[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: The Town Hall Debate

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The Town Hall Debate

October 9, 2004
 


 

Town hall meetings are one vestige of early American
democracy that modern presidential candidates know very
well. No one who has survived a New Hampshire primary
season needs to be told what it's like to answer questions
tossed out by a group of average citizens. It's the
democratic process in its most amiable state: earnest
Americans asking serious questions about the issues. Last
night's format was much more suited to George Bush's
talents than the hard-edged debate last week, but John
Kerry still managed to goad him to irritable near-shouting
at some points. 

One of the uncommitted voters in the audience sensibly
asked President Bush to name three mistakes he'd made in
office, and what he had done to remedy the damage. Mr. Bush
declined to list even one, and instead launched into an
impassioned defense of the invasion of Iraq as a good idea.
The president's insistence on defending his decision to go
into Iraq seemed increasingly bizarre in a week when his
own investigators reported that there were no weapons of
mass destruction there, and when his own secretary of
defense acknowledged that there was no serious evidence of
a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. 

Even worse, the president's refusal to come up with even a
minor error - apart from saying that he might have made
some unspecified appointments that he now regretted -
underscores his inability to respond to failure in any way
except by insisting over and over again that his original
decision was right. 

Unfortunately, for long stretches of the evening, the
format did not lead to such telling responses. On occasion,
the arguments were impossible to follow. Heaven help any
citizen who relied on last night's debate to understand
what is going on with North Korea or who tried to
understand the fight about tax cuts on Subchapter S
corporations. 

Mr. Bush was deeply unpersuasive when asked why he had not
permitted the importation of cheaper prescription drugs
from Canada. He claimed that the reason was "I want to make
sure it cures you and doesn't kill you." Mr. Kerry cleanly
retorted that four years ago in a campaign debate, Mr. Bush
had said importing medicine from Canada sounded sensible. 

And the president was utterly incoherent when asked about
whom he might name to the Supreme Court in a second term.
His comment about how he didn't want to offend any judges
because he wanted "them all voting for me" was a joke - but
an unfortunate one, given the fact that the president owes
his job to a Supreme Court vote. 

Mr. Kerry was weaker when he had to respond to a woman who
wanted to know about spending federal money on abortions.
Social issues seem to bring out the senator's worst
tendencies to paint a word picture in shades of gray and
equivocation. 

Both men seemed overly defensive at times, as if they were
fighting shadow opponents that were not even in the hall.
Mr. Kerry seemed intent, without much prompting by Mr.
Bush, on countering the attack ads run by the president's
campaign and by other Republican organizations. Mr. Bush
sometimes seemed as if he was trying to make up for his
weak performance in Debate No. 1. 

Mr. Kerry demonstrated, at the very minimum, a stature that
was equal to the president's. If Mr. Bush was hoping to
recover all the ground he lost last week, he failed in his
mission. 

The president seemed to fall back frequently on
name-calling, denouncing his opponent as a liberal and a
tool of the trial lawyers. "The president's just trying to
scare," Mr. Kerry said. It will be another few weeks before
we see how well that works. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/opinion/9sat1.html?ex=1098341335&ei=1&en=1c2f1aae88f98364


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