| To the dismay of many Nebraskans, the webcast of Thursday's debate between Senate candidates Mike Johanns and Scott Kleeb ended up not being available live due to technical difficulties. But, 10/11 News has now posted the video of the debate on it's website, and it's definitely worth a viewing.
Unfortunately, having attended the debate personally, I have to point out that a few key moments are left out of 10/11's video coverage. For those, you'd have to listen to the full audio of the 100-minute debate provided by the Lincoln Journal-Star.
However, the video does give a better sense of how these candidates actually stack up against one another upon their initial meeting. So, for those readers who only have so much time to dedicate to their online political consumption, I'm highlighting the most important of these omissions in my notes on the debate.
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For starters, both candidates appeared comfortable and generally well-prepared. Although the debate was understandably congenial, as it was the first time Kleeb and Johanns had met each other and they were speaking in front of a hall filled with sixteen and seventeen year-olds, there were enough lines drawn to get a pretty good sense of where this campaign is headed from here.
It has to be by design that Kleeb is echoing John F. Kennedy. Kleeb talks about change in the same terms Kennedy once talked about going to the moon, and his call for "new pioneers" is lifted right out of Kennedy's "new frontier." But, Kleeb isn't shying away from this fact, making several references to Kennedy by name. Kleeb praised Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis and his creation of the Peace Corps as direct contrasts to what we've seen of the Bush Administration.
I was proud of Kleeb for being willing to go after the Bush Administration. Holding up Scott McClellan's new book as a testament to "how fundamentally broken the system is in Washington," Kleeb even went so far as admitting "we were lied to" by the Bush Administration. He also went after Bush for vetoing the Farm Bill (because of its investments in growing the ethanol industry) and for overseeing the decimation of the federal government's balanced budget.
It was a bit of an ironic moment when Kleeb talked about the 2000 budget surplus with which then-presidential candidate Al Gore once hoped to shore up Social Security's long-term solvency. Kleeb asked the audience, "Do you remember that?" - forgetting that these students probably did not since they were only eight years-old at the time.
Where Kleeb wasn't strong enough was tying Johanns directly to the Bush Administration policies he criticized. It opened the door to Johanns' most memorable line of the debate, accusing Kleeb of "want[ing] to run against an administration that will be past history" when the next Senator takes office. There's a certain truth to that which undermines Kleeb's entire message unless he's going to explain why Bush's failures are directly relevant to this race through Johanns' own record. |
