i went to new york yesterday for a hearing. on the way home on the train i sat next to a professor of public speaking and rhetoric from a college in the NYC area. as one would expect from a speaking and rhetoric prof, she was very chatty so we talked most of the trip between penn station and 30th street station.
at one point, she asked me what i thought about the presidential debates from the night before. i told her i thought the president did terribly, he seemed to be bumbling his way through, look uncomfortable the whole time and appeared to be totally unaccustomed to anyone ever questioning his judgment to his face [that's what you get when a president is surrounded by sycophant for 4 years, does not give press conferences or interviews except where the journalist have submitted their questions in advance, and holds rallies where people have to sign loyalty oaths to attend]
anyway, as i talked about my impressions i could tell from the look on this woman's face that she was a bush supporter. so i asked her, "you're the speech prof, how do you think bush and kerry did?" she acknowledged that bush stylistically was not a good debater--he leaned on the podium, making him look uncomfortable, and kept smirking when kerry spoke which was neither convincing nor presidential.
she ultimately acknowledged that bush stylistically lost the debate, "but kerry got a lot of facts wrong" she added. i asked for examples and she said that kerry was wrong when he said osama bin laden was in afghanistan when everything she's read said he was in pakistan. i disagrees that it was an error. we don't know where OBL is, he could be in afghanistan or he could be in pakistan. he's probably on the border between the two countries. so that hardly counts as a factual error--especially when the president overstated the number of iraqi troops who have been trained by repeatedly claiming 100,000 had been trained and brags that 10.5 million afghans have been registered to vote when there are only 9 million eligible voters (see e.g.). besides kerry's point during the debates was more that OBL was not in iraq, which is undoubtedly true.
we then talked about how kerry voted for the war in iraq. and i told her my theory about that vote. kerry voted against the gulf war resolution in 1990. i believe that vote reflected his conscience. however, the war turned out to be popular and kerry took some political damage over it later when he was running for reelection. when the iraq war resolution was introduced, kerry was probably already thinking about running for president, at the very least he was probably running for some future political office. i think he voted for the iraq war resolution out of pure political expediency. he simply thought he needed to if he were going to be a credible candidate in the future. i do not believe it reflected his conscience, although it certainly reflected his character in that he would not vote his conscience on such an important matter.
i will never know if my theory is correct. kerry will never tell that story because it makes him look like a political opportunism rather than a man with principles. but the reason i favor kerry over bush on the iraq issue is that while kerry may have voted to give bush the power to go to war, i do not think kerry would have proposed war with iraq if he were the one in the oval office. i already know what bush would do under those circumstances, so kerry is simply the better choice.
after my long convoluted speech about iraq and kerry, my seat-mate unsurprisingly changed the subject, and we spent much of the rest of the ride talking about other things. as the train pulled into philadelphia she asked, out of the blue: "so you're voting for kerry?" "yeah," i replied. "i probably will too," she said, almost sounding embarrassed, as i got off the train.
