I know you're all waiting for me to say something about the debates last night, but I'm not ready to give a full analysis yet. I mean, I can just come out and say Kerry won, but what I find interesting about US politics is how the propaganda machine will spin it.

So I caught the Fox News Channel coverage this afternoon, and I kept hearing about how even though everyone but Dan Bartlett conceded the debate to Kerry, there was a distinctive "Kerry won on style" meme. Elsewhere I saw stories about how the cutaway shots clinched Bush's loss. And thenthere were the reminders of how people who listened to the radio debate thought Nixon won, but television viewers gave Kennedy the victory (this is true).

To these people, I say, just look at the transcripts. But that's not what I'd like to talk about right now. What I would like to humbly suggest to Kerry is that he spend the next few speeches doing two things:
<ol type=1>
<br><li>Fixing his "voted-for-87-million" problem by clearly and concisely explaining what how the votes went. We know you can do this John, you proved it last night.
<li>Redress your most important verbal gaffe:
</ol>
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LEHRER: All right, new question. Two minutes, Senator Kerry.

Speaking of Vietnam, you spoke to Congress in 1971, after you came back from Vietnam, and you said, quote, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

LEHRER: Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?

KERRY: No, and they don't have to, providing we have the leadership that we put — that I'm offering.
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I can tell what he wanted to say, but he has this instinct to do a reverse Texas-Two-Step when cornered with war questions. Immediately, Kerry tries to explain:

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I believe that we have to win this. The president and I have always agreed on that. And from the beginning, I did vote to give the authority, because I thought Saddam Hussein was a threat, and I did accept that intelligence.

But I also laid out a very strict series of things we needed to do in order to proceed from a position of strength. Then the president, in fact, promised them. He went to Cincinnati and he gave a speech in which he said, "We will plan carefully. We will proceed cautiously. We will not make war inevitable. We will go with our allies."

He didn't do any of those things. They didn't do the planning. They left the planning of the State Department in the State Department desks. They avoided even the advice of their own general. General Shinsheki, the Army chief of staff, said you're going to need several hundred thousand troops. Instead of listening to him, they retired him.
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What Kerry <b>wants</b> to say is that because "we broke it, we bought it" (notice the careful evasion he engaged in when quoting the "Pottery Barn rule"), American troops dying in the post-Saddam Iraq are not dying for a mistake, they're dying to save post-Saddam Iraq. He's ceding to the Bush bifurcation between the war against Saddam and the war after the hanging of the "Mission Accomplished" banner. Make no mistake about this–we took over Iraq, not just deposing Saddam or the Ba'ath party. We broke it in order to own it.

This is the real problem I have with Kerry–he lets Bush define him. He did a good job of pushing Bush around in the debate, and I wonder what heppens when they start talking about domestic policy.