Last night I watched the presidential debate on TV. Kerry did
pretty well. He seemed fairly collected, and, despite weird
pre-reports, did not sweat excessively. (It’s ridiculous that this
was even a topic of conversation.) In any case it was pretty clear
that he’d prepared pretty well, he handled the tough questions (the 87
billion dollar question) without cracking. It was what I would
expect, pretty much… I’ve read that you can’t really win the debates
so much as you can lose them, and Kerry definitely didn’t do that.

Bush on the other hand seemed rather petulant. There was one
moment where he spoke directly to the camera very powerfully, and I
thought that he had a real chance to nail this debate. But then he
performed poorly the whole second half, just repeating himself and
looking and acting as if he’d really rather be somewhere else. It was
sort of sad to hear him mention Poland’s contributions to the war a
couple of times. I kept thinking he would roll out his plan to woo
Panama back.