October 13, 2004 by lonbud

Baseball, Mom, and Apple Pie

To hear the slice of America tell it who dialed into C-Span’s phone bank after tonight’s final round of the 2004 Presidential Election Debates, President Bush was the evening’s clear winner because he is a man of faith and integrity who will protect America and keep her strong.

An equally sure, though generally more articulate group of callers hailed Senator Kerry the obvious victor by virtue of his clarity and confidence and his command of the issues.

It is doubtful either man changed many minds tonight.

It is also likely that we do indeed, as suggested by the 30 minutes of calls C-Span aired after the debate, live in a deeply divided nation, where ostensibly reasonable people have very different ways of looking at things.

The President sees a dangerous world where we must take the fight to our enemies and kill before they do, where our best defense is offense; where we must spend, and do, whatever it takes to “spread the light of freedom.” The Senator sees a world with dangers, where we must endeavor cooperatively with those who love freedom everywhere to identify and contain, and obliterate if necessary, those who kill in opposition to it.

In the President’s view he has done a lot, and plenty, and enough (in a time of declining stock prices, and recession, and being ATTACKED) to address America’s healthcare crisis, to support small business and the middle class, to create good paying jobs, and to educate people for the jobs of the 21st century.

Mr. Kerry believes, and used a blizzard of facts and figures to illustrate, Mr. Bush’s presidency is among the most spendthrift, incompetent, poorly managed administrations of all time. He believes he can do a better job and articulated his many qualifications for doing so.

For all the potentially volatile issues they broached -religion, homosexuality, abortion- moderator Bob Shieffer’s questions were largely softballs that allowed both candidates to hone their stump speeches for the homestretch.

On the whole I think Senator Kerry did a good job of expressing a hopeful view of the world and America’s prospects in it. He used the current state of division in America against the President, who campaigned four years ago as a “uniter, not a divider.” He certainly made a cogent and reasonable case for himself as a leader up to the task.

President Bush, on the other hand, relied less on articulating a positive vision for a second administration than he did on highlighting the dangers and fear lurking all around. He showed to its best advantage his simple, plainspoken approach to the nation’s challenges, and seemed genuinely content with his administration’s accomplishments.

In the end, and it was at the end, with Mr. Shieffer’s final question about the impact on each man of the strong women in their lives, Mr. Kerry played his trump card. After the President joked about his wife and daughters in that regular guy way of his and told America his was a love-at-first-sight, Mr. Kerry spoke first about his mother.

The President, whose face all evening in the split screen next to Mr. Kerry’s seemed decidedly flushed, turned beet red. How could he have forgotten his mother?