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I have to admit that I'm not extremely impressed by John Edwards and think that maybe somebody like Wesley Clark or Howard Dean MIGHT have made a more effective VP choice BUT as far as the debate tonight, I think that he held his own. It wasn't nearly as impressive as last Thursday's knockdown debate performance by Kerry but I don't think that it needed to be. It's hard to say who actually "won" the debate. I thought that Cheney, if you get beyond his lies, distortions, and sometimes harsh attacks against Kerry/Edwards, held his own as did John Edwards. I didn't really think some of the rules set by the moderator worked well and neither candidate REALLY answered a lot of her questions directly without veering off into a stump speech or a statement of their positions on various issues. There were a few things that Cheney said that I wish that Edwards had attacked viciously, especially when talking about Zarquawi and his alleged link with Saddam Hussein. It would have been devastating for Edwards to point out on national tv how he was operating freely in a US-controlled area until the invasion of Iraq and that Bush reportedly passed up several opportunities to take him out not to mention the fact that he survived the Iraq invasion and is now at-large and causing all kinds of mayhem in Iraq right now. However, there will surely be other opportunities for him (or Kerry) to attack Bush on this along with countering some of the lies and distortions that Cheney spewed out tonight. I have to say that I believe that Cheney might have won on style but Edwards won on substance and I thought that he was very focused and did not get rattled despite the verbal thrashing he was receiving from Cheney.
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