Short Commentary on the VP Debate
First of all, kudos to both Cheney and Edwards for a great debate. Rather than one 'floundering', they both had their facts/opinions and expressed them very clearly. I have to say as debates go, this one was much better than the presidential debate last week.
Next, I have to address the subpar moderator. She was doing fine at first, but then I noticed she *tended* to give Cheney the last word. Granted, if she had done this to Edwards, it would've been equally wrong/unfair. She also made a comment about not giving Edwards enough time to address Israel, although he did talk about it enough. SHE CAN'T MAKE COMMENTS!! Unfortunately she let her bias slip into her moderating. It wasn't too bad, but she definitely wasn't impartial. For example, she rarely asked Edwards if he wanted an opportunity to respond to Cheney's 90-second rebuttals, but she almost always asked Cheney if he wanted to rebut Edwards' 90-second rebuttals. And often, Cheney refused them anyway. She was also much more obtrusive than Lehrer was last week. He barely uttered a word aside from questions.
Moving on, you can also tell who is running the country: Cheney. It started off with a lot of "you did this", "well you did this", but it tapered off as the debate went on. Another interesting thing to note was Edwards' endoresement of Kerry, but Cheney never endorsed Bush by name. Rather, he just talked about the issues as his views, not the president's view. In his credit, this is smart. Bush himself, after all, has no clue whats going on, and the first debate proved that.
Then there was Cheney's "you're lying" phase. This was mostly during the Iraq questions, where Edwards made similar points that Kerry made. However, Cheney kept shooting them down as false. So I know that because he kept saying Edwards was wrong, there must be some right in there.
The most interesting part was the gay marriage question. It was the first and I believe one of very few times Cheney actually mentioned 'the president'. He said 'the president feels...etc.' regarding gay marriage. We know of course that he wants an amendment to the Constitution, basically banning it. Edwards responded by saying "I believe marriage is between a man and woman, but who are we to say they can't have benefits". Then Edwards got a smiliar question, and he said good words about Cheney's wife and gay daughter, and again how he agrees with Cheney about marriage being between a man and woman [although I don't agree it should be limited to heterosexual relationships!!!], but then went back again to saying how they shouldnt' be denied rights/benefits. When asked to a rebuttal, Cheney simply thanked Edwards for the kind words and offered no response. What was interesting was that he choose that topic to say 'the president felt this way and that way about gay marriage', while the rest of the debate has been 'me' or 'we'. I mean, he has a gay daughter, he can't say he supports the ban!!! So, in Cheney's defense, wise choice of words. But sneaky.... I can't help wondering what his daughter thinks of him though?
Overall a great debate!
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Off the bat it's 78% to Edwards, but I'm sure it will level out to roughly 50/50 like the last poll.
In all honesty though, they both did really well.