The word is out now and there’s nothing that can put it back in the box. Bush is angry:
Bush talked louder and tried to come across as less snide this time, though there’s still an irritable impatience lurking beneath the surface. Sometimes when Bush would get terribly noisy and almost shout, Kerry would come back with a soft-spoken — and thus implicitly more reasoned — response.
Halfway through last night’s debate, President Bush declared: “The best way to defend America in this world we live in is to stay on the offense,” but he spent much of the evening on the defensive against John Kerry’s unyielding accusations that he had mishandled the war in Iraq and the American economy. At the outset, Mr. Bush seemed a bit strident and on edge, as if over-eager to avoid a repetition of his pained performance eight days ago.
Bush again, as in the first debate last week in Florida, was shown in a few reaction shots looking weird, at one time shown blinking rapidly and another with a bit of a smirk. He also sounded shrill at times.
A.