US and the World

He can't admit a mistake - period

The New York Times > Opinion > The Town Hall Debate

I like this NYT editorial summary of the debate - particularly this couple of paragraphs:

One of the uncommitted voters in the audience sensibly asked President Bush to name three mistakes he'd made in office, and what he had done to remedy the damage. Mr. Bush declined to list even one, and instead launched into an impassioned defense of the invasion of Iraq as a good idea. The president's insistence on defending his decision to go into Iraq seemed increasingly bizarre in a week when his own investigators reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and when his own secretary of defense acknowledged that there was no serious evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Even worse, the president's refusal to come up with even a minor error - apart from saying that he might have made some unspecified appointments that he now regretted - underscores his inability to respond to failure in any way except by insisting over and over again that his original decision was right.

A lot of folks seemed to see this debate as a drawer. I saw it as a Kerry victory, though not as large as the first one. I think the "draw" analysis comes fom people having such low expectations of Bush.