George W Sighed.
The George Will comment that Al Gore would have won the election had he not sighed during the debate, but Al Gore was incapable of not sighing bounces to the top of my mind.
Somewhere in the middle of yesterday’s debate, I murmured “There it is again.” Bush was becoming irritable, and the visual flubberations were returning.
To paraphrase former Texas Governor Ann Richards on his father “Poor George, he can’t help himself. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
And now it occurs to me: the Law of Diminishing Returns has taken hold. Divorced from all context and without considering the actual content of what anyone said, last night’s debate was a draw.
But to use sports metaphors: this is the continuation of a game, not a whole new game. If Kerry beat Bush by a whopping 10 runs to 0 in Debate 1, if you desire to give Debate 2 to Bush by a run, in the playoff mode we’d have the Deciding Debate 3. (Where we toss the vice presidential debate in, I don’t know. That totally throws off the “Best of Odd Number”, doesn’t it?)
The first debate hangs over everything — the debate held before the baseball playoffs started, the debate watched by the greatest number of viewers, the debate that provided a sort of “first impression”. Everything from here on out is seen through the prism of the first debate.
And Al Gore sighed in the first debate.
Likewise, it has been theorized around the place that… Cheney made Bush look bad, and even if he had managed to perform a bit better (say if Cheney hadn’t just mailed in the domestic side of his debate), he would not have made Edwards look bad. Throw a Martian observer in to examine the debates, and the Martian would conclude that Kerry is the presidential nominee, Edwards is the vice-presidential nominee; and Cheney is the president, and Bush is the vice-president.
(Regarding the rumours of Bush having a feed into him, a story that has reached the NY Times and whose photograph is apparently not photoshopped together — I’ll demur to the Reason blog and post this Reagan-era SNL sketch transcript.)