Aristotle’s school of philosophy was called peripatetic. He and
his students would discuss philosophy while walking — the motion
of walking, Aristotle noticed, stimulates the motion of mind. Even
today people weighted down with problems often say, “I’m going to
take a walk to clear my mind.”
As Friday’s walk-around debate showed, George Bush is a
peripatetic president. Walking around stimulates in him more
expansive thought. The words came more quickly, the concepts more
clearly as his old confident swagger returned.
Kerry’s rigidity lends itself to a debate behind a lectern. But
in a town hall setting his tendency toward stuffed-shirt posturing
becomes obvious. Bush’s more active personality gets bottled up
behind a lectern but bubbles up when he is on the move.
Bush replaced his scowl with a look of bemusement as Kerry
recycled lines from the last debate. He replaced his unwillingness
to appear at a debate with a good-humored engagement of one. He
even looked like he was enjoying the debate, winking several times
at members of the audience, as if to say: “You and I both know that
Kerry is blowing smoke, but why get mad about it?”
Kerry was the whiny and defensive debater this time. He was
competent enough in the debate but his stunted range of thought,
emotion, and conviction always leaves his presentations with an air
of drabness. Kerry, despite his practiced smiles and wooden nodding
to audience members (who had the good sense to ask their questions
unostentatiously for the most part), just wasn’t charming and came
across as a senatorial stiff. His effective performance at the last
debate probably represents the peak of his campaign and the descent
has begun.
Kerry’s lawyerliness, while it makes him seem competent, works
against clarity, whereas Bush’s access to common sense and honest
emotion occasionally yields a crystallizing line, such as, “He is
going to tax everyone here.”
Kerry wanted the debate to focus on Bush’s record. But Bush had
the discipline in this debate to focus attention on Kerry’s Senate
record. Bush returned to Kerry’s liberal votes time and again, thus
reminding Americans that Kerry’s record is far more revealing about
his aims for America than his rhetoric. Don’t listen to his
rhetoric, look at his record. Kerry, proud to run as an unvarnished
liberal in Massachusetts, wanted nothing to do with liberalism at
Friday’s debate. “I broke with my party,” he said at one point,
suddenly approving of certain Republican policies.
He remained defensive on the war, maintaining the
Saddam-was-a-threat-and-wasn’t-a-threat posture. There was a
revealing mumble near the end of the debate when Kerry quickly said
that if he had been president Saddam Hussein “would not necessarily
be in power.” Not necessarily? So Kerry is now back to saying that
he might have invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam? Kerry is still
not comfortable with the Howard Dean-style position his post-August
handlers urged him to take.
He was consistent to much of the empty sloganeering from the
first debate, even returning to the hot-button word “global” when
calling for a “true global coalition.” Kerry, the globalist to the
core, fails to grasp that he is running for head of the United
States, not the United Nations.
Kerry believes in “global tests” for foreign policy, which
amounts to saying: we can only pursue what everyone agrees to. It
is a lowest-common-denominator policy. He applied the same sort of
lowest-common-denominator test to domestic social policy in
Friday’s debate, telling a pro-life questioner that he has no
choice but to favor abortion because it would be wrong to impose
his private view of abortion on all Americans. Is he serious about
this position? If so, then it means he could never take a moral
position, as somebody, somewhere would disagree with him.
Even as he appallingly used his “Catholicism” and status as a
former altar boy to win political points, he said that his religion
has no relevance in American politics. Got that? Once elected,
Kerry promises to stop talking about the Catholicism he used to get
him elected. The bishops are too spineless to stop this charade,
but surely lay Catholics won’t let Friday night’s outrage pass.
Kerry dishonestly defined the pro-life position as an “article of
faith” so that he could say that it is wrong to impose it on the
faithless. Kerry knows perfectly well that opposition to abortion
isn’t an article of faith, but a conclusion of reason accessible to
anyone with a functioning mind. You don’t need to be Catholic to
oppose abortion. You just need a conscience and Kerry lacks one. He
only uses the rhetoric of freedom of conscience as a way of freeing
himself from any responsibility of acting on his own conscience in
the public square.
Pope John Paul II’s phrase “the culture of life” came up in the
debate. Who invoked it? Not the Catholic, but the Protestant. Bush
said he had trouble “deciphering” Kerry’s answer about Catholicism
and abortion, and promised to defend a “culture of life.”
