John Edwards got the better of Dick Cheney in their debate Tuesday night. Especially in the first two-thirds of the debate, Edwards was able to dodge Cheney's venom while poking at the Vice President over and over again.

Edwards, in his very first answer, stunned Cheney by saying, "Mr. Vice President, you are still not being straight with the American people" on Iraq. Edwards invoked the names of Republicans or Bush Administration officials to buttress his arguments about how the Administration distorted the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam and how the Administration has made a mess in Iraq. Senators Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer all made cameos.

In response, Cheney simply cleared his boilerplate and mumbled on about how "we've made significant progress in Iraq."

Keeping on the attack, Edwards skewered the Administration for letting Osama bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, and Edwards took the shine off of Cheney's glowing depiction of life in Afghanistan today. Edwards mentioned that Afghanistan is "now providing 75 percent of the world's opium" and that large parts of Afghanistan "are under the control of drug lords and warlords." And he added that Osama bin Laden, by the way, is still hanging out there.

Edwards repeatedly embarrassed Cheney on Halliburton. Here was one riff: "The facts are the Vice President's company that he was CEO of, that did business with sworn enemies of the Untied States, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information, it's under investigation for bribing foreign officials. The same company that got a $7.5 billion no-bid contract" it was not entitled to.

Cheney slipped badly in response, first by bringing Halliburton back up when the subject had already moved on to Israel and Palestine and then by giving Edwards another opening. Said Cheney: "The reason they keep trying to attack Halliburton is because they want to obscure their own record."

When Cheney accused Edwards of having "one of the worst attendance records in the Senate," Edwards leaped down Cheney's throat: "I'm surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of ten to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa."

At that point, I thought Cheney was going to say, "No mas."

But Cheney stuck to the Bush campaign's two themes: Kerry's inconsistency, and fear. Throughout the night, he harped on these. "We have not seen the kind of consistency that a commander in chief has to have," Cheney said of Kerry. "He doesn't display the qualities of somebody who has conviction."

And he derided the macho rhetoric of Kerry and Edwards. "You cannot use 'talk tough' during the course of a 90-minute debate in a Presidential campaign to obscure a 30-year record in the United States," he said, and then repeated the comment later.

His most direct hit of the night was when he accused Kerry and Edwards of bowing to political expediency during the Democratic primaries when they decided to vote against the $87 billion for Iraq. "If they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al Qaeda?" Edwards did not respond directly, saying only that "a long resume does not equal good judgment."

Three times, Cheney hyped the fear that the American people are facing and strongly suggested, yet again, that only he and Bush can protect them.

In his first answer of the night, he said, "The biggest threat we face today is the possibility of terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon or a biological agent into one of our own cities and threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans." He repeated that phrase in the middle of the debate. And in his closing statement, in case you missed it the first two times, he said: "Now we find ourselves in the midst of a conflict unlike any we've ever known, faced with a 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."

This is the Republican's central theme: Vote for Bush or die!

Edwards seemed to lose focus and energy in the last third of the debate. Their agreement on same-sex marriage--that one moment of accord about Cheney standing up for his daughter--lessened Edwards's appetite for attack. And Cheney's shot about Edwards using a loophole to "avoid paying $600,000 in Medicare taxes" appeared to knock Edwards off his stride.

Edwards missed several opportunities to score additional hits on Cheney.

On Iraq, Edwards failed to cite Cheney's most outrageous comments about the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda and about Saddam's arsenal. For instance, Cheney on October 10, 2003, said Saddam "had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional weapons." And Cheney on Meet the Press in March of 2002 said that Saddam had "already reconstituted nuclear weapons." Edwards also missed a chance to attack the Bush Administration for not going after Zarqawi before the Iraq War. NBC News reported months ago that the Bush Administration had Zarqawi in its sights but didn't take him out because he was a convenient excuse for the war.

On the subject of 9/11, Edwards didn't go after the Administration for leaving the United States vulnerable to attack. Why hasn't Edwards or Kerry mentioned that infamous August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."?

On making America safer after 9/11, Edwards neglected to talk about the ports, nuclear plants, and chemical plants that the Administration has not secured. He could have cited Kerry's point in the first debate about how the Administration has put the interests of the nuclear industry and the chemical industry over the safety of the American people. And he could have drawn attention to Bush's abysmal response to that charge, which was, basically, how are you going to pay for that? As if securing our plants was not worth the money when Bush was willing to waste $200 billion in Iraq.

And for some reason, Edwards chose not to contradict Cheney when he said, "The first I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight." That was a factual error, since they had met at least twice before, including at a taping of Meet the Press. Edwards could have used Cheney's blunder to talk about the Administration's selective amnesia and willingness to lie to further their own agenda.

Edwards also could have jumped all over Cheney's admission, concerning a question about the rate of AIDS among African American women, that he "had not heard those numbers." It would have been easy to use that to say how out of touch the Administration is. Edwards himself did not have a great answer for that question, either, truth be told.

And when the subject of bipartisanship came up, and Cheney mumbled about how important it was "to see an improvement" in this area, Edwards could have nailed him by saying, "You don't build bipartisanship by swearing at a Democratic Senator," since Cheney earlier this year had told Senator Leahy to "fuck off."

Instead, Edwards seemed overly concerned with bringing all domestic issues back to health care. That's admittedly a crucial issue, but he seemed to be reaching for it too often.

For progressives, the debate was noteworthy for a couple of additional reasons.

First, for historical distortion: Cheney made a peculiar reference to the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. He held up U.S. policy there as a great example of bringing "freedom," yet the U.S. government was funding the death squads and the brutal military there, which worked hand in glove. In the Salvadoran civil war, 75,000 people died, a fact Cheney did acknowledge. The fact he did not acknowledge was that the vast majority of those deaths came at the hands of the death squads and the Salvadoran military.

Second, for the lack of debate on Israel and Palestine: Edwards was to the right of Cheney on this one! Edwards never mentioned the word Palestine or Palestinian, much less suggest that Palestinians are being oppressed by Israel or that they deserve a state of their own. He focused his entire answer on Israel's right and obligation to defend itself against suicide bombers. A right and obligation it certainly has, and the suicide bombings are utterly indefensible. So, too, is Israel's ongoing occupation, but you didn't hear that from Edwards. Cheney at least acknowledged the importance of a Palestinian state.

Third, on Iraq: Cheney was actually right when he said that the Kerry-Edwards plan was more of an "echo" of the Bush strategy rather than a vastly different one. Kerry and Edwards have now committed themselves to sending more troops to Iraq, which will only make matters worse.

Fourth, on Iran: Edwards kept trying to say that Bush and Cheney have not responded aggressively enough. What does Edwards have in mind? And if he and Kerry win, do they intend to provoke a clash with Iran?

Finally, on gay marriage: It would have been nice if Edwards had made the courageous point that there is no rational, secular reason why a gay couple that's been together 20 years can't get married but why Britney Spears can get married twice in one year at the drop of a hat. Edwards did say that discrimination against benefits for gays was wrong, and that "using the Constitution as a political tool" was also wrong. But he could have gone further.

On style, the reptilian Cheney, with his chin on his chest and his eyes down, did not compare well with the open and smiling Edwards.

All in all, Edwards did well for himself and for Kerry.

Cheney did better than his boss, but that's not saying much.

© Copyrgight 2004 The Progressive

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