In terms of communication skills, I like the analysis from the "uncorrelated" blog of Mick Stockinger.
uncorrelated.com
Bush Subtance, Kerry Style
Bush was clearly had a much stronger position on substance. Kerry's positions are basically nonsense if you understand the issues. Bush corrected Kerry a couple of times on misstatements, while letting the false claim that Bush said, "Mission Accomplished" slide without comment.
Kerry wins on substance only because he was competing with himself. He was better stylistically than expected. Several people mentioned this to me.
The value of Bush's win is probably discounted because the average American knows and cares very little for the nuts and bolts of foreign policy. The post-debate spin may turn out to be the deciding factor. Gen Tommy Franks dropped a bomb shell after the debates, correcting a repeated mischaracterization of remarks attributed to him and pointing out that bin Laden is not in Afghanistan. In coming days, Kerry's remarks are going to be mined for contradicts, logical fallacy and errors of fact--the question is whether those errors can be successfully communicated to Joe and Jane Average. The Bush campaign has its work cut out for them.
Kerry's outpacing his low expectations has to be a good thing, but its ultimate effect is hard to know. Kerry's negatives are only incidentally his personal disagreeableness. His irresolute and ambiguous positions are far more characteristic. In this sense, Bush hammered him pretty good. Kerry showed that he isn't an empty suit, but how many people really thought that was his problem?
Yet ultimately these conclusions are superficial impressions, because the debate should be judged by how successful each candidate was in achieving their objectives. Clearly Kerry's objective was to pin Bush down on Iraq, and he failed to do that. Bush's objective was to highlight Kerry's flip-flopping, and I think he was successful.
Most notably, Kerry now has a new self-inflicted wound--His clear statement that the war in Iraq is a "mistake" not only evokes the question of how he is going to get his mystery allies to commit troops and money, but echoes a statement he made as a much younger man:
How do you ask someone to be the last person killed in Iraq? How do you ask someone to die for a mistake?
The "nuance" of believing the war to be a mistake, yet being committed to fight it is simply impossible to communicate politically. The intuitive sense of Americans is that Kerry cannot possibly fight to win in Iraq with no conviction that it is a righteous cause.
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