rumble in St. Louis

The first fifteen minutes of tonight's debate looked like a bad rerun of last week's performance. Then the President turned on the juice.

And it was good.

Reasonable people can disagree about who won on points. But Mr. Kerry lost his balance—more than once—while Mr. Bush owned the room, and likely a plurality of the viewing audience. I went from an involuntary fetal position to fist-pumping cheers in a space of about seventeen minutes.

Some random thoughts:

• The Senator proved once again that he is constitutionally incapable of self-deprecation—a weakness symptomatic of a greater strategic vulnerability: he can't take criticism. Just a few solid jabs from the President and Kerry was on the ropes. Were Mr. Bush that sensitive, he would have gone LBJ halfway through 2002.

• The conventional wisdom once held that the President would be toast when the campaign turned to domestic issues. It appears the contrary; tonight that is when he started to shine.

• It's just frustrating as hell that Mr. Bush doesn't defend against the bogus charge of unilateralism by pointing to the Oil-For-Food debacle—especially now that the Duelfer Report has given him so much material to work from. But I do understand why the Administration continues to pull its punches: perhaps Schroeder in Germany can get away with making anti-Americanism the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, but at the end of the day the President still has to work with the UN and our more perfidious “allies”. It might seem out of order for the leader of the Free World to so bash the international order.

I'm not, however, saying that I agree with that reasoning. But I do understand it.

Fox News has the transcript here. Two passages in particular are worth excerpting.

LONG: Senator Kerry, thousands of people have already been cured or treated by the use of adult stem cells or umbilical cord stem cells. However, no one has been cured by using embryonic stem cells.

Wouldn't it be wide to use stem cells obtained without the destruction of an embryo?

KERRY: You know, Elizabeth, I really respect your — the feeling that's in your question. I understand it. I know the morality that's prompting that question, and I respect it enormously.

And:

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.

That's why I think it's important. That's why I think it's important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

In case you weren't watching, both questions were asked by women in the audience. And nothing showed Kerry's true colors like the blueblood elitist condescension which positively oozed from the Senator as he tried to explain how much he “respected” their positions.

Not objectively pro-abortion? Like hell he's not.

MORE. A non sequitur, but the geek in me just has to quote John Derbyshire:

“I'm going to be a president who believes in science”—-Kerry.

Please, PLEASE, someone ask him to give ONE of Newton's three laws of motion.

And AllahPundit was kind enough to include this post in his debate reaction roundup (even though I sent the link just as he was wrapping up for the night).

Like you, I saw the President's performance last night give reasons to cheer. Though I continue to be frustrated by the fact that Kerry opens himself up to knock-out punches but the whole world, including Bush, pulls those punches.

Case in point...

Kerry has again demonstrated that his position on abortion is the worst possible position, "I respect your belief, I understand your belief. In fact, being a Catholic...I, myself, share your belief. However, this does not trump a woman's right to govern her own body and we must, therefore, guarantee her right to kill this person who has infringed upon that right."

Both sides should cringe at this.

Indeed they ought. But as Kerry has made clear, his primary allegiance is to a very different Church than the one he named Friday night. And the hierarchy of that Church know that they own him wholesale.

The President's response to the Senator was good. I probably would have gone further, but as Sam pointed out, it was perhaps best that he allowed Kerry's condescension and moral turpitude to speak for itself.

And speaking of Kerry's condescension, how about when he said, "By the looks of this audience, the only people falling into the $200K tax bracket are me, Bush, and Charlie"

Why be so cruel as to ask Kerry a 'trick' question about one of the Three Laws. I doubt he knows how many pounds in a kilogram, how many gallons in a barrel of oil or the difference between a gamete and a somatic cell.

And speaking of oil, how he intends to eliminate dependence on foreign sources whilst simultaneously blocking domestic exploration.

Maybe the same way he will raise people from wheelchairs?