October 06, 2004, 9:29 a.m.
Cheney the Veep Man
If I inhale some asbestos, Edwards is my guy.

My favorite part of the debate last night was when Edwards mentioned how he "agreed with John Kerry on Thursday night." You gotta love it that even John Edwards has to nail down the exact time and place that John Kerry said something he agreed with. You can't just say "I agree with John Kerry." That's like saying the globule in the lava lamp is oval. Wait a minute and that will seem ridiculous. So you've got to nail it down.

In fact, Edwards kept saying "the American people saw John Kerry Thursday night" over and over again. I'm sure his strategy was to feed off the hype of Kerry's modest victory that has been spun by the media into a debate between Cicero and Barney the Dinosaur. But for me, all I could think was that Edwards was just so relieved that the roulette wheel that is John Kerry's conviction-o-meter had stopped, albeit briefly, on a spot the American people didn't loathe.

No seriously — imagine that you struck up a conversation with a relatively informed person who said, "I agree with John Kerry about the war on terror." What, exactly do you think that person would mean?

Would he be trying to communicate that we should stay the course? That we blundered going to war in the first place? That we were right to go to war but handled it wrong since we were there? That it was a good cause? A grand diversion? We should bug out? Finish the job? Or simply that he doesn't know anything about the war except that George Bush is always wrong?

This it seems to me is the crux of the problem with John Kerry. There's a very old tradition in the Democratic party, going back at least to FDR, of presidents telling various constituents and factions what they want to hear. Roosevelt was a master of it. One group would come in pleading for X. Another group would come in begging for not X. And each would come out of the room with the impression that the president agreed with him. But this was all done behind closed doors.

John Kerry, meanwhile, has been saying mutually contradictory things in public since he's been running for president. Here's a tip for Kerry: If you're going to be a vacillating, sausage-spined, chameleon, don't do it with the cameras on. This gets to the core of the most important issue last night, Kerry's flip flops. The Kerry camp responds that Bush has changed his position on several issues over the last few years. They're right. But changing your position is very, very different than changing it from A to B and then back to A. Indeed, Kerry says Bush is ideologically rigid and unwilling to change his mind — except when he is changing his mind. Meanwhile Kerry's meanderings don't reflect judgment and reflection; they show that he's willing to take any seemingly beneficial position, without reflection. Everyone changes his mind. The question is "Why?" For Kerry/Edwards the reason was that Howard Dean was ruining their chances to live in the White House. Cheney scored that point and Edwards didn't un-score it.

Remember the old saw that if someone says "it's not about the money" it's about the money? Well, when John Edwards consistently whines "John Kerry has been completely consistent" you know that even Edwards understands that John Kerry hasn't been. If someone keeps insisting "I don't think I'm going bald!" you can be sure there's some Rogaine in his medicine cabinet.

Too many people have already "fisked" or dissected the debate in one place or another — including most of NRO's stable in The Corner last night. But let me just say why Cheney won in broad brushstrokes. On substance Cheney was an incontrovertible winner on foreign policy. In the first half, Edwards was preening that he could remember the name of the pizza joint that got blown up in Israel. Anybody who's read foreign-policy theorists from Grotius to Kissinger fully knows that this is the stuff of statesmanship. Meanwhile, Cheney not only scored stronger and better points about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, he managed to do it while simultaneously underscoring the Breck Guy's weakness and Kerry's inconstancy.

Cheney attacked Edwards for not showing up for his job, for not having a serious record, and for being a political weathervane. Edwards responded by attacking Cheney's record, which included voting against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and — shudder — meals-on-wheels. That's all fine. But Edwards's attack reinforced the image that Cheney is a man of conviction willing to buck politics for principle (He voted against meals on wheels!). Edwards meanwhile had no defense on the charge that he's a show pony, not a workhorse.

On domestic policy, which came in the second half, Edwards won marginally, but at that point it was clear that we were watching Serious Guy and his amusing sidekick.

Some seem to think Edwards's energy and toothy grin won the show. Nonsense. First of all, people have been voting for presidents with nasty or grumpy VPs for centuries. The job of the vice president isn't to be popular, it's to make the opposing ticket unpopular. No one went into this debate expecting Dick Cheney to be anything other than Dick Cheney. But Edwards came in more undefined. And the definition he offered wasn't that helpful. He reminded people that Kerry and Edwards are fairly desperate politicians and he particularly underscored that he's a good trial lawyer. Cheney underscored that he's a good chief of staff in the war to obliterate our enemies. That's an impression the Bush ticket needed a lot more than anything Edwards had on offer. If I inhale some asbestos, Edwards is my guy. If I want someone to "stand up" democratic regimes in the Middle East and obliterate jihadist terrorist groups, I'll go with Cheney.