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The spirited debate they had last night on terrorism in iraq, but this time they were not on a common stage and kerry had the kind of confidence that comes with polls and pundits agreeing that he won last night s showdown. did you watch that debate last night? this was john kerry today. bolder, declaring victory, relieving worried democrats. yesterday he showed me he s ready to leave this country. reporter: in pennsylvania today, the president tried to overcome doubts about his debate performance by swinging hard at his opponent. in a new line of attack, he failed to use last night but may wish he had, mr. bush accused senator kerry of more confusini contradictions on iraq after first voting to authorize the war. some bush supporters at today s rally expected more from the president last night. i think he could have been better in another type of format other than the debate. reporter: and the white house advisers were spinning a bush ....
Puzzling to say the least. but as you pointed out, the historical record shows two things. one of which you just detailed atlan and that is the challenger usually wins the first debate. why do you think that is? i mean, i was surprised going back at the record to find five of six previous examples were such clear victories for the challenger. well, i think there are two main reasons. number one, americans love an underdog and love a good fight. they love a good game. they love a good race. there s natural undertow, if you will, for the underdog. the second is the president, he s busy with a lot of things during his presidency. and he doesn t have the time to prepare. and give mitt romney credit. for those who say, well, he was lucky last night. listen, where preparation meets opportunity, that s what a lot of people call luck. he was enormously prepared. he also had gone through 19 debates during the primary season. had spent a great deal of time preparing for this debate, whereas, ....
When he delivered the pizzas. he said, you know, they re making me do this work. he didn t want to prepare for this debate. he s lazy and disengaged. that is how the national co-chair of the romney campaign thinks last night went. that s how the romney campaign followed up on their debate win last night. national campaign co-chairman saying the president is lazy. they also put the same man on fox news to call the president stupid. you don t think there will be a better prepared president obama on stage next week? when you re not that bright, you can t get better prepared. that the romney campaign s post-debate message from their national campaign co-chair. the president is lazy and not that bright. here was the obama campaign s post-debate message. the mitt romney we all know invested in companies that were called pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries. but the guy on stage last night, ....
Debates won by an incumbent president facing his challenger on tv is basically zero. we ll keep this as a running tally here, right? so zero wins at this point. zero wins, one losses. incumbent presidents are 0 for 1. how about the next one? 1980. all right. at that point, the incumbent president was jimmy carter. the challenger was ronald reagan. everybody knows how the election came out that year. that s not what we re talking ant here. what we re talking about is who won that first debate. incumbent president jimmy carter or was it the challenger, ronald reagan? leaving cleveland this morning, the president had a message for anyone who thought reagan had come across better in the debate. i think the issues are more important than the performance. the president is visibly more relaxed today than he was on the stage with governor reagan last night. since there s no way to know yet for sure which man helped himself the most, it s likely that the president is simply relieved that ....
Possible. the pool audio from philadelphia has been lost momentarily. we hope to have it back any minute. we don t know what s happened to it. it took 27 minutes to get that sound back. so the first time we had incumbent president face his challenger on tv in a debate in american history, it was totally novel to the country, it had never happened before, and the verdict to the extent that there was any clear winner or not, nobody really seemed to think there was a clear winner. frankly, it was almost beside the point. everybody was distracted with what went wrong, technically, 27 minutes of silence all blamed on this tiny little capacitor. mostly that first one should sort of drop out of the mix because it was such an outlier from the rest of them and there aren t that many of the rest of them. the contemporaneous news coverage at the time, nobody in the country thought the incumbent president gerald ford clearly won that debate. after the first try at this as a nation, the number ....