For reasons of, frankly, rank cynicism most of what I wrote last Thursday and Friday about the presidential debate focused on George W. Bush's egregious loss on style points. The press, as we learned from the Bush-Gore debates, is composed of very smart people acting very stupid, so this is what they focus on. And Bush's foreign policy has been terrible and he put in a stylistically terrible performance at the foreign policy debate, so the point needed to be driven home. The time, however, has come to move beyond the hunched shoulders, the blank stare, and the inappropriate facial expressions.
On ABC's This Week on Sunday morning, Cokie Roberts -- evidently the “liberal” on the panel, since neither George Will, David Brooks, nor Fareed Zakaria fit the bill, though Sunday punditry bias is so egregious nowadays one hardly notices it -- explained that even though he lost on the all-important style question, “what George Bush said was fine.”
Evidently, Roberts was watching with the sound off, and just decided this would be an intelligent-sounding thing to say. Even Will was driven to remark, “I'm not so sure,” and point out a flaw or two in Bush's substantive performance before moving on to the John Kerry-bashing.
Was it really fine? Was it fine when Bush petulantly accused Kerry of forgetting about Poland when listing the countries that had participated in “major combat operations” in Iraq based on Poland's contribution of a token force of 60 combat troops? Was he not paying attention during the war he ordered?
Maybe the fine part was Bush's explanation that he “understand[s] how hard it is to commit troops.” After all, Bush “never wanted to commit troops.” As he explained, “when I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that.” Never? The most charitable explanation is that the president was being overly literal and also has some kind of sleeping disorder where he never dreams. Less charitably, maybe he was just lying. Faced with the reality that he has, in fact, committed troops in a careless and irresponsible manner, he now feels the need to pretend that he understands why you shouldn't do this. Least charitably of all, maybe the president meant what he said and he actually ran for president despite a total lack of understanding the job. Every president since Herbert Hoover -- at a minimum has committed troops somewhere or other. Every president in American history (except, perhaps, the unfortunate William Henry Harrison) has at least needed to seriously consider deploying troops. It's sort of an important part of the job. But maybe on the same planet where substance doesn't matter, it's fine, substantively, for a presidential candidate to seriously misjudge the probability of war or just make things up.
Was it fine when the president said that “nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and other security personnel are working today?” Maybe what Cokie meant is that there's nothing wrong with those words. Certainly, they're excellent words. I wish they were true -- it would be good for our country for them to be true. But as Reuters has reported, only 22,700 have enough training to be “minimally effective at their tasks.” Worse, as Mark Kleiman pointed out over the weekend, this claim was made -- and debunked -- before the debate. The president and his handlers just didn't care. That doesn't seem fine to me, but maybe someday when I have years of experience in this business I'll appreciate how fun it is to be deliberately lied to.
My personal candidate for least-fine thing Bush said, though, is that the reason we shouldn't have bilateral talks with North Korea is that that's “precisely what Kim Jong Il wants.” Now unlike the president, I've never gone to business school. My understanding, though, is that the concept of “negotiation” would probably show up there, so I don't really know why the president doesn't understand this. But the idea of a negotiation is that you give the other guy what he wants, and in exchange he gives you what you want. In particular, if we want Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear weapons, we're going to have to give him something he wants. That's the way it works.
The president, evidently, is opposed to giving bad men things that they want to have. It's understandable, in a way. Bad men are, after all, bad, and giving people what they want makes them happy, and who likes to see a newly happy bad man walking around smiling? Not me. But then again, I also don't like the prospect of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons and I don't want our overstretched military to need to fight another war. That means negotiating. Giving people what they want. The president, apparently, has other plans. Four more years will mean either more wars, more nuclear proliferation, or some combination of the two. It isn't fine.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
