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President Bush and Senator Kerry challenged each other on foreign policy Thursday. Jed Glickstein, one of the nation's top student debaters, assesses how the two performed in this first debate of the 2004 presidential season.

Click here to read Jed's bio.

I believe Senator John Kerry won the debate. The various polls I have seen immediately following the election also seem to indicate a consensus for a Kerry victory. Of course, in 2000, Vice-President Gore also "won" the first debates. In the ensuing media cycle, however, he was demolished by a political atmosphere that seemed to give more weight to style and less to substance.

I could detect no outright gaffes on Mr. Kerry's part-although one must never underestimate the ability of somebody somewhere to find such a mistake. However, President George Bush did not make any either, and what Mr. Kerry needed was to score a resounding win.

Both candidates did remarkably well from a stylistic perspective. Given the time-honored tradition of lowering expectations before any important political event, both Senator Kerry and President Bush came across as coherent, straightforward and relatively intelligent.

In terms of civility, it was probably the most courteous exchange between the two camps to date. If the time limits were troublesome to anyone, it was the president, who ventured into "blinking red" territory a few times, while appearing hard-pressed to fill his allotment in others. The president did appear a bit more jumpy than the senator, sometimes interrupting moderator Jim Lehrer, but he still appeared entirely within the bounds of acceptability.

In terms of argumentation, Senator Kerry's prosecutorial training was in evidence, and he was more articulate and better at culling statistics than his opponent. In my opinion, Senator Kerry was more nimble as well. He attacked President Bush from a variety of angles, citing sources from the past (his father), the present (mounting monthly casualties in Iraq) and the future (government reports on Iraq indicating a stalled or deteriorating situation).

Senator Kerry seemed one step ahead of President Bush in most lines of argument, and in this respect the president was not up to par. Senator Kerry did a fine job separating the War on Terror from the War in Iraq, showing how the president's missteps in the latter have had a detrimental effect on the former. He appeared ready for the charge that he was disparaging America's allies, as well as the charge that his vacillating would hurt combat effectiveness on the ground.

President Bush opened up possible fronts for attack with his argument about the International Criminal Court and especially with his criticism of the Kerry camp's response to Prime Minister Allawi but did not take full advantage of them. Finally, President Bush did not seem to have any response to Senator Kerry's position on nuclear proliferation. Senator Kerry did his best to hammer home the contrast between himself-a man with experience in the area and a promise to solve the problem in four years-and his opponent-a man with neither.

President Bush, on the other hand, was solid and did little to alienate or offend. His central strategic decision was to repeat the familiar accusation that Senator Kerry is a "flip-flopper." Many of his speeches were in fact exercises in generating euphemisms- not sending "mixed-messages," not "changing positions," "staying on the offense," remaining "steadfast and resolved."

But the president appeared unprepared to defend this accusation beyond such surface level claims. When Senator Kerry adeptly pointed out nuances-Osama Bin Laden attacked us, not Saddam Hussein-that have been public knowledge for some time but continue to be overlooked, President Bush simply moved to a different explanation of his original argument. While this was probably a calculated move to maintain a consistent message, from a debate perspective, it was insufficient to respond to many of the issues Senator Kerry raised.

In my mind, Senator Kerry succeeded in showing that President Bush had made mistakes in the past four years. In this critical sense, he won the debate. And since historically, undecided voters break away from the incumbent if he is perceived as having done a bad job (recall Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"), this ought to be enough to give the Democratic challenger the advantage.

But the differences between the two candidates were not very stark going forward, both because of pragmatic considerations (we cannot leave Iraq no matter what kind of mistakes were made) and because of President Bush's debating. The president often times harmonized his position with the senator's, arguing that he was involved in setting up summits, that he had in fact increased funding for securing fissile materials, that he is financing homeland security initiatives, and so forth.

One can win a boxing match by out-sparring one's opponent for the allotted rounds. At the end of the fight, the points are totaled and one man's glove is raised. But people rarely pay to see points totaled; they pay to see a KO [knock out]. Senator Kerry, whose background as a prosecutor seemed to favor him as a rhetorical pugilist, failed in this regard.

The results of this debate are in the Democrat's favor, although the final impact of the debate will primarily be decided by whoever can mobilize their base and control the tenor of the resulting media coverage. For now, the senator should be pleased but not complacent, and the president should be nervous but not despondent. Even if Senator Kerry sees a large boost from the debates, he still needs to solidify that support before the election. And unlike high school debate, there are really only 538 ballots that matter.

-- Jed Glickstein is a freshman at Yale University.

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