How Sweet It Is...

Picture it.

11pm, Friday night. Five fraternity brothers sitting in a room watching the presidential debate with the same intensity and expectation of the Yankee game--currently in progress. They have beers, of course, but the silence is inconsistent to their usual glee. They are hunched forward, and someone says, "This better be good."

We were not disappointed.

The debate last night was a throwdown, tensions running as high as a Mariah Carey note. They were in each other's faces, refusing to concede a point. Even the usually giddy Charlie Gibson was confrontational, demanding straight answers from the two candidates when set answers were given. Another person in the room says, "This is better than the Trinidad fight!"

On a deeper level, this debate took on a greater significance than either of the opponents. Bush and Kerry became iconic--symbols of some of the greatest ideologies that this country stands on. The idea that no man is beyond criticism and public scrutiny. I heard one of the spinsters after the debate say that Kerry was "disrespectful." I don't think he was. Kerry was direct and Kerry was forceful, and while that might be disrespectful to the King of England or Sweden, we live in a country without titles. We live in a country where a person stands on their own merits and actions, and in the office of the presidency we find no other job to stand equal to the necessity for fair and just actions. When a president cannot adequately substantiate his decisions he cannot hide behind his title to give him shield from criticism. In fact it is demanded that the population holds him accountable for his actions, otherwise we run the risk of falling into tyranny. When Kerry looked at Bush and said "The world is more dangerous today because the president didn't make the right judgments." I knew the Bush cadre's game of the Wizard of Oz was coming to a close. It was time that we all remembered that the President of the United States is still a man, who, just like the bus driver that crashes the bus, or the surgeon who does a castration instead of a vasectomy, or the business owner who embezzles money, and all the rest of us, he must also be held accountable for their actions. No more no less.

Watching Kerry do his work out there, for a moment, made me believe in Justice. And whether of not you're for Kerry (Actually another member of our group said to me "I'm actually kinda impressed by him [Kerry]--maybe he does have a spine.") Maybe even if you're for Bush, you have to realize that he has had the weird luck of having the least amount of media and internal scrutiny of perhaps any president, or at least any president in recent history. Watching the news felt like the rumor mill in the back of your 5th grade class-- "Pssst! I hear that the President stole the election--but don't say it too loudly or he might hear you." For that hour and a half watching Kerry, in front of Bush, state all of those unstated statements, say all those little things that you've been ticked off about, but could never afford to get that private audience with the president (You know, like the WAR, and the ECONOMY, and the WAR, and the WAR {Yeah--its kind of an important issue}) it felt like you were there. It felt like a politician was doing something that they always promise to do--stand up for the little guy.

As Kerry said (one of the best puns in years) "You need intelligence to fight a war..." And yesterday we saw that Bush has little of that, and a ton of stubbornness. Even though President Bush is privy to "The Internets," which leads me to believe he has more than one--his platform is one of faith. Faith to a man who appears intellectually bankrupt and fanatically religious, and his answers to the questions on abortion and stem-cell research seem to prove it.

I won't bore you with any more of my rhetoric. But I will make one parting note before I end this post. Kerry's image in the last week or so since that first debate has made a 180. Alot of it came from putting a seasoned veteran (In more ways than one) into the ring with an inept puppet. But I think Kerry has gone past that. He's actually gone past tearing down Bush's facade to show America that he might actually have some principals of his own. His response in regards to abortion:

"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."

In the forum of abortion, people may say you're either for it or against it--but I like the line Kerry draws here. It seems wise, and reasonable, and intelligent. I remember saying to one of guys in the room "I think he just got 5 million votes for that response." And someone responded "Yeah, well he lost 6 million in the bible belt." Well if that's the case, so be it. I said it before, and I'll say it again. I was waiting to hear what Kerry stood for and to draw that dividing line in the sand. Kerry did his part, and I think he's created a more intelligent, and reasonable platform than Bush, who's tenure has been a gigantic screw up. Yet, if these particular issues matter more to people than rationality, if your religious' beliefs supersede your belief in the constitution, and the separation of the church and state, and you use your vote to try for some pseudo-referendum on what our government stands for then by all means "vote your heart." We deserve what we get. My grandma had a saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." Kerry's showing us the way, now it's up to us.

Until then I'm going to bask in another minor victory, and think of how sweet it is.