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The only thing I wanted to hear from Coral Gables

"Mr. President, my position on Iraq has not changed because of politics; it has changed because the situation and the evidence changed. Adjusting a course of action to account for the best available evidence is not flip-flopping. It's leadership. Knowing what we know now, I would no more endorse your war than I would keep driving once I saw that the oncoming bridge was out. In Iraq, not only have you burned the bridges, but you've kept driving us towards them as if they were still there."

He came close a couple of times, and did a decent enough job, I suppose. Three other thoughts:

It was almost unbearable to watch the "expert commentators" weasel out of making any sort of claims about the debate, choosing instead to "wait until we've had a chance to see how it was received." In other words, here were CNN commentators basically admitting that they had to wait and see what everyone else thought before they'd be willing to admit to thinking themselves. Shameful.

But they had no monopoly on the shame front. Jenny and I watched the Daily Show afterwards, and while Clarke was clearly partisan, Rudy Guiliani crossed the line from partisanship to mindless TOOL. Guiliani actually described Saddam Hussein as a "weapon of mass destruction," and behaved as though that fulfilled Bush's rationale for going to war in the first place. Where's the Zellot when you need him? Rudy, you know what is a metaphor is, dontcha? Apparently not.

Okay, one last thought, and I'm done. When asked about the Sudan, Kerry delivered a concise diagnosis of the problem, and offered a specific policy change (shift our focus to logistic aid). Bush repeated almost everything Kerry said, minus the specific policy (and minus any explanation of why he's not done anything yet), adding only that the "rainy season" there was almost over. Ummm, Mr. President, why haven't you intervened in a situation your own Secretary of State describes as a virtual genocide? It hasn't stopped raining yet? Oh, okay. Thanks. If I hadn't decided yet to vote, and for whom to vote, that'd be enough for me.

Comments

I basically agree... I think Kerry missed some opportunities, and I wish he'd done more to more specifically say leadership is complex and stubborness may be leadership, but it is bad leadership, a la Jed Bartlet. He didn't quite hammer it home, but he looked, literally and figuratively, head and shoulders above the President in this debate.