Just as an FYI, Bush was “concise.” That’s the start of the spin, it would seem. Other words I would have chosen were “flustered” and “angry” but I guess I’m not a member of the media.

A big issue is that the debate started out very boring and canned at first. So boring, in fact, that my wife fell asleep and then got up to clean the house rather than watch the rest of the debate. However, just about half way through it’s as though Bush ran out of material or something. He started getting flustered and making long pauses. Kerry basically roared in and filled the gap, which is great for Kerry. Unfortunately, I wonder how many people were still watching by that point. So not only are the majority of people going to see this through the media spin but those who managed to watch the debate and left may not have seen Kerry’s upsurge.

Most news outlets seem to be saying “Debate was Kerry’s but polls aren’t showing a enormous margin” or something like that. It’s as though they aren’t allowed to say “Kerry wiped the floor with Bush”. They have to do the “fair and balanced” thing and throw Bush some sort of bone even if he doesn’t really deserve it.

In any case, I think this has to help Kerry to some degree. I feel a little bit more confident about him rather than just disliking Bush but I wonder what the rest of the US thinks?

I watched Fox afterwards as well. It’s amazing how quickly Fox turns it into a meta-story — the story about, say, how much headroom both candidates had. It turns into the story about the debates, rather than the story about the content of what they said. And when Fox does talk about what they said, they misstate what Kerry said. And they criticize him for not laying out his plan on Iraq, even though he had 2 minutes to do so and just pointed people to his website. Bah.

The electoral-vote map isn’t looking so good, at least pre-debate.