Well, I took the challenge to take a swig of wine every time Edwards mentioned Halliburton, so I've a nasty headache this morning. I just have a few things to add to BRD's post on the controversy over who won the darned thing, and then I'll put my hands back to the sides of my head to keep it from exploding.
To my mind Cheney won on every topic but health care, which Edwards took by a mile. (He even had a formula for getting rid of frivolous law suits.) I've done a bit of factor analysis of various surveys, and health care is usually "highly loaded" on a general liberal/conservative factor that includes most of the items in a typical survey. The loading is so stong that you could probably predict liberal/conservative ranking based on the answer to that question alone. So it's not surprising, really, that a lot of liberals think Edwards won that debate... even though he really only won that single issue. It's a little like that map of the nation that used to appear on the cover of New Yorker, which was nine-tenths Manhattan. It's a matter of perspective.
I also noticed that Cheney passed up the opportunity to respond to the Edwards accusation that he voted to end many of the weapons systems that Kerry voted against. Cheney could have observed that he sought to end them after the Cold War had been won, while Kerry voted against them before the end of the Cold War. I guess he didn't feel he had to make that point though. No one really believes Cheney's a peacenik, and the contention doesn't quite match the anti-Cheney rhetoric that he's a war monger, so why bother countering it?
Posted by Demosophist at October 6, 2004 11:06 AM | TrackBack