OT: Debate

[Will]

Ok, I guess I'm right along the line of a political thread here, but I felt the need to post something about the US Presidential Debate.

I watched it with a large group in my apartment complex, and we had a Law Professor from Univ. of Wisconsin who was visiting campus give a talk afterward, on Western political philosophies from Plato onward (interesting, but a bit irrelevant, I thought).

Anyway, before watching it, I thought both of them would do about the same in this debate, and there wouldn't be much change. Then during the debate, I was wondering if Bush even prepared for it at all. From a pure debating standpoint, disregarding the politics behind everything, I think Kerry utterly destroyed Bush. He was assertive and articulate, while Bush stumbled through what I think should have been easy targets. Both managed to sound like broken records throughout the whole thing, but Kerry seemed to hide it better. Towards the end, there was a particularly bad moment when Bush was supposed to be offering a rebuttal on a position with North Korea, where he instead switched back to a scripted "We must stay the course in Iraq," a complete non-sequitur, and it confused just about everyone in the room.

So far the "analysis" I have seen from the debate has pretty much two camps: Democrats who were iffy on voting for Kerry now having a stronger opinion in favor of Kerry, and staunch Bush supporters who seem to have turned a blind eye to all the obvious blunders he made in the debate, and are still staunch supporters. We'll see if that changes in the next few days, but I just think it's sad that it has become so polarized that people are not being swayed in either direction. It's becoming almost a dogma, you must support one candidate, and not waver in that choice, ever.