n Who votes in these polls at MSNBC’s website?



I think that Cheney clearly won the debate. I can’t understand anyone feeling otherwise. Cheney came off like a statesman; like a businessman who’s in the business of managing the country and doing a hell of a competent job of it. Edwards just struck me as a Bill Clinton Wannabe, with his little hand gestures and his sh*t-eating grin and his repetition of Kerry’s lines from last Thursday night. Carville and Begela must be pretty proud of Kerry’s performance last Thursday night, because they seem to have sent Edwards out simply to perform an encore of the same material.

A few key moments that stuck in my memory, quoted from a CBS transcript of the debate (there’s a one-page transcript at MSNBC if you don’t want to befoul your browser with a CBS website), and analyzed by yours truly:

n Cheney on Edwards and Kerry’s vote against funding the war:

I couldn't figure out why that happened initially. And then I looked and figured out that what was happening was Howard Dean was making major progress in the Democratic primaries, running away with the primaries based on an anti-war record. So they, in effect, decided they would cast an anti-war vote and they voted against the troops. Now if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al Qaida?

Whoop! There it is!

n Cheney on the Kerry/Edwards position on the government of Iraq:

Our most important ally in the war on terror, in Iraq specifically, is Prime Minister Allawi. He came recently and addressed a joint session of Congress that I presided over with the speaker of the House.

And John Kerry rushed out immediately after his speech was over with, where he came and he thanked America for our contributions and our sacrifice and pledged to hold those elections in January, went out and demeaned him, criticized him, challenged his credibility.

Then, later, this exchange:

CHENEY: He won‘t count the sacrifice and the contribution of Iraqi allies. It‘s their country. They‘re in the fight. They‘re increasingly the ones out there putting their necks on the line to take back their country from the terrorists and the old regime elements that are still left. They‘re doing a superb job. And for you to demean their sacrifices strikes me as...

EDWARDS: Oh, I‘m not...

CHENEY: ... as beyond...

EDWARDS: I‘m not demeaning...

CHENEY: It is indeed. You suggested...

EDWARDS: No, sir, I did not...

CHENEY: ... somehow they shouldn‘t count, because you want to be able to say that the Americans are taking 90 percent of the sacrifice. You cannot succeed in this effort if you‘re not willing to recognize the enormous contribution the Iraqis are increasingly making to their own future.

Is Kerry so desperate to keep the Howard Deanists from voting for Nader that he’s willing to drive a wedge between himself and the new government of Iraq? What good could it possibly do his campaign to slam the first democratic government in that country’s history? I agree with Cheney completely on this issue, and I can’t imagine anyone other than the Michael Moore types supporting Kerry’s remarks about Prime Minister Allawi. That’s an awful base to appeal to… the Michael Moore fans will be too busy trying to score a nickel bag and download System of a Down MP3s to even get to the polls this election day.

n Edwards on Cheney’s daughter:

Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

Was this a not-so-subtle attempt to cause anti-Cheney feelings among the far-right of the conservative base? Or, maybe an attempt to rattle Cheney? Either way, it made me really dislike Edwards.

n Cheney on the Kerry/Edwards tax plan:

Well, the fact of the matter is a great many of our small businesses pay taxes under the personal income taxes rather than the corporate rate. And about 900,000 small businesses will be hit if you do, in fact, do what they want to do with the top bracket. That's not smart because seven out of 10 new jobs in America are created by small businesses. You do not want to tax them. It's a bad idea to increase the burden on those folks.

Amen, brother. I was laid off three damn times during the high-tax Clinton 90’s. And what was the liberal solution to that? Raise the friggin’ minimum wage. Look, if I can’t support my family on a couple of bucks and a dime, giving me a couple of bucks and a quarter won’t help. Thankfully, now that we have a conservative in the White House, I have a darn good job for a company that is growing in an economy that the Kerry campaign derides. Look, working people aren’t stupid. Most of us understand how things work. The government needs to keep it’s damn hands out of the pockets of my company so that they can afford to keep me working.

n Edwards tries to answer a question without his memorized Kerry-this-Kerry-that script:

John Kerry made clear on Thursday night that—I‘m sorry, I broke the rules. We made clear—we made clear on Thursday night that we will do that, and we will do it aggressively.

We made it clear? We??!? John, were you in Senator Kerry’s pocket, like a little mouse, last Thursday night?

n Morton Kondracke at Fox summed it up to my satisfaction when he said of Edwards: “It was like a dog yapping at a grownup’s heels.”

n By the way, it turns out that Cheney has met Edwards previous to last night’s debate. Big deal.

n Sometimes I wonder why I continue linking to Andrew Sullivan:

If last Thursday night's debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate - just concluded - was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away.

I’m glad to see that Andy can get a good connection from his ISP on Pluto. (Rolls eyes, sighs, does the whole Bush-Last-Thursday thing.)

n There is, of course, a ton of debate analysis out there on the net. Don’t miss Jay Nordlinger over at NRO:

It seems that, year after year, election after election, Democrats campaign in such a way as to hide their true beliefs — they're trying to sell themselves as something they're really not. Republicans, by and large, are true to their beliefs, for better or worse. Democrats act like America is a conservative country — one in which they have to fudge, in order to get elected.


_________________

UPDATE: What is it about Edwards that makes some people compare him to small, fuzzy animials? First there was Kondracke's line about him being a dog yapping at Cheney's heels... Without thinking about it, I likened him to a mouse myself...and, Wendy reminded me that we'd flipped channels last night in time to hear Chris Matthews say that Cheney was "out on a hunting trip. ... And he found squirrel."