final debate

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well, you know what is this all about. i am so anxious about it because i want to take the chance to remind Equester .. Equester, can you hear me? .. yes, Equester, do you know your Danish video link of the whole debate is extermely valuable to many of us?

Also, everyone has some cans of beer ready near by, let's play a little game here.
When Kerry says "i have a plan" --- 1 can
Bush "i am resolved" --- 2 cans
Kerry "Canadian drugs" --- 1.773 can (take precise measurement!)
Bush "iraq" --- 5 cans (domestic issue debate and he mention iraq, this worth 5 cans)
Kerry "job lost" --- 1 can
Bush eye blinks once for 0.5 can, continous twice for 1 can and so on.
feel free to increase the list and add some challenge.

 

It's 3 in the morning now, and I'm up to see it. Going to debate it in school tomorrow, I guess.

No beer but some mountain dew, is that okay?

 

Kerry 'this president' 1/2 a can

its been 2 minutes since it started and im already getting tipsy...

 

Muahaha, now Bush blamed the Flu on the Englishmen. Classic.

 

I just turned it off, its shaping up to be a word for word repeat of the previous debates already - 3 questions in...

George - "Freedom is on the March! Freedom is on the March! Freedom is on the March!" x10000000000

John - "This problem underscores the problem with our healthcare which has gotten worse under this president...."

repeat, repeat, repeat... uuuuughhh...

 

Kerry... *hick*... keeps...*hick* saying... *hick* plan... *hick*

If my brother wasn’t an engineering student, alcohol would be getting scarce.

*Edit
For those of you who want to soldier on through the 3rd debate, but missed it when it aired, there's a video here: http://news.yahoo.com/elections
For any who have bad eyesight, the oct 13th video link is underneath the pic on the left side of the page.

[ October 14, 2004, 06:19: Message edited by: Celesialraven ]

 

I think Bush dominated this debate. I was cracking up watching Bush's face when Kerry would start talking out of his butt again...

I'm never going to forget that Kerry has Blue Cross/Blue Shield and that he's Catholic...only because he repeated it like 10 times each.

 

Errm, this debate was clearly in Kerry's favour, not Bush's.

 

If you put any faith in polls, which I rarely do, it would appear that Kerry won the debate. The main problem with polls though is I'm not so sure that whoever is conducting the poll is actually attempting to obtain a representative sample of the population.

I find it far beyond mere coincidence that polls from left-leaning news organizations typically show that Kerry won the debate (and is ahead in the presidential race) while right-leaning organization polls show that Bush won the debate and is leading the race.

However, there is one thing that isn't up for debate: namely that in most head-to-head debates, Kerry will come out on top simply because Bush (self-admittedly) is not a particularly strong public speaker. Heck, he doesn't even have that great of a command of the English language.

Even on these boards I encounter Europeans who appear to have a greater English vocabularly than Bush, which is really shocking considering that A.) for many of these people, English isn't thier first language, and B.) Bush has had 50+ years of speaking English, whereas most people that I'm referring to have far less than that (I'm assuming that the vast majority of posters are a lot younger than Bush).

However, the election is not on who's a better speaker, but about two main issues: the economy and Iraq. Sure there are other issues, such as education, same-sex marriages, health care, and abortions, just to name a few main ones, but it's Iraq and the economy that is going to decide the vote. If you have been fully employed for the past 4 years, have purchased a whole bunch of stock in oil companies, and have made a ton of money, then you probably feel that Bush is doing fine and you see no point in changing. If, however, you've been unemployed for the past two years and have lost a family member in Iraq, then chances are you feel that the country is overdue for change. (Yes, I realize the two examples I gave over-simplify the problem, but I think I made my point.)

[ October 14, 2004, 18:44: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

I just saw most of the debate, I snoozed some and zapped around but I saw a fair bit and of what I saw I thought Kerry did better than portraied and better than I expected. I really liked the Soprano reference, I think it was truly called for, not even die hard Bush supporters can connect fiscal responsibility with Bush II.

 

Sorry, Kit...but Kerry clearly won this one. The conventional wisdom now, that will be repeated in news cycles from now till Novermber, is that Kerry won all 3 debates. Considering that no incumbant president in history with approval ratings below 55% has ever won reelection, and Bush has been hovering around 48-52% for the last 2 months, Bush needed at least one solid, decisive victory in these debates to blunt Kerry's momentum. Agree with what he said or not, Bush clearly didn't do that.

Bush's performance was much better in this debate than the last two, and Kerry still came out ahead in nearly every regard. That means nobody can blame this loss on Bush's getting pissy like he did in the 1st debate. For 3 straight debates, the challenger came off as more presidential than the president - and that registers with people more than the "liberal liberal liberal!" crap Bush kept throwing out (which was weak). He whipped out that little outdated life preserver so much that I don't think anyone could see that as anything other than desperation on Bush's part. Kerry's 'Soprano's' comment was pretty good, too.

Nobody scored any major blows, and both were a little fuzzy on the facts. For example: Kerry's claim about 1.6 million jobs being lost on Bush's watch wasn't totally correct - it's actually 600,000, as Kerry's figure didn't include government jobs gained. But Kerry's point here - that Bush will be the first president since Hoover to have a net job loss on his watch - was completely accurate. I wish Kerry had pointed out that Bush promised over 200,000 jobs per month would be created thanks to his precious "tax relief," and has fallen drastically short of that, undercutting a big paprt of the rationalle behind the tax cuts. But again - I'm picky.

But Bush was innacurate much more - in both frequency and severity - than Kerry. He trotted out the "vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom" line again, which is patently false. He also had a major gaffe when he denied ever saying Osama was no longer a priority, when Kerry's verbatim quote was entirely accurate. This will haunt Bush in the weeks to come, believe me.

I could go on, but...eh. In short, Kerry succeeded in taking the steam out of the "flip-flopper" nonsense, reassuring voters and deflating BC'04's most significant line of attack against him. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 2-4 point margin for Kerry over Bush in the polls over the next few weeks.

 

@DR,

You see, that's the problem - both canidates take the comments out of context. Technically, Bush's comments were accurate. He said that "the majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom" which - techncially - is true, as there are far more people at the bottom than there are at the very top. So technically speaking, many more people at the bottom got a tax cut than people at the top. However, the actual VALUE of those tax cuts - which is what Kerry was saying - was heavily skewed towards to top income owners.

Concerning Osama bin Laden - Kerry quoted Bush as saying he "wasn't that worried" about ObL. Bush denied saying he wasn't worried, and again, technically, that's true. Bush's actual quote back in 2002 was that he "wasn't that concerned". Yes, these two phrases carry nearly identical meanings, but technically he didn't say what Kerry said he did. You can bet that the Republicans will be spouting off about how Kerry misquoted Bush during the debates.

 

Yes, and it won't carry much weight with most people. People will see what Bush said in the debates side by side with what Bush said in 2002, which was "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him." You can bet the Kerry people are cooking that up in a nice campaign commercial as we speak. Kerry's remark regards the full context of what Bush said, and any attempts by BC'04 to spin it as carry lying will fall flat, because the gaffe is plain as day. Part of what makes this gaffe so bad for Bush is that it's so un-spinnable. My take, anyway.

edit - EXACT quote from the debate:

[ October 14, 2004, 19:25: Message edited by: Death Rabbit ]

 

Since Equester is not here to give the link I'll give it for him.

http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/usavalg/article.jhtml?articleID=206221

Klick the "Klik her" button in the "Se tv-duellen" box and off you go.

EDIT: Apparantly someone had allready provided a link but here you can see some funny Danish writing and stuff

 

To the tune of Bush's parroting -- I just saw a clip from Jay Leno's interview with John Edwards. I only caught a piece of it this morning...but it went something like this:

Jay: Hey....did you notice that big lump in George's pocket the other night during the debate?
What the hell was that?

Edwards: Oh!...his battery.

 

Didnt Bush talk about education on pretty much every question? Iirc he did it on unemployment and some other questions as well.

 

Just a few more general responses:

@ DR, I don't think Kerry "clearly" won all three debates. I think one problem is that you want your guy to win badly, so we falsely boost our impression of him. If you look at most of the polls, Kerry only clearly won the first debate. He held a slight advantage over Bush in the final debate, and the second debate was dead even. So I think it's more appropriate to describe the debates as: Big Win for Kerry, a tie, and Small Win for Kerry. But yes, I hope the Dems do put Bush's ObL comments in a commercial.

@Tal, Bush interupting the moderator in the final debate was passive when you compare it to the second debate. In the second debate there were two times that Bush went so far as to talk over the moderator while he was trying to ask the next question. And yes, Bush can only concentrate on doing one thing at a time, so the choices was have him smile for the whole debate or frown for the whole debate, and his advisors decided while neither were perfect options, smiling was the better choice.

@ Tal and joacqin, Yes Bush referred to education frequently in his answers. You see, every president has a domestic issue of some type that they spearhead, and Bush's is "No Child Left Behind". He has to defend it, because it's his idea, but the problem is that it's horribly underfunded. My wife is an elementary school teacher, and she says the No Child Left Behind plan is a miserably failure. Not only does the underfunding mean that most schools can't afford to buy new books for students (which are necessary in many cases to meet the objectives of the program), but additionally the plan has reinforced the very thing it was trying to eliminate: i.e. pushing children through the system. Now that every student has to learn X, Y, and Z to pass to the next grade level, that is almost exclusively what they are taught, because schools failing to meet the requirements are penalized. Results from students who fail the national tests aren't turned in - they report the student was absent that day if he/she failed - and they let the kids who fail stay in for recess the next day to redo the questions they got wrong the first time.

So, the whole point was to give kids a better education. However, what was accomplished was 1.) Subjects other than English, Math, and Science are taugh considerably less, because they aren't tested on them. 2.) As a result of 1, students are less prepared for future schooling, when they actually will have to take subjects like history, and have to do real science as opposed to the pseudo-science that elementary schoolers do. 3.) Instead of preventing children from being pushed through the system they are fostering this practice, because the school doesn't want to get penalized by turning in bad scores. 4.) Due to underfunding, a typical elementary school like the one my wife works at, has over 500 students, but receives only a $20,000 annual stipend for books. Do the math - that's about $40 per student - maybe enough for a single text book.