Most people at Amherst who debated in high school (myself included) probably felt that they would have been relieved to face this guy in any tournament debating round. In an especially biting moment of post-debate commentary, Senator Joe Biden, D-Del, complimented William Weld, the Republican Governor of Massachusetts who debated John Kerry in 1996 for his senate seat, by comparing their debates to the legendary repartees of Lincoln and Douglas. Weld, for his part, thanked him, but in the background, I distinctly felt a derisive exchange. Biden was asking how someone capable of such animated debating could put his support behind George W. Bush, someone who makes it harder and harder to believe that an age of incredible debating ever existed.
It's no surprise that instapolls taken by three major news sources immediately following Thursday night's debate resoundingly approved of John Kerry's performance over President Bush's. What is surprising is that most news sources, and the politicians in the spin room who were interviewed, maintained the president had made a decent showing. While I agree that John Kerry is a skilled debater and George W. Bush is a less effective one, I'm tired of analysts taking this into consideration when judging the debate. Justifications like, "well, he's not as a good a debater, but he held his own," call into question the very essence of what it means to be presidential. Is the ability to debate no longer something we intrinsically value in our president, as these newscasters or (usually) partisan politicians maintain? And, as so many maintain, is it not a significant strike against the current president that he's all but incapable of holding his own when the oiled Karl Rove machine is taken away? I felt, much like Dorothy in the "The Wizard of Oz," that somebody had pulled back a curtain and the big, booming voice of Rove and the Bush speechwriting team left a middle-aged man who, in a testament to confused nervousness, couldn't control the twitching of his nose.
Ignoring policy, what does it say about a president if he comes up with something like, "We won the war too fast," in order to justify his failures, as if he himself thinks it's a good argument? The response itself is clearly bogus, but I didn't think, "Wow, this president must live in a world of pure delusion," as much as I thought, "How did they let him say that?" The president, in a sense, no longer represented one man with a desk upon which the words "The buck stops here" were written in large black letters. Instead, he was the head of a political movement, a political movement that no longer had the time or national support to change its leader. The goal of the party became just to get the thoughts out there and hope that the message pervades the delivery. But, I thought, don't I want a president who's writing his own message?
Perhaps I'm being too hard on George W. Bush. Apparently, he didn't have much time to prepare for Thursday's debate, and he isn't as eloquent as Senator Kerry. But I don't think it's elitist to want an intelligent president. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a president to be able to hold his own, really hold his own, in a debate with another political professional. This is the president we're talking about. His job isn't to make people who don't have the brainpower to be president feel better about their inability to argue persuasively. His job is to represent America to the world and to itself, and to fight for what the country believes in. His job, I would venture to suggest, is not to be a symbol of a political party, but to be a man that has the intelligence to rise above a political party.
This may be an unreasonable hope in an age of extraordinarily partisan politics. But my message is not a partisan one: I've been watching past presidential debates on CSPAN, and Bush senior spoke eloquently, persuasively and, I would argue, presidentially. You don't have to be a Democrat to acknowledge that previous Republican candidates have been much more suited for the job than the current one. In this election cycle, we know that John Kerry can argue persuasively, can be, well, presidential. Bush generally can't.
As the debate fades into the background and the Bush ads poking fun of Kerry's "global test" come to the foreground (taking Senator Kerry's words about justified international decision-making completely out of context) I ask that all of us remember the raw debate, the pre-spin and the president behind the curtain. You aren't electing a cabinet, a family or a set of values. You're electing a president. And, without his cabinet, without his staff, which candidate can actually run the nation? Think of the issues that haven't arisen yet, the ones that neither candidate currently supports. Who do you trust to understand them? To, well, debate them? I think Thursday night made that painfully clear. The president's camp now has a lot riding on proving one specific thing in Friday's showdown: that the president can debate.