Never keep Dubya up past bedtime
I caught the last few minutes of the debate between president George W Bush and Senator John Kerry and it looked like I had expected it to: Bush on the ropes from sheer exhaustion after doing something for more than 45 minutes straight. I don’t understand how his advisors could agree to 90-minute debates.
Not that I think Bush really hurt his re-election chances much since Kerry kept reminding everyone that he won’t even blow his nose before creating an international alliance for the occassion. I just don’t trust him to pull the trigger when the trigger needs to be pulled. His debating skills, honed by 20 years in the world’s most self-important discussion club, just can’t convince me otherwise.
The debate format worked very well, and I think it’s actually superior to the more free-wheeling debates that are typically preferred outside the U.S. Such debates tend to degenerate into the candidates hectoring each other about “unanswered questions”.
