Did Anyone Really Listen to the VP Debate?
Extraordinary! I can’t believe so many people actually think Edwards won that debate! Cheney kicked his butt so bad it was stunning. Edwards was visibly more nervous, you could see his hands shaking for the first 20 minutes. Edwards proceeded to accuse the Republicans of trying to interpret or spin the previous presidential debate and then repeated his spin about how great Kerry was in the debate. I thought that was ironic and something the commentators should have caught. Even at the end Edwards was stumbling as he repeatedly went outside the bounds of the question about himself and mentioned Kerry twice by name. Cheney was the old, wise, voice of experience and Edwards was trying to wax poetic by talking about 2 cent screws and sitting at the kitchen table. On the Iraq thing, Cheney totally killed him. All Edwards could do is trot out the same old 90% statistics and inflated budget statistics (which include all sorts of future estimates and things that haven’t even been approved or experienced yet). Cheney nailed him on that, nailed him with facts about his record and especially Kerry’s record of voting against military and intelligence spending, nailed him on more accurate stats about our allies and losses, and generally did quite well. Certainly Cheney is touchy about the gay marriage issue but he handled it fairly well considering his feelings about it.
When I hear Kerry and Edwards talking about suddenly insuring all these additional people and increasing spending on Iraq (doubling troops and such), increasing spending on education, increasing (”doubling”) spending on Aids assistance to Africa, increasing spending on everything really — and then their answer for paying for this is just rolling back the tax cuts on the $200,000+ a year folks, it reminds me of a punk kid running for class president on a platform of providing free ice cream to every student. It’s talk designed to tickle the voters ears. It doesn’t really compute or work! They also have claimed they won’t partially privatize or really change social security at all. This means taking more tax money to pay for social security and it also means people like me are more likely to have to pay more and see it less (or not at all) some day. And jobs? How are they going to create jobs when rolling back the high bracket tax cut is obviously going to have an impact on small business owners? You can throw money at education all day long but it doesn’t miraculously create jobs. Cheney is right and needed to hammer on it more… we need to create a business friendly atmosphere. And for the most part it is. Our unemployment rate is extremely low by any historical comparison (even recent history).
But in general, when I watched that debate (unlike the presidential debate), I’d say our side won, so it amazes me that people think Edwards did better. What? Just because he talked about the kitchen table and his Dad working at the mill? Come on! Wasn’t anybody listening to the heart of the arguments?