND Kerry have missed, much to my dismay, would address the almost surreal complaint that John Kerry is somehow calling our allies bad names because he refers to a “Coalition of the Coerced and the Bribed.” All it would take to flatten this argument into extinction are two words: “OLD EUROPE.” Oh, how I yearned to hear Edwards say that during the debate. Nor did Edwards take advantage of the address OUR man in Baghdad, Prime Minister Allawi, has now given to his own assembly about how bad things really, truly are in Iraq. “Sobering” was the word used by the New York Times’ report. Much different than the speech that White House operatives so thoughtfully prepared for him to deliver to American audiences when he was visiting here, recently. But, no, he’s certainly no puppet, ‘eh?
The vast majority of viewer polls today give the match clearly to Edwards. Prince Charming bested Rumplestilskin. Our prince could have delivered a few more knees to the evil gnome’s groin rather than simple punches to the gut. But a TKO is okay. Even if Cheney’s good points hadn’t been canceled out by his lies and misrepresentations, his faithful followers would be toasting with a flat beer. Had Cheney won, outright, it would still have clearly shown who their strongest player isn’t. George Bush paled even more pathetically by comparison in this debate than he did during his own with Kerry. In fact, I’d bet next week’s gasoline money that they’re wishing it were Cheney at the top of the ticket instead of the spoiled, flinching, stammering, smirking little boy we saw onstage in Coral Gables on September 30th. Too bad they’ve already declared themselves so flip-flop-phobic.
The best closing moment arrived after the closing statements, when Mary Cheney was finally allowed to come in from the cold, taking her rightful place onstage with all the other Cheneys – unlike at her dad’s party’s convention. Surely her family doesn’t view her as a second-class citizen, but that’s the subtle message they’d already telegraphed to the rest of the country. But this was an appropriate follow-through, after the brief and most tasteful exchange about her, earlier in the debate. If anything, THAT served Edwards, and all Democrats, beautifully well. IF your issue really, truly is “family values,” that is.
Seems to me these debates have become metaphors for the overall campaign. John Kerry will have to do the rest of the heavy lifting for the Democrats. And that’s good. Because he can. The problem for the GOP is that George Bush is going to have to do the rest of the heavy lifting for them. And that’s also good. Because he can’t. And Dick Cheney might have won this match going away – if only he’d told the truth. Seems to me the entire election’s going to come down to that.
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