142 articles
JUST IN CASE you were worried that not enough supposedly neutral institutions and publications were gunning for George W. Bush, part of the international public health establishment just risked its reputation to join the fight. On Friday, the New York Times reported a new study in the British…
LET'S GET RID OF PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. They don't bring out or test the characteristics and skills we want in a president. They take up days and days of practice before the actual debate, then dominate the campaign with sound bites from the 90-minute encounter for days afterwards. They often…
IN THEIR FORMAL STATEMENTS reacting to the new videotape from Osama bin Laden, both President Bush and John Kerry were statesmanlike. Each man called for Americans to unite against terror and vowed to defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Canton, Ohio
"It's absolutely impossible and irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, [Saddam] wouldn't necessarily be gone. He might be gone." --John Kerry SOME PEOPLE WORRY that John Kerry doesn't know what he will do once in power. But that's not the half of it. Kerry doesn't even know what he…
DEMOCRATIC ACTIVISTS, many still seething over what they see as Ralph Nader's role in spoiling the election for Al Gore four years ago, have filed numerous court charges against the Green party candidate to try and keep him off the ballot this year.
FOUR YEARS ago, when I covered the last U.S. presidential election campaign, it was hard to be impressed with George W. Bush. He seemed a callow sort, propelled effortlessly towards the presidency by a combination of heredity and money, swagger and bonhomie.
WITH ALL ATTENTION focused on Florida and Ohio, it's tempting to pity California which, in this election at least, seems to have mattered most as the home of Jay Leno and The Tonight Show. Once again, the wealthy nation-state has lived up to its traditional role as the ATM of American politics. Not…
AT FIRST GLANCE, Colorado looks like a trusty slice of "red" America. It has a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and about 19 percent more registered Republicans than Democrats. Its congressional lineup tilts 5-2 in the GOP's favor, and Republicans control both houses of the state…
THIS ELECTION is going to be close, but George W. Bush will indeed be victorious. This was the prediction made by Matthew Dowd, senior strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign, at a luncheon held at the St. Regis hotel in downtown Washington yesterday. For the past week, a dining room at the hotel…
IT'S THE ISSUE that just won't stay in the closet. Republican politicians run skittishly from talking about same-sex marriage. The polls from Hawaii indicate they should be highlighting it.
THE TEXANS FOR TRUTH have unearthed a video clip of a young-looking Bush flipping the camera the bird--or, as he prefers to call it, the "one-fingered victory salute."
DURING THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE on September 30, John Kerry invoked the name of Ronald Reagan to criticize President George W. Bush's policy on Iraq. Kerry claimed that, like Reagan, he would work with our allies and the international community on foreign affairs, instead of acting…
William Kristol
FINALLY CLINCHING the conversion of the Detroit News from a principled conservative voice to a liberal echo, the paper the other day declined to endorse a candidate for president. This abdication, ending a string of Republican endorsements unbroken since World War II, fooled no one: Michigan…
THERE ARE no former Boston Red Sox fans. And it isn't a sustained act of perversity to stick with the Red Sox over the years. Failing to win the World Series for 86 years didn't create a masochistic love for the team. Instead, the attraction of the Red Sox is very simple: they were always in the…
COVERING THE HOTEL-LUNCHEON BEAT comes with some definite perks: Namely, campaign officials come to you, not the other way around. On Tuesday, Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman and communications director Nicolle Devenish lunched with print reporters at the St. Regis hotel in downtown…
JOHN KERRY now closes his presidential campaign exactly as he opened his political life: Attacking the United States military.
JUST WHEN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY thought it had made its peace with New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer showed that his battle with the investment banking industry had whetted, rather than sated, his appetite for combat. Helped by guilty pleas from two executives with American…
THE CLASSIC, BLOOD-CURDLING MOVIES so many people like to watch in the days leading up to Halloween suddenly don't seem so frightening when compared to the real-life horror flick that made its debut in Washington, D.C., last Friday. An hour-and-a-half of ominous background music, graveyards…
NEXT WEEK'S ELECTION is rightly regarded as the first presidential contest of the post-9/11 world, but it is also a larger referendum on the role of the United States in the post-Cold War era. Iraq has so dominated the debate that it's easy to forget that the security challenges of the 21st century…
IT SEEMS THAT Monday's groundbreaking New York Times story on missing explosives in Iraq was certainly not groundbreaking and may not even be true. The allegations that nearly 400 tons of "high explosives" were missing from the al Qaqaa arms dump are based on charges leveled by Mohamed al Baradei,…
SOME REPORTERS spend the final week of the presidential race inside the Bush and Kerry campaign bubbles, following the candidates to swing states, eating fast food, obsessively checking their Blackberries, and writing up the candidates' stump speeches again and again and again. Not me. Today I'm in…
EVER SINCE John Kerry decided his best tack in this campaign was to turn against the Iraq war, despite his past support for it, his core argument has been that it was a diversion from the war on terror. Iraq, he has been insisting, had nothing to do with that war, which is about al Qaeda and Osama…
FOR NEARLY SIXTY YEARS, since the birth of Israel, American Jews have faced accusations that they care more about the well-being of their ancient homeland than of their home. Well, barring some unforeseen circumstance, the canard of dual loyalty should be retired forever on November 2, 2004. On…
LAST FRIDAY, Charles Krauthammer argued in his column, Sacrificing Israel, that the currency with which a Kerry administration "would pay the rest of the world in exchange for their support . . . is obvious: giving in to them on Israel." Krauthammer pointed out that Kerry has emphasized over and…
I GO TO AMITY SR. HIGH SCHOOL in Woodbridge, Connecticut--a liberal public school in a liberal state. Conservatives are scarce around here and outspoken ones are scarcer. I am so "unusual" that people (friends and even some I don't know) call me "Dan, Dan, Republican," which is a good-natured joke,…
Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden, Tell Any Fib
"We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as." --John Kerry, responding to Bob Schieffer's question, "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" in the…
Tampa
FIFTEEN MILES WEST of Denver, halfway up the Rocky Mountain foothills, there is a place that once was called the Garden of Angels. Two red sandstone monoliths shoot up from the hillside at 45-degree angles, towering 300 feet overhead. Stand between them, and you stare into a valley, brown and green…
JOHN KERRY wasted no time jumping on President George Bush about the unexpected shortage in flu vaccines this year. Why wasn't Bush paying attention? He should have done things differently. And of course Kerry had a "plan" to solve the whole mess.
I NEVER FEARED strange noises in the night until a few months ago. But now I lie in bed in the dark, trying to sleep, and I can't, because of my dread. The room is silent, but that silence is notable because I am certain it will soon be shattered.
HERE'S A CHUNK of President Bush's standard stump speech: "Think about what happened in Afghanistan. It wasn't all that long ago that the Taliban ran that country. Young girls couldn't even go to school. They were not only harboring terrorists, they had this dark ideology of hate. And people showed…
West Hollywood
Austin
"ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT" and "anger management" both come to mind when one attempts to envisage the transition from a Bush to a Kerry foreign policy. And the changes wouldn't be merely matters of attitude. The first 100 days of a Kerry administration would represent a counterrevolution both in tone…
Marietta, Oklahoma
Books in Brief
Quagmire Redux?
Collected Stories
IF JESSE HELMS taught North Carolina Democrats one thing, it's this: "Jessecrats" matter. The Democratic supporters of the retired GOP senator are the kind of folks Howard Dean pigeonholed as "guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." They're also the guys who were the bane of a…
AS A LIFELONG Boston Red Sox fan, I couldn't be happier to deliver to you the following analogy between the now vanquished New York Yankees and the failures of big government policy. It's true: The parallels prove that a Leviathan state and attitude, without regard for individuality and incentive,…
JOHN KERRY, in his grand effort to be all things to all people, has spent the last few weeks trying to convince people that he, too, is a sports junkie, a hardcore Red Sox fan, and devotee of the NFL. His missteps, such as lauding "Lambert Field" during a visit to Wisconsin in August, may prove…
SENATOR CARL LEVIN, the Senate's fiercest and most partisan critic of the Bush administration, released a "report" Thursday challenging the administration's claim that Iraq had a relationship with al Qaeda. The report was produced by the Democratic staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with…
"I HAVE MET MORE LEADERS who can't go out and say it publicly," John Kerry said in March, "but, boy, they look at you and say, 'You gotta win this, you gotta beat this guy, we need a new policy'--things like that." He was talking about foreign leaders, ministers and deputy commissioners and…
THE BOSTON RED SOX WERE TOAST. At least everyone thought so. The California Angels held a 3-1 edge in the best-of-seven ALCS. It was the 9th inning of Game 5 in Anaheim, and, with two men out, the Sox trailed by a run.
THIS WEEK both John Kerry and his senior foreign policy advisor, Susan Rice, have argued that the Bush administration was wrong about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. He was not a danger before the war; his contacts with Saddam's Iraq non-existent; and his relationship to al Qaeda only now…
I UNDERSTAND moms don't read websites. Moms don't blog either (except for, say, MommyPundit or 200 other momblogs) or read newspapers or magazines. They probably don't even vote.
THE PRESIDENT'S REELECTION CAMPAIGN is getting a big boost from a Christian group that has enlisted dozens of entertainers on its behalf to convince young evangelicals to vote.
WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED the Washington Post to inflict real damage on John Kerry's faltering presidential campaign? Yet they have.
THIS NEWS FLASH FROM IRAQ: Combat has a negative effect on Army equipment readiness rates!
IN A CONFERENCE CALL with reporters Monday, Susan Rice was asked about Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Rice is a senior foreign policy adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign who is often mentioned as a possible National Security Adviser in a Kerry White House. Her comments on Zarqawi make that a…
THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.
THE GAME of predicting the economic consequences of a president is, in a sense, a frivolous exercise: It is impossible to predict in advance the nature of the problems any president will be called upon to solve. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a pledge to balance the budget, and reelected on a…
CALIFORNIA IS FLAT BROKE, its budget a fiscal train wreck. Expenses have so far exceeded state revenues that this spring citizens of the Golden State were forced to pass a bond measure borrowing $15 billion (not including interest) just to keep the state afloat. And now, the Piper must be paid to…
Berlin
PRESIDENT BUSH'S political strategists have avidly studied past campaigns. But they still repeated the most famous mistake of President Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign. They prepared Bush too relentlessly for his first nationally televised debate with John Kerry, holding practices and prep…
Berlin
Bournemouth
NEVER HAVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE elected as president a candidate with a record on national security issues resembling that of John Kerry. Consider some of the distinctive national security choices Kerry has made over the years.
Kerry's Carping
Metamorphoses
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD would have us believe there are no second acts in American lives. But then, he never met Rodney Dangerfield.
Detroit
IMAGINE THE New York Times writing a damning article about the Clinton administration's tax policies cribbed exclusively from a Heritage Foundation press release. Can't do it, can you? How about the Gray Lady recycling ACLU misinformation about the Patriot Act without any additional research? This…
YOU MIGHT THINK with more electoral votes than Wisconsin, Iowa, or Missouri, and with local polls showing the president narrowly trailing his Democratic opponent, that New Jersey would by now have played host to both George W. Bush and John Kerry. In fact, neither man has stumped there, or even…
Copenhagen
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Books in Brief
MORE THAN A DECADE after the end of the Cold War, foreign affairs are once again front and center of American politics, and for the first time in perhaps five elections, since the face-off between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980, Americans must choose between two distinct approaches to U.S.…
Double Lives
Sort of Fake, But Sort of Accurate
SIX MONTHS AGO, in the Kingdom of Bahrain, an interesting television experiment, broadcast throughout the Middle East, came and went without much fanfare. Reality TV, in the form of Big Brother Middle East, made its debut, was embraced by viewers, then in just over a week was shown the door by a…
BOTH MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES have their own pet rationalizations for defeat at the polls. When Republicans lose, they invariably complain that the system is rigged against them. Defeat is blamed on corrupt city-machine politics, special-interest money, gerrymandered districts, a changing…
READ A NEWSPAPER, watch television, or listen to the radio this fall, and the story from Iraq is the violence sweeping the country. Insurgents have stepped up their attacks, you'll hear. More and more U.S. service members are being killed and wounded every month. The international media is fleeing,…
IT REMAINS TRUE that people beset by an unhealthy thirst for politics tend to see politics everywhere. This monomania was most recently on display with the left's embrace of Roland Emmerich's fine disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow because they thought it was an assault on George W. Bush.
WHAT DO YOU want to achieve in a presidential debate? You want to hammer home your campaign themes. You want to put your opponent on the defensive. You want to sell yourself personally. And you want to avoid a gaffe or a damaging sound bite. Bush did all four in Wednesday night's third and final…
Round 1: Will we ever be as safe and secure as we used to be?
IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE how Bob Schieffer could have been more pro-Kerry in last night's debate--short of actually wearing a Kerry-Edwards button.
YESTERDAY, German defense minister Peter Struck told interviewers from the Financial Times that Germany had not ruled out sending troops to Iraq. "At present I rule out the deployment of German troops in Iraq. In general, however, there is no one who can predict developments in Iraq in such a way…
IN THE SECOND DEBATE, an issue of obvious importance finally came up, in a question put to President Bush: "If there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who do you choose and why?" The question was smartly asked, not least because it began…
FARM POLICY usually peaks as an issue in the presidential campaign a year before the election, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. But with Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio among the most fiercely contested of the battleground states, this year could be an exception.
AT THE DEBATE last Friday night, audience member Sarah Degenhart asked John Kerry, "Suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder, and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion. What would you say to that person?"
WHOEVER SAID PLAYING VIDEO GAMES was a non-educational, mind-numbing activity meant to divert you from more worthwhile pursuits such as, say, keeping up with current events? Not Kuma Reality Games, a New York City software company, whose website allows you to download and participate in…
IS IT AN EARTHQUAKE or simply a shock, asked Cole Porter almost 70 years ago. That question, or one almost like it, is puzzling economists today, as they try to decide whether the U.S. economy has merely hit a speed bump in the road to continued recovery, or driven into a ditch. The nervous types…
(1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .
JOHN KERRY is famously hard to pin down; you can reach out to grasp his opinion only to find that it has flitted away like a bashful butterfly, or a goldfish you are trying to catch with your bare hands. But nowadays his pronouncements and campaign ads are easy to read. They suggest that Iraq is…
OCTOBER 9 will be a big day for the war on terror. In Afghanistan, voters will choose a president. Across the globe, Australians will decide the fate of Prime Minister John Howard. A smooth Afghan election is crucial. But the result Down Under is also important: It may determine whether the United…
MARTIN HASKELL, George Tiller, and Warren Hern have several things in common. All three are abortionists who specialize in late abortions. Haskell's name is closely linked with the partial-birth abortion method. Tiller and Hern may be the only two abortionists in the United States who openly…
True Lies
HERE'S WHY President Bush survives the gauntlet of three nationally televised debates: the Kerry contradiction. John Kerry is glib and knowledgeable and smart enough in his attacks on Bush to stop short of being overbearing and abrasive. But the dominant issue in the campaign is Iraq, and that's…
Brighton
Wisconsin Sports Report
IT IS A SIGHT to make L'Enfant's jaw drop: a great pile of buff limestone, like a mesa promontory somewhere in the desert. The walls undulate as the mass tapers towards the east--with large, glazed cavities and overhangs on one side, a main entrance overhang facing the Capitol, and a low, stepped…
FACED WITH the series of beheadings and other grisly crimes committed in Iraq by the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Westerners may wonder why this gang should call itself "Monotheism and Jihad." The group's Arabic name, Tawhid wa'al-Jihad, is often misleadingly translated "Unity and Jihad,"…
MY MOTHER recently told me that my apartment looks like a nineteenth-century brothel. The dark red of the walls, she said, makes her think of Belle Watling's house of ill repute.
Abilene, TX
JOHN EDWARDS believes that words matter. Especially for those who would lead the nation during a time of war. He's right.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN IRAQ? The U.S. presidential election will likely be won or lost over the war and its aftermath. If the United States fails in Iraq--if it is driven out by violence, and the country descends into internecine strife--then former ambassador (and current Kerry adviser) Richard…
Just Enough Liebling
WHEN DEMOCRATS dream of the perfect presidential campaign, they dream of the war room--the magic rapid-response operation that with its targeted rage and its lethal objections turns every Republican attack back on the attackers. If only Democrats were quicker, they say; if only they were nastier;…
IF YOU HAD TO PICK a single reason why the Democratic party is weaker at all levels than at any time in the last 50 years, it is the transformation of moral-values issues into an overwhelming Republican asset.
Books in Brief
Round 1: Kerry: Are you too wishy-washy?
ON NOVEMBER 3, we may look back at October 7 as a very good day--even a turning point--for the Bush campaign. This was the day that news reports, one after another, reminded us that we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Most of the accounts I saw included side-by-side…
THE INFAMOUS SNOBS of the Swedish Academy, brooding in the land of military cowardice, interminable winter, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world, have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic: The 2004 prize has…
ONE OF THE HARDER THINGS to do in Washington is to speak the truth about Saudi Arabia. So give the State Department credit for declaring that in the desert kingdom there is no freedom of religion.
IN THE LAST FOUR presidential elections Republican candidates have wasted little time and money campaigning for Maryland's 10 electoral votes. The state hasn't gone in the Republican column since George H.W. Bush's 1988 landslide. Al Gore carried Maryland by 17 points in 2000.
WITH THE RELEASE of the Duelfer report on Iraq's weapons programs, now is a good time to review what role the international inspections had in verifying Iraq's disarmament--a role Senator Kerry and others appear to have confusion about. The inspection regime established by the U.N. Security Council…
ISRAELIS RECENTLY OBSERVED the 31st anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. This anniversary is made much of, because Israel's near defeat revealed some basic flaws in its system of governance. The debates about these flaws are still going on, gradually transforming Israeli society in profound and…
FOLLOWING UP on his interview with the Bushes, Dr. Phil today rolled the film on his interview with John Kerry and Teresa Heinz. One could hear the congestion in the senator's voice as he was apparently suffering from a cold during the taping. Dr. Phil was again accompanied by his wife Robin, who…
IF A GAFFE falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, is it still a gaffe?
WALTER PINCUS, the veteran Washington Post reporter, is by no means an ally of George W. Bush. In fact, it's safe to say that, over the last few years, in his reportage on intelligence issues and in public appearances, he's done more than any other national security reporter to scrutinize the Bush…
WAS REMOVING Saddam Hussein from power a "diversion" from the war on terror, as Senator John Kerry now claims? Or was taking action against the Iraqi regime necessary in a post-September 11 world, as President Bush believes?
Cleveland
IF IT'S POSSIBLE for a vice presidential debate to matter, last night's duel between Dick Cheney and John Edwards did. Why? Because Vice President Cheney did two things that might help President Bush. He attacked Bush's presidential opponent John Kerry effectively on the war on terrorism and…
FIRST things first:
"MR. VICE PRESIDENT, we were attacked but we weren't attacked by Saddam Hussein."
THE KERRY CAMPAIGN continued its attempt to dissociate the Iraq war from the broader war on terror on Monday. In a conference call with reporters, senior Kerry advisers Joe Lockhart and Susan Rice previewed the questions John Edwards will ask Dick Cheney during the debate this evening. Expect the…
IS IRAQ part of the "global war on terror" or a diversion from it? Is the war over once we capture Osama bin Laden--or kill him--or will it continue after? Should America side with the reactionaries or the revolutionaries?
HURRICANES hit America's offshore oil rigs, temporarily closing down about 10 percent of the nation's oil production. Insurgents hit Iraq's oil facilities. Rebels led by Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari hit Nigerian oil fields. Terrorists hit foreign oil workers in Saudi Arabia. Putin hits Yukos. All…
AS JOHN KERRY stepped down from his campaign plane at Youngstown airport in Ohio en route to a rally Sunday, an enterprising reporter shouted out an excellent question.
EUROPEAN PUBLICS, fed by their media a steady diet of horror stories from Iraq and Michael Moore-style caricatures of the Bush administration's criminality, could be forgiven for being mystified and dismayed by the course of the U.S. presidential election.
RIGHT NOW, Bill Burkett of Baird, Texas, happens to be the most notorious former anonymous news source in America, which, I'll grant you, is a distinction no one would ever aspire to. On the other hand, no news organization would want to find itself where CBS News is at the present moment, thanks…
What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought…
WE REALLY DON'T KNOW what a President John Kerry would do about Iraq. His flip-flops about the war, his inconsistencies, the ambiguity of his current position (win or withdraw?)--all of these mean we can only guess about a Kerry presidency. He would probably be inclined to get out of Iraq as soon…
SELDOM HAS THE COURSE of European history been changed by a non-politician's throwaway remark in a German-language newspaper on a Wednesday in the dead of the summer doldrums. But on July 28, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the conservative Hamburg-based daily Die Welt that Europe would be…
Earth Tones Out, Jewel Tones In
Waffle Watching
EVERY MAN with presidential aspirations has a black sheep in the family. Heck, George W. Bush has been the black sheep in his family from time to time. John Kerry is no exception. After decades of living abroad--most recently in Indonesia--Diana Kerry, John's younger sister, has returned to the…
THE QUESTION no longer is whether Democrats can win back the Senate, now controlled 51-49 by Republicans. The prospect of a Democratic takeover was always remote and has recently become more so. The question now is how much can President Bush, should he defeat John Kerry by 5 percentage points or…
SUPPOSE you were doing a little research into the history of Supreme Court nominations, and you learned from one book that Grover Cleveland "bested Benjamin Harrison by almost 100,000 votes in the election of 1888, but the vagaries of the electoral college caused him to lose the election" (p. 130).
LISTEN TO DNC and Kerry campaign officials talk about the CBS memo scandal, and you might start to think that they protest too much. Just read the email Howard Wolfson sent to the press corps the other day. Wolfson is a political consultant, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, and a senior…
Books in Brief
PUNDITS normally chew over the world's great ills--war, famine, terrorism, Michael Moore, and the like. But sometimes a smaller matter sticks in the craw and demands attention. This is such a time. The actions of petty-minded government bureaucrats have left a bad taste in my mouth. Literally.
THERE MUST BE A NAME for people like me, people who are caught in a terrible, interminable inbetween. We were too young to see the original Star Wars trilogy when it first came out in movie theaters, but not quite old enough to escape its spell. I didn't exist when Star Wars opened in 1977, nor…
FOR JOHN KERRY, the first presidential debate was an opportunity. He seized it and revived his flagging candidacy. For President Bush, the debate was a burden. He struggled through it, acting as if he had better things to do. But the second debate this Friday in St. Louis will find Bush in a…
TALKING TO DEMOCRATS prior to last night, what you heard were complaints about how bad John Kerry was as a presidential candidate. The good news for Kerry is that on the basis of his solid performance in the first nationally televised debate with President Bush, the griping among Democrats is…
I JUST WATCHED MSNBC score the debate unanimously for Kerry. Andrea Mitchell pointed out how much the reaction shots hurt Bush--making him look impatient and irritable. Joe Scarborough reported that Bush said, "this is hard work" 11 times. Jon Meacham of Newsweek described Bush's performance as…
HOW DID Bush and Kerry do tonight? A mixed bag for both. Let's look at the scorecard.