PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT via PG
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center>And now on to the entry.
I spent last night on the purple futon with my roommates, biting my nails and fidgeting. We technically do have a TV, which we donāt ever use to watch anything but DVDs. The reception is very snowy and blurry and not too fun to watch, but we were all bound and determined to watch the debate last night. I was a little skeptical; Iād heard about the ridiculously detailed debate rules, because apparently two grown millionaires canāt get it together enough to conduct themselves appropriately in front of gazillions of people watching them. I didnāt know if there would be any significant differences in their words and I suspected that Iād want to start yelling at the TV in a most unladylike fashion. But mostly I was a little iffy on the whole thing for a very dumb reason and that is that I seem to prefer my candidates in print or online than on TV. I canāt stand to watch Bush on the screen, it drives me mad. And Iād pretty much never seen Kerry on TV either. The candidatesā acting abilities donāt matter too much to me and I donāt care what kind of uptinght-white-man-suits they wear. I usually prefer to read what theyāve saidā¦and if the past six or so weeks are any indication, to read what other people say about what they say, ad nauseam. I didnāt think that the debate was going to be that interesting, given that they werenāt allowed to address each other directlyā¦I mean, thatās not really a debate, even, technically speaking, is it?
But somehow I felt I owed it to the too-little too-late Democrats to show my support by sitting between my poor patient roommates and clutching them at various points during the show. I thought it would mean, through some sort of transmogrification process that I may have slept through in my Suspect Physical Phenomena class in college, that the Democratic Party would know that I, Chiara, was watching, and if they didnāt want to be in trouble with me personally, then theyād have to get their act together, in fear of my incoherent rage. Or something.
I had to get my knitting after a couple of minutes so I wouldnāt bruise J or Cās arms with fevered clutching; honestly, I didnāt think I could be so emotional about something like this. I freaked out, yelling āNo!ā and āGOOD QUESTION JIM!ā and āOh, HELL NO, Dubya!ā and āCome on, Kerry, bring it home!ā I was, like lots of people, struck by some of the superficial differences in manner between the two: Kerry seemed pretty low-key and put together, although I thought he did wander a bit in some questions. Bush seemed uncertain and unoriginal; Iād heard that he sticks to his talking points come what may and that certainly seemed to be the case; often he didnāt even answer the questions. And he did look ridiculous when he asked for more time and then didnāt have anything to say.
I think Kerryās main mistake (beside saying that Treblinka is in Russia) was that he didnāt go after some very obvious points that Bush just gave to him. He didnāt press him on Halliburton, he didnāt get anything in about how it certainly must be hard to comfort a war widow when youāre the one that sent her husband to Iraq, he didnāt mention that being a casualty in Iraq is way harder than seeing it on TV, and on and on. I was glad to see that he did make the point that it wasnāt, actually, Iraq who attacked the Towers, though I think he ought to have jumped on Bush’s mixing up Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein because man, that’s a GIFT. I liked his emphasis on global coalition-building. Maybe he was trying to be polite or to abide by the debate rules but thereās a part of me that thinks thereās too much at stake to worry about being polite and sticking to 32 pages of rules or whatever.
I’m not all that liberal, but I donāt think Kerry is much of a liberal eitherā¦certainly not socially or perhaps not even fiscally, although I donāt know enough about him to really be sure. I didnāt vote for him in the primaries because I thought his vaunted āelectabilityā meant that he was essentially identical to Bush, and I certainly hadnāt had much of a sense of who he is before now. I didnāt much care, either, being firmly in the Anybody But Bush camp, frankly, stupid as it is. The flip side to the ABB is just as ridiculous to me, for the record: what, people are going to vote for someone just because heās already President and because the Democrats canāt get it up enough to run someone a little more passionate? How does that help anyone?
But to my surprise, Kerry kind of pulled it together for me last night, and maybe it really was because of this new-fangled television thing. I feel like I got a better sense of who he is, which I found oddly comforting, given as how I do feel excluded from the whole Democrat thing. I donāt think Kerry is the perfect candidate, but weāre not going to get the perfect candidate this time (if at all) and Iām feeling a little better about voting for Anybody. I wasnāt expecting that at all. Iām not ready to call the race yet, because if we know anything we know that the Republicans are willing to go to some pretty extreme lengths , but I am willing to concede that I think that if Kerry gets in heāll do a good jobā¦much better than Bush, at any rate. This is the first time since the race began, too, that Iāve felt any optimism about the whole thingā¦itās about time.
Okay, now go register to vote!