The second debate

Saving me the trouble of putting up two links (I'm still new at this blogging thing), the Associated Press helpfully moved this story saying that the latest Iraq and economic news will frame the discussion. I'm hoping that rude pundit gets his wish from Kerry, but I'm not holding my breath. All the news is positive for the Democrat, with today's job numbers weaker than expected (96,000 in September when 150K are needed just to keep up with population growth) and Iraq continuing to be smoldering hell-hole for, like, the thousandth straight day.

It will be interesting to see what the split is on domestic and foreign policy questions tonight. I hope Charlie Gibson, the moderator (sigh, where have you gone Jim Lehrer,) chooses a representative sample of questions meaning that if 60 percent of the full pool of questions are about the war, then 60 percent of the selected ones will be. I imagine he'll try to impose some thematic order on the night, which sucks when you think about it. I want to see these guys on their feet quickly switching gears between foreign and domestic topics. I want to see Bush answer for his jobs record and North Korean nukes in rapid succession. The president has to be able to multi-task, to keep a lot of the different strands in his head, in the parlance of our times.

One fascinating part of last Thursday's debate was how our president's positions have become so simplistic that he couldn't fill his alotted two minutes talking about them. And tonight he'll have even fewer facts to fold into his answers to expand them to the full two minutes. As he came to the end of his canned answer and saw that his light was green, his famed discipline abandoned him and he started to ramble. Tonight he will get to use some of his time to try and connect with the questioner, which should help him appear as though he has enough to say. But Bush loses the election tonight if seems as petulant with average Americans challenging him as he did with Kerry's challenges last week. Bush has been going town halls with hand-picked audiences for months. He hasn't faced tough questions in a long time.

Kerry is up in the latest AP poll, but is behind in the majority of the polls. But if he can win tonight, I might remove the caution from my optimism.