Taken To School

Man, Dick Cheney’s gonna be pulling chunks of John Edwards out of his stool for months after tonight’s debate.
I had not, you may recall, planned on watching tonight’s debate, or any of today’s playoff games; I started an arbitration today, which had been projected to run the rest of the week. I won’t go into details here except to say that it only took one day of hearings to bring the case to a successful conclusion, leaving me unexpectedly free, after hearing a few innings of the Yankees-Twins game, to catch the back end of the debate on radio and TV and then catch up on the rest on tape and transcript.
My impressions? Well, as I said at the time, I thought the first presidential debate was pretty good; Bush was solid but far too slow to respond to Kerry’s attacks; Kerry was at the top of his game, albeit due to throwing out a lot of falsehoods.
Tonight’s debate was even better (as debates often are when the candidates are sitting down) – these guys weren’t afraid to mix it up, and frankly called each other liars quite often (Cheney: “Well, Gwen, it’s hard to know where to start; there are so many inaccuracies there.”). Now, some people really do think most of what Dick Cheney says is lies. You can’t reach those people. But to anybody else, it had to be obvious that Cheney won this one, and the Kerry camp had to be hoping that a lot of people were watching the baseball game instead. Cheney was on top of just everything, very fast on his feet, he was calm, deliberate, and serious.
Edwards, meanwhile: well, to those of us who are practicing litigators, Edwards is a recognizable type – the lawyer who’s great in front of juries, where he gets to control the narrative, but not so hot in front of judges, because he keeps trying to launch into an emotional closing argument instead of answering questions. Here’s a perfect example:

As far as spin goes, by the way, by my count of the transcript Edwards referred to Kerry’s Thursday debate performance six times (“The American people saw John Kerry on Thursday night. They don’t need the vice president or the president to tell them what they saw. They saw a man who was strong, who had conviction, who is resolute . . . “). The Kerry folks either think or want us to think that Kerry was so dominating in that debate that the election’s over. Nice try.
Cheney did a particularly good job of coming back to the points in Kerry’s record where he actually had to make decisions and made the wrong ones, and got in a solid zinger early that turned out to be just a warmup:

He repeated this later:

Edwards, by contrast – go back and look at what he said – lapsed into lawyer-speak trying to defend Kerry’s record:

He said that — made mention of this global test. What John Kerry said — and it’s just as clear as day to anybody who was listening — he said: We will find terrorists where they are and kill them before they ever do harm to the American people, first.
We will keep this country safe. He defended this country as a young man, he will defend this country as president of the United States.
He also said very clearly that he will never give any country veto power over the security of the United States of America.
Now, I know the vice president would like to pretend that wasn’t said, and the president would too. But the reality is it was said.

Yeah, the testimony’s in the record. Unfortunately, so is Kerry’s record and his past statements. As usual, the only way to defend Kerry is to try to deny the existence of his position; to defend it in a way that is distinguishable from the president’s is to stand on indefensible turf. Democrats want to say that they would get more allies before going to war, without recognizing the corollary – that they would have let the absence of certain allies stop them from doing what they otherwise claim they believe should have been done. (Cheney’s use of Kerry’s 1991 vote reminds us that this is pretense – there’s always an excuse not to do something).
Probably Cheney’s best moments, just as Bush had his best catching Kerry denigrating the role of allies like Poland, were when he cleaned up something Bush should have responded to on Thursday, when Edwards trotted out the talking point about the US supposedly bearing 90% of the costs and 90% of the casualties in Iraq. First, this:

Then, when Edwards tried to defend his exclusion of the Iraqis in the field from the casualty figures:

And, of course, the evening’s killer line about Kerry and to a lesser extent Edwards zigging to the left on the war last fall:

Naturally, I also liked how Cheney drew together the strands of Zarqawi and the Palestinian suicide bombers and how they all trace back to Saddam.
I wasn’t surprised to see Edwards run on and on about Halliburton; it’s sometimes all the Democrats have to cling to. Although Cheney took the same shots back at Edwards later by tweaking him for using tax loopholes to avoid Medicare taxes, a picayune point but one that reminds the viewer that these guys all have advantages we don’t.
Cheney got in another great prepared dig at Edwards’ puny record and poor attendance in the Senate, even though it was out of place in answer to the question about Israel:

Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session.
The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

The domestic policy stuff was a bit dreary by comparison – it’s hard to follow war-and-peace issues with domestic stuff without gearing down a bit – but provided more entertainment. After some back and forth in which Cheney and Edwards competed to see who could look most uncomfortable talking about gay marriage, we got this exchange. Edwards larded on the condescending empathy for the Cheneys and their gay daughter:

After a convoluted series of non-sequiturs from Edwards on the issue, the moderator went back to Cheney:

At this juncture, Cheney and Edwards reminded me of nothing so much as a father sitting at a dinner table trying to cut off some line of conversation started by a young fellow dating his daughter who was meeting the family for the first time and had brought up something inappropriate.
The tort-reform stuff was interesting, but I may get back to it another day; you could see that Edwards felt the need to play defense on that issue, which suggests that it’s playing well for the GOP:

My wife and I found it telling that Edwards, when he then talked with pride about his career as a trial lawyer, had to pick an example of a case that had nothing to do with medical malpractice.
Cheney also gave us a revealing admission that a Democrat would be terrified to make, in response to a statistic about AIDS among African-American women:

I have not heard those numbers with respect to African- American women. I was not aware that it was — that they’re in epidemic there, because we have made progress in terms of the overall rate of AIDS infection.

Cheney punted on directly attacking Edwards’ experience. I almost wanted to hear him say, “Senator, I know Dan Quayle. I worked with Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle is a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Dan Quayle.” Quayle, of course, had been in Congress twice as long as Edwards by 1988, and hadn’t spent most of his time there running for president.
Finally, from the closing statements, John Edwards committed a faux pas by loudly ripping a piece of paper while Cheney was talking, but then he said something that made me think:

Was I the only one who thought: “and there, on the TV, was Dick Cheney”?