By Carly Hawkins

Watching the debates on C-Span last Wednesday, I felt for a moment as though someone had replaced the feed on the right showing President Bush with SNL debate parody footage while Senator Kerry continued normally on the left side of the screen. Somehow Bush managed, within 90 minutes, to play in to almost every stereotype about himself – the constant, inappropriate chuckling, the long pauses before “big words,” the low blow almost-joke on CBS credibility in front of Bob Schieffer. I even felt a pang of sympathy for his campaign advisors and how it must feel to watch your candidate bomb so terribly on national television. It didn’t take much for Kerry to beat Bush under those circumstances, but he cleared the low bar by a mile and showed, once again, why he is the better option to serve as our next President.

            There wasn’t anything substantively new in this debate, unsurprisingly. Bush continued to mislead voters with claims about Kerry’s health plan, voting record, and judicial appointment intentions, while Kerry continued to pin the blame for the economy on this administration, its tax cuts, and its war. At this point, the people who are going to vote based on those issues are already familiar with each side’s positions and have made up their minds. Where this debate could make a difference is for those who have never seen how unpresidential and unstatesmanlike George W. Bush can be.

            Now, Bush supporters tell me that this is part of his appeal – the “just folks”iness. Apparently, having a President that they would also like to share a beer with is a deciding factor for some voters. I’d never really bought seen it until this last debate, when Bush was asked about his faith and then, in the last question, about his family. His answers to those two questions were the most sincere that I’ve ever seen Bush be, and at that point he seemed like a nice enough guy. He seemed like someone who I would’ve liked to hang out with at that barbecue where he met Laura – as long as we didn’t talk about politics, of course.

            The thing is this – I need more than that from my President. Where I need his sincerity and a sense that he really understands the issue is not on religion or his own family, it’s on civil rights and health care and social security and paying for college and the true, long lasting ramifications of war. Bush doesn’t pay much more than lip service to those issues. But Kerry does.

            Kerry understands that the fact that people are poorer now than four years ago, and that’s why more families qualify for Pell grants to help pay for college. He understands that it’s hypocritical to say the government shouldn’t tell people what to do with their money while simultaneously calling for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. And he understands the complexities and shades of gray that now shape our world and what it takes to work within them.

            Sadly, however, presidential debates are not a division series in baseball, so the fact that Kerry swept Bush by a wide margin in all three debates could mean very little. But hopefully, it will mean a lot. Don’t forget to vote on November 2^nd.

By Andrew Hollingstead

On April 23, 1971, John Kerry appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee to testify on conditions in Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War.  Kerry told the committee that American military personnel had on a “daily basis” “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan…” While the My Lai Massacre and other wrong doings occurred, these were not the work of the rank-and- file American soldiers on a “daily basis.” While I do not place the weight of the many missteps of American policy toward Vietnam on his shoulders, Kerry’s comments did give the communists the type of propaganda that Americans such as John McCain endured torture on a daily in basis to avoid providing the enemy while punching in the gut Kerry’s “band of brothers” still in the war zone. Thirty-three years later, John Kerry went into the 2004 Presidential debates needing to prove that he had finally began to understand the nature of those wishing to do us harm as well as tackle other  issues facing the nation.

            Relating to the most important issue of our times, the war on terrorism, Kerry followed his earlier statement calling for a more “sensitive” war on terror with a statement in the first debate calling for a “global standard” that America must pass before using its military might to eliminate threats posed by the animals who seek to slaughter civilians on our streets. What, Senator?! You’re telling us that you think that we should have to get the approval of graft grubbing foreign leaders in Paris and elsewhere before we protect ourselves? Did Kerry not get the memo about the twin towers being leveled?  Maybe he didn’t. He didn’t bother to attend 75% of the public hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a committee to which Kerry is assigned, since the WTC was bombed in 1993.

            Prior to the debates, Kerry proclaimed that he wants to improve America’s already growing economy by closing loopholes in the tax structure used by “corporate Benedict Arnolds” to “unpatriotically move jobs offshore.” The New York Times, however, reports that Kerry and wife Teresa, the richest perspective first couple in U.S. history, made the bulk of their income in 2003 through returns on investments that are tax free. Aside from this, the man ranked by numerous non-partisan government watch dogs as the most liberal member of the Senate played yet another tired attempt at the losing tax hike hand after voting more than 50 times in the Senate for tax increases. Hasn’t this debate largely been settled?         

            The debates, however, were fitting for this Halloween season, because they featured Kerry running from his record much like some beauty pageant queen running aimlessly away from the Jason or any other horror movie bad guy. I always hate to know the ending of a film before I see it play out, but in this case, I know that Kerry’s record will catch up with him. Kerry did not understand the threats facing us during the Cold War, just as he does not face the issues and threats facing us now, and is, therefore, still unfit for command.