Oct 09 2004
A True Sign of my Greatness
Never let it be said that I don’t post followups when I’m wrong. I wholly admit that this time, I was wrong about the debates.
Yesterday I made the following prediction:
And, just for shits and giggles some thoughts beforehand:
a: Does anyone believe that there really are people out there who, less than thirty days out of the election, have not made up their mind?
b: Does anyone really believe that the questions won’t be mostly liberal attacks on Bush or criticisms of Bush
c: Like last time Kerry’s voting record will not be mentioned at all while his Vietnam service of four whole months will be mentioned repeatedly.
d: That Gibson will be about as far and impartial as Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken?
e: That if Bush wins, we’ll hear about last week and Kerry winning / or next week and how he isn’t out of the woods yet, and if Kerry wins we’ll hear about the trouble Bush is in for next week, or how that was two impressive performances?
A. I still think people have their mind made up and the idea that anyone is undecided 27 days out is ludicrous to me, so this stands.
b. They weren’t, there were some pointed questions aimed at both sides. Very good ones, I might add. Granted some might have been more appropriate for a twenty-plus year senator than a 4 year President, but they were all pretty good and Gibson picked a great range of questions.
c. His voting record still wasn’t mentioned except by the President, but I guess in the reality of the situation, normal people don’t care about voting records. People who read this site and who follow the issues do, but we’re not the average citizen. We are way more politically informed than anyone else, and what matters to us probably doesn’t matter to the rest of the country. If it did, we could predict elections.
d. Gibson was very fair, and his collection of questions was outstanding. No one got off easy last night.
e. Remains to be seen, but I think in the post coverage that so far, everything is spun off as either Kerry winning or Kerry losing. In other words, Bush can’t win, regardless of whether he does or not. Still remains to be seen, though, and since the papers on the weekend are mostly fluff and bullshit we won’t really know until next week, and the final debate is Wednesday so we’ll be hearing about that debate by the time the reaction to this one starts to be known. In other words, we may never know.
There.
Never let it be said I don’t followup when the followup hurts me. I have no problem admitting I was wrong, and in this case, I admit I was wrong.
October 9th, 2004 at 2:06 pm
like you, i thought the questions were very good.
the only one that sounded “lefty” was the “name three mistakes that you’ve made since you became president”.
Otherwise, it was a very good debate.
I wish the next debate was in this type of setting.
October 9th, 2004 at 2:59 pm
“A. I still think people have their mind made up and the idea that anyone is undecided 27 days out is ludicrous to me, so this stands”.
You would think so, and so would I. But we had an election up here just a couple of months ago. Heading into it, the polls were absolutely unanimous…a Conservative Government. The only questions was majority or minority.
To everyone’s astonishment, approximately 8% of the electorate changed their minds when they walked into the voting booth, and we ended up with a Liberal minority.
Still looks pretty volatile down there from this perspective. Let’s see whether the boomer vote breaks towards Bruce Springsteen or Britney Spears.