kerry is endangered species ?? ==Kerry to a prizefighter who scores well in every round but never lands the knockout punch.
''They're not debates,'' Paul Begala, one of the party's leading debate strategists, said. ''You have a collection of people with their canned lines, some of them good and some of them not good, and they just recite them in random order. In fact, maybe we should just do that. 'Senator Kerry, could you please give us your line on Medicare?'''
Begala said the best way to fix this mess would be to somehow winnow the field, giving a smaller number of candidates more time to answer each question. When I repeated this suggestion to Sharpton, who has clearly been the most agile debater thus far, he scoffed. ''What are we really talking about?'' he asked. ''A minute or two? It's not like some of them were on the verge of brilliance and then somebody cut them off!''
I asked Sharpton to rate the debating skills of his rivals. Gephardt and Kucinich show the most passion, Sharpton said, while Lieberman is the most sure of his convictions. ''He don't care if they heckle or boo, that's who he is. I respect it.'' Dean, he said, ''can come off as arrogant or even mean-spirited.'' Sharpton likened Kerry to a prizefighter who scores well in every round but never lands the knockout punch. |
