Debates highlighted Bush's inability to admit mistakes

In fifth grade, I had my one and only formal debate. We were supposed to pretend we were on the brink of the Civil War, a choice that no doubt seemed safely distant to most of us where I grew up, in Colorado.

My parents' house lay about 2 miles south of what back this way was the Mason-Dixon line, so I chose to represent the South. It went pretty well through the opening statements and one round back and forth.

Then I got to my second major point, which was that northerners had no real moral claim against racism, since they had plenty of Ku Klux Klansmen up there, too.

My opponent, the dreaded Rhonda Blankenship, flashed a winning smirk and noted that I must be quite a fortune-teller - the Ku Klux Klan didn't exist until after the Civil War.

I still remember the shame of that defeat. Maybe that's what keeps bringing me back to watch the debates every election season.

I want someone to look worse than I felt back in fifth grade. After watching three rounds of John Kerry going head-to-head with George W. Bush, I'm starting to feel a bit better. Even for the pros, it's hard to keep everything on track.

Bush seemed out of his element. Presidents often get coddled into thinking they can do no wrong, and by carefully screening crowds and limiting his press events throughout his first term, Bush might have been softened up even more than some of his predecessors.

The easy floater questions suddenly came high and inside like a Roger Clemens fastball, and the soothing scroll of a teleprompter was nowhere in sight.

At times, he simply didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

During the second debate, responding to a question about tax cuts, Kerry pointed out that the Republicans include certain dividend payments as if they were small business earnings. Kerry noted that Bush had counted as a small business because of an $84 check from a timber company investment.

Bush mocked Kerry in his response. "I own a timber company? That's news to me! Need some wood?"

As it turns out, Kerry had a better handle on the president's investments than the man himself did. The president's 2003 financial disclosure form showed he received $84 for his partial ownership of "LSTF, LLC," a limited-liability company organized "for the purpose of the production of trees for commercial sales."

Kerry's source, www.factcheck.org, noted that their article omitted the fact that LSTF wasn't in the timber business when the president's received his $84 check and that it was designated on his 2001 tax return form as coming from "oil and gas production" business.

Speaking of timber, Kerry managed to appear confident and steady on most issues without falling into the woodenness that plagued Al Gore four years ago. And after the first debate, Republican tacticians largely abandoned the Kerry-as-flip-flopper taunt they'd used for months. Sixty million Americans had just seen the challenger sound so resolute that the sandal slander no longer fit.

After three surprisingly substantive debates, what might be most shocking is not that we face yet another close election in just fifteen days, but that some voters still can't seem to make up their minds.

After all was said and done, if you still can't decide which of these two men would be the more thoughtful, competent, honest leader, or which represented your positions better issue by issue, then I would direct you to the straightforward question asked late in the second debate by Linda Grabel.

Asking Bush to think through the thousands of decisions he has made in the past four years, she requested simply, "Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it."

What came next was eerie. Bush seemed to be at a loss to think of any substantive mistakes from his first term. He acted as if Grabel sought to lure him into another question about Iraq. His response whittled down to this: "On the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions because I think they're right. It's really what you're - when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about."

No, Mr. Bush. It's not just about Iraq or the mistakes you've made there. It's about being human. It's about recognizing that even the president of the United States is fallible. It's about learning on the job. And if you can't manage to learn and be president at the same time, then I urge us all to help you concentrate exclusively on the former.

Contact David Havlick at havlick@email.unc.edu