The only people who pay attention to the vice presidential debates the first time they're broadcast typically fall into two groups: political pundits and the candidates' mothers.
Most people's exposure to the vice presidential debates will be in those short sound bytes run in the few days before it gets bumped off the news cycle. Vice presidential debates - even more than presidential debates - live and die by the zinger.
This fact favors the Bush camp, which answers questions to complex problems with simple, easy to understand, wrong answers. Yet, Cheney still didn't do well.
The vice president sounded a bit irrational at times. Saying that Americans didn't make up 90 percent of the casualties because that number didn't include Iraqi security forces reveals the high casualty rate of the Iraqi security forces. It's hard to imply that Iraq is better off when security forces there are getting picked off left and right.
Also, by making a "correlation implies causation" argument that terrorist attacks in Israel are down since Saddam was removed from power makes Cheney's claim that there was a link between Iraq and Al Queda look all the more ridiculous.
He might as well connect the links between Saddam and the UFOs, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the Church of the SubGenius.
Moderator Gwen Ifill asked a question about AIDS. It was clear neither candidate was prepared to answer. Cheney wasted his two minutes talking about the economic problems caused by AIDS with all the warmth and empathy of a thorazine-doped Vulcan. Edwards also did poorly at first, but eventually linked it to the Democrats' health-care plan.
Cheney, in response, tried to paint Edwards as an ambulance-chaser, but that tactic fumbled because most of the general hatred for lawyers is really a hatred for corporate lawyers. It also fumbled because Edwards instead offered a specific, alternative plan that uses a review system to pre-screen cases for merit - instead of Cheney's plan to penalize deep-pocket pickers and justifiably wronged alike with judgement caps.
Besides, hating lawyers is outdated - the bogeyman of the 21st century is the fat-cat, downsizing CEO. Edwards took advantage of that opportunity to shred Cheney like an Enron memo on his ties to Halliburton.
No one in the Bush camp has been heavier handed with trying to paint the opposition with fear, uncertainty and doubt than Dick Cheney.
Last night, he did not disappoint, Cheney claimed early on in the debate that he never connected Iraq and Sept. 11, 2001, but then later talks about al-Zarqawi, once again trying to link Saddam and Al-Qaida.
He even said, in his closing statement "Now we find ourselves in the midst of a conflict unlike any we've ever known, faced with the possibility that terrorists could smuggle a deadly biological agent or a nuclear weapon into the middle of one of our own cities. That threat - and the presidential leadership needed to deal with it - is placing a special responsibility on all of you who will decide on Nov. 2 who will be our commander in chief."
But the idea that terrorists would attack the U.S. if the Democrats are elected seems less plausible after the first presidential debate. No politician, with the possible exception of Kinky Friedman, has ever acted with the infallibility of Divine wisdom.
So, at last Friday's debate, Bush needed to come up with a plausible reason their policies would work, rather than asserting they would and asking the populace for faith in Bush/Cheney.
Bush couldn't provide it last Friday, Cheney didn't provide it last night.
Boyko is a journalism graduate student.
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