HE'S A PEEVER:

Candidates Most Telling When They Aren't Talking (ALESSANDRA STANLEY, 10/01/04, NY Times)

When President Bush leaned over his lectern and talked directly into the camera, he had the same firm, squared-off look he brings to a presidential address from the Oval Office.

When the networks (flouting the debate rules) cut to Mr. Bush while Senator John Kerry was speaking, the president had the hunched shoulders and the peevish, defensive look of an incumbent under heavy attack.

And it was body language as much as rhetoric and one-liners that distinguished the two candidates in last night's debate. The networks were right to disregard the campaigns' ban on cutaways and reaction shots. Instead, all the networks, including Fox News, lavished viewers with split screens and shots of the candidates from almost every angle, including shots from behind the president's tensely knotted back.

Television homes in on feelings hidden beneath rehearsed words and reveals instinctive responses and glimmers of personality.

The cameras demonstrated that Mr. Bush cannot hear criticism without frowning, blinking and squirming (he even sighed once). They showed that Mr. Kerry can control his anger and stay cool but that he cannot suppress his inner overeager A student, flashing a bleach-white smile and nodding hungrily at each question.

Unfortunately for Mr. Kerry the last couple A student types were Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. People give the A student the debate and the C student their vote.

MORE:
Finally Face to Face, Candidates Deepen Their Division on Iraq: Bush and Kerry raise few new arguments, but dig in on differences over how to win the war. (Ronald Brownstein, October 1, 2004, LA Times)

President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry increased the odds that the voters' verdict on the war in Iraq will decide the November election, as they deepened their disagreement over the conflict during a sharp but civil debate Thursday night.

Overall, the two men raised few new arguments. But they offered starkly different visions of how America should pursue its goals in the world, how a president should lead and, most emphatically, whether the ongoing war in Iraq had enhanced or diminished American security.

Continuing the tougher tone that he had unveiled in recent weeks, Kerry described the war as a "colossal error of judgment" that had weakened American security by diverting attention and resources from the pursuit of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

"Saddam Hussein didn't attack us," Kerry declared in one of his most forceful moments. "Osama bin Laden attacked us."

Bush insistently declared that the war would reduce the long-term threat of terrorism by encouraging the spread of democracy in the Middle East and allowing the United States to take the offensive against terrorists.

But the president sometimes seemed exasperated and even angry as Kerry pressed his case against him; at one point, Bush even apparently sighed in frustration, a distant echo of the behavior that hurt Vice President Al Gore in his first debate against Bush in 2000.

Fun to try and watch the Left make George Bush seem like Al Gore, confusing condescension, which the average person hates, with annoyance, which they share.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 1, 2004 10:35 AM