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I saw the debate last night but haven’t read any blogosphere reaction. I did watch the PBS and MSNBC post mortems, and talked a bit about it with my roommate (who hasn’t watched the campaign terribly closely, though he’s pretty well-informed as a regular Daily Show/Colbert Report watcher).

• What was with McCain standing up and wandering around all the time while Obama spoke? There was an enormous contrast between the demeanor of the two while the other party was speaking — Obama was completely relaxed and attentive to what McCain had to say. But while Obama spoke, McCain wandered around, and hardly ever sat down and just listened. I couldn’t help but think that McCain looked like one of the crazy old men you might see wandering about aimlessly in the background at a nursing home. I’m pretty sure I know why he didn’t sit down — he didn’t want to look shorter than Obama — but the end result was that he looked kinda crazy.
• Obama didn’t take notes even once, so far as I noticed, yet he was completely in command of what he wanted to say and never missed an opportunity to respond to what McCain had said. Obama didn’t *need* notes, yet McCain appeared to.
• I’m not sure if McCain lied less often or if I’m just getting used to, but I didn’t shout at the TV as often as I have in the first two debates.
• Could Brokaw’s plan for 1-minute discussion have been any worse? He was asking substantive followups that required more than 1 minute between the candidates (or even 1 minute each), and if they went over, it was Brokaw’s own damned fault for asking what amounted to followup questions that simply required more time than he allowed them. It seemed rather churlish of him to ask such questions and then refuse them the time it took to answer — very seldom did either candidate filibuster in response to Brokaw’s followup questions.
• Why in the hell would anyone think that Warren Buffet would want to be Secretary of the Treasury?

Otherwise, an uneventful debate. Obama looked more and more presidential and McCain looked more and more out of touch, just repeating the same old stuff.

My debate reactions follow.

• John McCain has sacrificed one of his own party’s best hopes by pulling Palin into the VP nomination about 3-5 years before she’s actually prepared. She did a reasonably decent job in the debates. In fact, put her in the Republican primary debates and she would have won, as she was far, far better than most of the tripe that was regurgitated by the candidates in the Republican field. But she’s going to lose this election and she’s going to get the blame (though it’s actually McCain who is to blame — see Post Turtle). Now, I could never vote for someone who supports the policies she is for, but I can recognize a genuine political talent, and a truly winning personality (though some of her tics do grate a bit) — she would have been a huge star on the national scene and a formidable opponent had she been allowed to grow into national policy experience and knowledge.
• Just as I noticed the night of Palin’s speech at the RNC, Republicans sure do like to tell lies.
• Biden was much better than I expected. He looked relaxed, he clearly had the facts at his disposal and wasn’t delivering prepared speeches. That was clear from the relative pacing of the two’s comments — Biden was measured and varied the pace of his remarks, while Palin raced through everything, as though she wanted to make sure she’d get through all the prepared points before time ran out. While she didn’t crack, she was clearly not a seasoned debater on these issues.

It’s pretty clear to me that Biden won simply by relaxing and being himself. Palin certainly may have repaired her growing reputation for incompetence in speaking, but she still wasn’t in the same league as her opponent. In short, Palin exceeds the extremely low expectations, but Biden still wins.

FactCheck.org fancies itself the authoritative, objective, non-partisan fact-checking site on the web, but, in fact, it needs to be fact checked itself in many cases. The worst example is its fact-checking of the first Obama-McCain debate.

Example 1: Diplomatic talks with adversaries of the US

Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran “without preconditions,” but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for “high level” talks with Iran starting at the secretary of state level and said, “I do not believe that we can make conditions.” After the debate the McCain campaign issued a statement quoting Kissinger as saying he didn’t favor presidential talks with Iran.

This is a very mealy-mouthed fact check (and the later detailed analysis doesn’t get any closer to the truth). In fact, there are at least two other very good fact checks of the debate, ThinkProgress’s real-time fact check, and the Washington Post’s next-day effort. The continuing “disagreement” between McCain and Obama over this issue stems from McCain’s change of the terms of the debate. He is mischaracterizing Obama’s original statement, concentrating on the *level* of the talks, whereas Obama is concentrating on whether or not there are preconditions. It is the latter that Obama has consistently criticized the Bush adminstration for using as a way to prevent any diplomatic contact with the US’s foreign adversaries. Kissinger is on record as favoring talks without preconditions at the level of Secretary of State. Obama’s position is clearly that high-level talks are needed without precondition, not that they must be engaged in by the President. In short, none of the three fact checks quite gets this one right, seems to me.

Example 2: The legendary $42K tax increase

Obama denied voting for a bill that called for increased taxes on “people” making as little as $42,000 a year, as McCain accused him of doing. McCain was right, though only for single taxpayers. A married couple would have had to make $83,000 to be affected by the vote, and anyway no such increase is in Obama’s tax plan.

This is so incredibly bad as to be laughable — even the WaPo gets this one right:

John McCain claimed that Obama voted in the Senate to raise taxes on anyone making more than $42,000 a year. This is misleading on several levels. The vote that McCain is talking about was a non-binding resolution on the budget that envisioned letting the Bush tax cuts to expire, as scheduled, in 2011. But these budget resolutions come up every year, and do not represent a vote for higher taxes in future years. In fact, Obama has said that he will continue the Bush tax cuts for middle and low-income taxpayers. He says that he will cut taxes for all but the wealthiest tax-payers.

The detailed analysis is a great example of “burying the lede:”

The resolution actually would not have altered taxes without additional legislation. It called generally for allowing most of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts to expire. McCain is referring to the provision that would have allowed the 25 percent tax bracket to return to 28 percent. The tax plan Obama now proposes, however, would not raise the rate on that tax bracket.

In other words, the legislation that Obama voted for wouldn’t have raised anyone’s taxes, because only *other* legislation could have done that, and secondly, this is not a part of Obama’s tax plan. *That* should have been the fact check conclusion at the top of the article, not buried here in the “analysis” section, where it is not even clearly drawn out to show that McCain’s use of this old canard is simply another example of McCain’s profound dishonesty.

Example 3: McCain’s $700 billion in “foreign aid”

McCain repeated his overstated claim that the U.S. pays $700 billion a year for oil to hostile nations. Imports are running at about $536 billion this year, and a third of it comes from Canada, Mexico and the U.K.

This is a truly egregious example, in that the “fact check” accepts the McCain campaign’s spin, allowing them to compare apples to oranges, and then does nothing but quibble over whether it’s a McIntosh or a Red Delicious being compared to the orange. A real fact check from the WaPo:

When discussuing what ways he would save money in the federal budget, McCain said, “Look, we’re sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much.” This is a line he used in his campaign acceptance speech, but as a matter of context he was not talking about foreign aid. That only amounts to $39 bllion a year, most of which is economic aid. McCain instead is talking about the amount of money that Americans spend on foreign oil, though some experts think that figure is a bit high. It certainly is not part of the federal budget.

And ThinkProgress’s version of the same fact check:

Discussing ways he would save money in the federal budget, McCain said, “Look, we’re sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much.” But as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler points out, McCain is confusing foreign aid with the amount of money that Americans spend on foreign oil. The U.S. spends only $39 bllion a year in foreign aid.

The only justification for FactCheck’org’s acceptance of McCain’s framing of the issue as oil money is to ignore the context within the debate. From the transcript:

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I went to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn’t make sense.

Let me tell you another place to look for some savings. We are currently spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when they have a $79 billion surplus. It seems to me that if we’re going to be strong at home as well as strong abroad, that we have to look at bringing that war to a close./p>

MCCAIN: Look, we are sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much. Some of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.

The issue is clearly *government* expenditures, but McCain is talking about the total that the US economy spends on foreign oil. This is a completely non sequiture, and rather Palin-like in its ADD switch from the topic of discussion to one of his debate-prepped talking points. FactCheck.org accepts McCain’s context switch (and, not suprisingly, McCain uses inaccurate numbers even in his own private context), and ignores the fact that he’s making a really stupid claim that sounds to the casual listener as though the US spends $700 billion in governmental expenditures for foreign aid. This is either profoundly dishonest on McCain’s part, or just sloppy debating. Either way, no fact checker should be led by the nose this easily.

Amusingly enough, the editors of the article seem surprised at the idea that the context was actually different from what they “fact checked,” since they add this parenthetical comment:

(Note: A few of our readers messaged us, after we first noted McCain’s mistake, with the thought that he was referring to foreign aid and not to oil. If so he’s even farther off than we supposed: The entire budget for the State Department and International Programs works out to just $51.3 million.)

Ya think? Geez. There is no question that in the actual context of the debate (i.e., following Obama’s remarks on Federal spending) McCain’s switch of subject away from government spending to the whole country’s expenditures on foreign oil leads to the implication (intended by McCain or not), that he’s talking about government spending on foreign aid.

Pathetic.

Example 4: Percentage who get Obama’s tax cuts

Obama said 95 percent of “the American people” would see a tax cut under his proposal. The actual figure is 81 percent of households.

This is a case of cherry picking Obama’s words. At one point in the debate, what Obama said. From the transcript:

…Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important.

And in his [McCain's] tax plan, you would have CEOs of Fortune 500 companies getting an average of $700,000 in reduced taxes, while leaving 100 million Americans out.

So my attitude is, we’ve got to grow the economy from the bottom up. What I’ve called for is a tax cut for 95 percent of working families, 95 percent.

And that means that the ordinary American out there who’s collecting a paycheck every day, they’ve got a little extra money to be able to buy a computer for their kid, to fill up on this gas that is killing them.

Obama was *very* clear here on who it applied to, not 95% of taxpayers, but 95% of “working families.” It’s no surprise that this “fact check” is not included in the others, since this is just a made-up error in the FactCheck.org version, which bases its “fact check” on another context, in which Obama said this:

My definition — here’s what I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut. And if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime’s worth of tax increase.

Now, to me, the second sentence makes precisely clear what he means, by virtue of citing the cutoff for his tax cuts (i.e., $250K). In the context of the debate, it’s even clearer, since it was the question of “who is rich.” The “fact check” is only true if you ignore the relationship between the two sentences uttered back-to-back by Obama.

Example 5: McCain’s health care “plan”

Obama mischaracterized an aspect of McCain’s health care plan, saying “employers” would be taxed on the value of health benefits provided to workers. Employers wouldn’t, but the workers would. McCain also would grant workers up to a $5,000 tax credit per family to cover health insurance.

This one is close, in that Obama was a bit elliptical in how he worded it (from the transcript):

Just one last point I want to make, since Senator McCain talked about providing a $5,000 health credit. Now, what he doesn’t tell you is that he intends to, for the first time in history, tax health benefits.

So you may end up getting a $5,000 tax credit. Here’s the only problem: Your employer now has to pay taxes on the health care that you’re getting from your employer. And if you end up losing your health care from your employer, you’ve got to go out on the open market and try to buy it.

The fact is, employee withholding will have to go up, which means that an employer’s payments in taxes to the Federal government will go up. But those taxes will be taken out of the employee’s paycheck. The principle behind employee-provided healthcare was that the cost was tax-free, and it allowed the employer to provide non-taxed benefits. If those benefits are taxable, it becomes a good question why the employer should provide them at all, and the assumption among many experts is that employers will simply drop their health plans entirely, leaving the employees to find their own health insurance. So, while it’s technically true that the taxes will be paid with a check from your employer, the employer is just passing through money taken out of the employees’ paychecks.

I’d score this as another of those fact checks that gets the detail right (McIntosh vs. Red Delicious) and misses the main point. You’ll also note that it’s not an issue mentioned on either of the other fact checkers, which tells you something about whether or not it was in need of any comment.

The last really annoying thing about this article is that the summary omits a boatload of the detailed fact checks in the analysis section. Why would that be? Well, perhaps it’s because in the details, it becomes quite clear that most of the factual errors were by McCain — by cherry picking which fact checks to put at the head of the article in summary format, they make it look like there was some kind of parity between the two candidates, with both Obama and McCain saying a few things that were inaccurate. But, once again, here we have the media coddling a Republican for lying by putting the truth beneath the fold: McCain lies a lot and Obama only occasionally shades the truth (and usually because he’s being elliptical, not because he’s misrepresenting basic facts).

The pundits I saw last night on the TV machine (as our beloved Rachel Maddow calls it) all seemed to see the thing as a tie. I didn’t. I thought McCain clearly won.

Why?

In my mind, McCain went into the debate as a crazily unreliable batshit insane guy who is all over the map on everything. But he was completely coherent in all of his foreign policy-related comments, and not just coherent in a Republican sense, but coherent in a reality-based community sense. I disagree with him, but he was clear and was not struggling at all to make his points. He may very well have been heavily prepped, but the prep just made his answers deeper, rather than bubbling to the surface, Palin-like, in a tumble of non sequiturs.

Yes, he told a string of lies about Obama’s record, but that’s what Republicans do these days.

But for me, he regained a level of respectability that he had lost in the past two weeks of flailing over the economic crisis. Whether or not the undecided voters see it that way, I can’t say.

Obama, on the other hand, seemed to me a lot like Kerry. He had the facts and he had coherent answers, but he just wasn’t direct enough in his answers.

And $deity spare us the awful “talk to each other” format. It may have looked really great on The West Wing, but when your debators are not actors delivering pre-scripted lines, it maybe doesn’t work so well.

What I’d like to see is a debate that is fact checked in real time, maybe with a single moderator and a panel of bloggers with computers researching every claim, so they could provide documentation on the lies to the moderator so he/she could call the candidates on them. In this debate, Obama might have been called on 2 or 3 misrepresentations at most, while McCain would have been called on at least a dozen outright lies and myriad other misrepresentations.

Of course, it will never happen.

Dean is done.

It seemed obvious to me that Kerry has grown substantially over the course of the debates — he really does do a much more persuasive job of explaining himself. Edwards was absolutely amazing, in my opinion — he hit several of them right out of the ballpark. He’s the candidate that I can get excited about.

But Dean, well, he just didn’t rise to the occasion. He seemed limp, unexcited about what he was saying. He gave the same answers he’s been giving in debates since December. The only answer of interest was his very first one where he very artfully turned an invitation to beat up on Kerry over special interests into a very strong attack on Bush.

I don’t know if Edwards picks up any support with these kinds of performances. For me, it really does make me optimistic that there is someone running who is inspiring and can grow as a candidate. It does appear to me that he’s stolen a lot from Dean, especially the “I’ll tell you the hard truth” trope, which he used in regard to the question of whether jobs never returning once they’ve gone overseas, and on the question of his portion of personal responsibility for the war due to his vote for it.

Kerry dodged this last rather poorly, in my opinion, in a fashion that made Edwards’ upfront admission refreshing and winning.

Kerry’s got the nomination, I’m sure, and that’s really too bad, given that he’s just not a very good campaigner. But I’m not sure he’s any weaker than Al Gore was (and I was an enthusiastic supporter of Gore). If Edwards becomes his running mate, I truly think it’s a very strong ticket.

But, oh how I regret that Dean flamed out. In retrospect, I think it’s clear he wasn’t all that strong a candidate, though he was saying all the right things. I was never too happy with where he comes down on certain positions (gun control, death penalty), but those differences with my positions seemed to me to enhance his electability, as most voters are well to the right of me on these issues. I hope Dean has a role in the party from here on out.

I hope the Democratic Party has learned its lesson from Dean and his campaign, that timidity and calculation lose you more votes than they win.

I don’t remember which candidate it was in the New Hampshire debate (Dennis Kucinich?) who pointed out that in the discussion of health care, all the candidates were talking about insurance instead of health care itself, as though the two are synonymous. In the South Carolina debate, this became even more obvious — everyone was talking about providing insurance to everyone, and many talked about controlling the cost of prescription drugs. But no one was talking about the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the insurance companies (and their lobbyists), whose lap dog, Lieberman, was right there on stage. Kucinich made the point that a single-payer plan would take the profit making out of the payment system, which is an indirect way of addressing the problem. But he didn’t draw out the conclusion that part of the profits were going to the insurance companies. The candidates were quite ready to jump on the pharmaceutical companies for taking too much profit and call for government price negotiation, but they didn’t take the further step of applying that principle to the insurance companies.

If you’re going to make health care cheaper so that everyone can afford it, you’ve got to do two things: 1. lower costs and, well, 2. lower costs. Talking about extending insurance programs simply doesn’t address the core problem in the system, uneven distribution because of high costs.

I wish one of the candidates would take this up in a much clearer manner than Kucinich or Sharpton have done.

I fully expected the media reports on last night’s Greenville, SC, debate to dwell on the disgraceful performance of Tom Brokaw as moderator. The very first question (and about half of them throughout the debate) included a misrepresentation (Dean didn’t fire Trippi, as Brokaw said). Other candidates who were forced to correct Brokaw on questions of fact and implication included Clark, Kucinich and Sharpton. Fortunately, all of the candidates were up to the challenge (though Brokaw mean-spiritedly held Sharpton to a higher standard than he held himself). But so far, other than Mike Malloy’s program last night, I haven’t heard or read a word about it.

The worst of it: what kind of professional journalist would repeatedly refer to the Islamic world as the “Nation of Islam?”

Again, as in the New Hampshire debate, Kerry got softball questions, mostly. But Dean never got any substantive questions at all. I’m rather upset about Dean’s decision to go negative — that more than anything indicates to me that Dean is done. But it was heartening to see the candidates not buckle under to the assumptions behind the skewed questions coming from Brokaw. It’s still an awfully good and interesting field of candidates. Except for Lieberman, of course. And kudos to Edwards for standing up for gay rights in a manner that provided the Republicans with some sound bites that they’ll definitely use against him — not only did he say the right things, he got the nuance. It’s clear to me that it’s an issue where Edwards was not pulling the points off of notecards, but an issue that is basic enough that he doesn’t really have to think about the answer to the question.

OK, I’ve been thinking about the degree to which the Democratic presidential candidates have shaped their positions in reaction to Dean. I remember thinking quite clearly during the Jan. 4th, 2004 debate that this was so. I Googled on a transcript of the debate and found one at CNN. The rest of this post will be an examination of how the other candidates’ responses reflect the way in which Dean’s positions set the terms of the debate on one subject.

Dean’s Position: The capture of Saddam has not made America safer.

In the very first question, which was about the capture of Saddam, Edwards responded:

Well, the truth is that Saddam’s capture and the trial of Saddam Hussein, which the entire world will be able to see when it takes place, is going to reveal the atrocities that he’s been engaged in and some of the incredible conduct that’s occurred in Iraq during the time of his reign.

The reality of protecting the American people is, there’s a still great deal of work to be done. I mean, the president claims that he’s keeping people safe in this country.

He then went on to outline the ways in which the country is vulnerable because the “homeland” (Sieg, Heil!) is not really being protected. The unspoken meaning of his response was: we are not safer at home simply because Saddam has been capture. Edwards didn’t say it as bluntly as Howard Dean, but that was the gist of his answer to the question.

The question in a slightly reworded form was then put to Carol Moseley-Braun, who didn’t mince words, but said about Saddam’s capture “I’ve always maintained it had nothing to do with — or little to do with keeping the American people safe.” She then went on to outline all the things we should have been doing instead (mostly pursuing Al Quaeda). Moseley-Braun was presenting Dean’s argument for why America is not really safer.

Kerry was next asked a different question, but he took the time to point out that Saddam was “way down the list, with respect to the targets, even on the Pentagon’s own list of targets.” This is not an endorsement of Dean’s assessment of the safety of America, but it goes along with Dean’s main point, that it was the wrong war. And this from someone who voted for it.

A few questions later, Isreal is the subject of inquiry for Lieberman, and, because Howard Dean’s positions were controlling the agenda, Lieberman felt obligated to clearly distance himself from Dean’s position before answering the actual question asked of him:

First, let me say that the capture of — overthrow and then capture of Saddam Hussein has made America safer and made the world safer. It has not ended all of our problems or all the threats to our security, but a president has to deal with more than one threat at a time.

Is it just me, or is that an incredibly weak argument? Like Kerry’s remarks above, it still takes Dean’s basic premise, that Saddam’s capture is minor in the bigger picture, while disavowing the blunt admission that it’s is so minor as to not really change anything in regard to the safety of the US itself. All the candidates agree that Saddam’s capture is not all that important in the larger scheme of things — the only question is whether it is insignificant or has no significance whatsoever.

Later, Dean is given the opportunity to close the circle and bring home the bacon, and he does it, when asked about his position that Saddam could have been captured 6 months earlier than he was:

I believe that, had Saddam been captured earlier, we might have been able to spend more time looking for Osama bin Laden, which is the real problem.

Note Senator Lieberman said that we were safer now that Saddam has been caught; I beg to differ. Since Saddam Hussein has been caught — who’s a dreadful person. I’m delighted to see him behind bars, and I hope he gets what he deserves.

But the fact is, since Saddam Hussein has been caught, we’ve lost 23 additional troops; we now have, for the first time, American fighter jets escorting commercial airliners through American airspace.

What we should have done is spent some of the $160 billion that we have in Iraq and all the effort when we went to go after Saddam, who was never an imminent threat to the United States, what we should have done is followed up and tried to get Osama bin Laden and spent that money and all those lives trying to protect America from terrorism, which is the true enemy of the United States.

It gets better and better — the followup question was “What about something that Senator Lieberman also said, and that was that, if we had followed your ideas toward Saddam Hussein, he’d still be in power?” to which Dean answered:

I actually don’t believe that, because I think, given the time that’s elapsed, we could have done the proper thing, which George Bush’s father did, and put together a coalition to go after somebody who was a regional threat but not a threat to the United States.

Our resources belong in fighting al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has got us in a position where we’re now worried because we’re at level orange. We need a concentrated attack on al Qaeda and on Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein has been a distraction.

Lieberman is offered a rebuttal and produces the biggest howler of the debate, a horrendously mistaken analogy to Hitler and Stalin (too bad Godwin’s Law can’t be invoked to eject candidates from debates):

I want to respond to Howard Dean’s criticism of my statement that we’re safer with Saddam Hussein gone. You know what? We had good faith differences on the war against Saddam. But I don’t know how anybody could say that we’re not safer with a homicidal maniac, a brutal dictator, an enemy of the United States, a supporter of terrorism, a murderer of hundreds of thousands of his own people in prison instead of in power.

And to change the subject as Howard does and to say that we haven’t obliterated all terrorism with Saddam in prison is a little bit like saying somehow that we weren’t safer after the Second World War after we defeated Nazism and Hitler because Stalin and the communists were still in power.

Now if that isn’t awful, I don’t know what is.

The key point here is that all of the candidates dance around the central point of Dean’s position, that the Iraqi war was a distraction from the real task of going after Al Quaeda, the the Bush administration’s priorities were simply wrong, and have not done anything significant to address the real, crucial problem facing the US in regard to safety from attack at home.

On the subject of NAFTA, Dean also had the middle ground, the position that nearly all of his opponents (except Gephardt, Kucinich and Sharpton, so we’re talking about the candidates who remain viable after Iowa). Dean’s position was that free trade as a principle is a good thing, but that free trade without a truly level playing field for all the nations involved is going to put the US at a disadvantage. Dean wants free trade agreements altered to bring up labor standards in the poorer nations to those of the richer nations. Why? No, it’s not to make us more competitive — it’s in order to improve the working environment for the people in the other countries, because that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number.

This is the position that all the non-protectionist candidates were dancing around. And it addresses the key issue of what the protectionist candidates feel is wrong with NAFTA and the WTO.

So, here we have Dean, the so-called liberal, occupying the centrist position.

On the subject of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Dean is again in the center. Even Moseley-Braun, who is pretty reliably liberal, agrees that we can’t just irresponsibly pull out of a nation that would not have been destroyed if we hadn’t unilaterally acted against it. Indeed, Dean’s position is actually more responsible than that of the lawmakers who voted against the $87 billion in funding for the rebuilding of Iraq (the same lawmakers who voted for the war in the first place).

On taxes, Dean has a problem — he calls (like Kucinich) for the rollback of the entire Bush tax cut, including the cuts for the middle class (which were actually there because of Democratic initiatives). His reasoning is not too difficult to understand: looking at the tax code without also evaluating the services the government provides does not give a true picture of the net effect of Bush administration policies on the middle class. Dean argues that when you look at the global picture, Bush’s tax cuts, even the middle class part, have served to vastly increase the overall expenses of middle class taxpayers. Dean’s problem here is that he doesn’t explain it very well — he gets the details but fails to close the deal.

Dean seems to be the only candidate that is looking at the tax cut issue as part of a global issue, of what government can do for the people, and which demographic groups get the most benefit from the government. He would work to restore benefits that the Bush administration has cut to finance its tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s not clear the extent to which the other candidates would do this (though Edwards’ riff on the transfer of the burden of government from capital to labor is basically a restatement of Dean’s core position), but only Dean is talking about it as intimately tied up with the Bush tax policy.

It just seems to me that, over and over again, it’s the Dean positions that animate the discussion and that everyone else’s policies are reactive to his positions, which are almost always squarely in the center of the range of positions staked out. The media pundits rate the horse race and don’t seem to really look at where things stand on the positions, or the degree to which one candidate has energized the entire field.

The Black & Brown debate in Iowa on Sunday evening was the worst ever. I simply couldn’t get through it. The questioners were sub-sub-standard, the questions themselves, far worse. Is the political process served by such amateur-night forums?