Duke was hot with political fever Wednesday night, as the voices of President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., boomed out of dorm room windows and through campus gathering points. The third and final presidential debate sparked opinions, cheers and even laughs from subjective students and pundit professors alike.
“I think you probably see Kerry winning more of the issues, but it wasn’t a walkaway like the first one,” Richard O’Dor, a lecturer in public policy studies and specialist in public speaking, said after the debate. “I thought he did well in taking some of the answers and then bringing it back and talking about how it applied to people. Like with the divide in the country, you might see a disproportionate amount of undecided voters looking and saying, ‘Why has this happened? What has Bush done?’”
Political science chair Michael Munger noted that Bush has had a rough six months, but he concluded that Kerry has played to the middle of the electorate and posed as merely another option to Bush, which has been a “dumb strategy” that has made a dead heat of what Munger saw as an easy win for the challenger.
“Kerry has not given us an alternative. It just is a referendum on Bush,” he said. “Kerry’s a very weak candidate and he’s run a terrible campaign. And I think that happened again tonight. There’s no bold definition on his part.”
Munger was one of six members of a pre-debate panel in Griffith Film Theater, where students and faculty from both sides considered the effect of the debate season and particularly what it has revealed about Bush’s campaign strategy. Panelists assessed the president’s tactic of targeting his conservative base to set what political science graduate student Brendan Nyhan called the underlying “narrative that comes out of these debates.”
But the focus of the discussion eventually returned to the importance of 18- to 24-year-old voters. “I think lots of students, especially here at Duke, when we do talk about issues like gay marriage and abortion... I think it’s really important that these issues not get lost in the debates,” said senior Evan Burness, a member of Duke Democrats and co-president of Duke for Rep. David Price, D-N.C. “It’s very important for all of us that we all do as much as we can to look at what issues matter to us and not just what the candidates are choosing.”
While there were plenty of jeers from among the more than 200 students who remained in Griffith for the debate when Kerry explained his foreign policy plan in the beginning of the domestic-based showdown, the accompanying cheers for Bush’s sound bites dwindled as the questions shifted toward social policy.
Junior Tierney Ahrold whittled away at her Japanese homework among a cluster of students plopped on couches in the Blue Devil Beanery as she listened for segments dealing with civil rights. After tuning in to those exchanges, she said she was “now willing to condemn” Bush for his conservative positions. “I wish he could hear what he sounds like to someone else,” she said of the president’s take on her key issues. “Nothing comes out of his mouth that makes any intuitive, emotional sense.”
The approximately 50 students gathered to watch the debate in the Great Hall as part of West Campus graduate assistants’ ongoing One Sweet Vote program were more attentive on the whole. Giggles at both Bush and Kerry were sprinkled among otherwise quiet consideration of social and domestic issues concerning young Americans, though many hoped for more specific responses. “In an ideal world they’d address social issues, but in this political spectrum they have to play to the middle, so they just appeal to the lowest common denominator,” said senior Andrew Herbert, a member of Duke for Kerry.
Back at Griffith, debate moderator Bob Schieffer’s question for Bush and Kerry about affirmative action prompted an ominous “oooh” from the crowd. “I think Bush completely ignored and neglected the question and Kerry took a more direct approach,” said sophomore Joiselle Cunningham. She added that the problem of an American political divide, is mirrored in class discussion and around Duke.
The polarization made some sense to Bill English, a graduate student in political science and former president of the Duke Conservative Union. “You actually got the sense that George Bush is a conservative and John Kerry is a liberal,” he said. “That hasn’t come through as of yet, and I think in that sense you had an honest debate that got to the root of the election.”
Students like sophomore Scott Liddle, who spent Wednesday evening lying alone in a Craven Quad commons room watching the Red Sox-Yankees game, settled on their choice well before Bush and Kerry’s last clash. “Pretty much I’ve already got my mind made up,” he said. “It’s not that it’s not important or I don’t care, I just don’t think [the debates] are going to change that much. And, come one, it’s Red Sox-Yanks.”
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