Prediction On Tonight’s Debate

Rather than write my own prediction for tonight’s debate I’m going to give you Glenn Reynold’s:

Unless Kerry melts into a puddle on the floor, the media spin will be that he did well and helped his campaign. This is for two reasons. One is, as Newsweek’ Evan Thomas remarked, that the press “wants Kerry to win.”
The other, of course, is that they want the race to remain interesting — which is to say, a race — for another month, and it’ll be hard to do that if everybody’s pronouncing Kerry doomed after tonight.

I think that’s spot-on. Some journalists are going to play the part of Kerry campaign cheerleader as long as Kerry doesn’t melt-down. The rest of the media is going to play-up Kerry’s performance, not out of any sort of liberal bias, but rather because they have a vested interest in doing so.
In the weeks before the Super Bowl the press always plays-up the underdog. They make the team sound tougher than it actually is so that the game will appear to be more evenly matched, thus more appealing to spectators.
Kerry is clearly losing this race right now, but the press will try to make it seem close to keep voters tuned in and buying newspapers.