The first thing a casual observer might have noticed about last night's "town hall" debate is that President Bush seemed a lot more engaged and fluid. Gone were most of his long, awkward pauses, "uhms" and "uhhs." He still spent much of the evening on the defensive, but managed a few offensive moves this time.

Kerry seemed a bit uncomfortable or nervous at first, but quickly settled in and gave a performance consistent with the first debate. At several points it was easy to imagine Kerry the prosecutor presenting evidence to the jury rather than Kerry the Senator presenting evidence to the audience.

For both candidates, the gloves came off for this debate. Unfortunately, just as the fists went flying, so did adherence to the facts. Factcheck.org's analysis is a good read. Two of the more troubling slip-ups: Kerry's assertion that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was "forced to retire" after his Senate testimony, when in fact the General had announced he'd retire a year earlier; and Bush's claim that "frivolous lawsuits [related to medical liability]...cost our government $28 billion a year," a claim that the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office both dispute. In fact the CBO said there's "no evidence that restrictions on tort liability reduce medical spending." Both candidates were playing fast and loose with the facts at approximately an equal rate.

Here's what morons.org political analyst John Persson had to say:

Aside from his unseemly outburst, your average viewer thinks that Bush's performance was much better last night than what we got out of him during the first debate. Yet a number of people still have the same problems with his behaviour: he was still making faces while Senator Kerry was speaking, tapping his foot impatiently, and generally getting quite angry whenever he or his record were directly challenged.

What's worse is that this time Bush came across to many voters as "out of touch"-- that's the phrase they're using, "out of touch." You know, people notice the most interesting things in these performances. For example, one person said to me that he noticed Bush always talks about watching "tv screens" instead of "tv" like most people would say it. And this person thought it was funny, because he thought it made the President sound like he thought televisions were some quaint new invention.

But getting back to that point, last night bush said, and this is a quote, "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." Horrible grammar in that sentence aside, everyone who's ever used the Internet knows that it's singular. Bush also said, "we've got battling green eye shades." Most people when they hear that ask, "well, what's a 'green eye shade'?" It turns out that's a way of saying "accountant" but most people have probably never heard that term. And he used the word "facile" talking about the military when he said, "we need to be lighter and quicker and more facile and highly trained." I don't know about you, but I've never used the word "facile" before. I admit I had to go look it up. And it turns out that it means "arrived at without due care or effort; lacking depth" according to WordNet, but I think the president intended the Webster's definition, which is "easy to be done or performed: not difficult; performable or attainable with little labor."

Another thing some viewers noticed about Bush was that he could never bring himself to address Senator Kerry by his name or by his title. Kerry was always "my opponent." On the one occasion that Bush tried to use Kerry's name, he got it wrong, calling him "Senator Kennedy."

The other thing people noticed was something morons.org predicted, and that is Bush's tendency to oversimplify, or to see things in simple black or white terms. There was a short exchange on abortion, which as you know is a very emotional, heated and highly debated topic in this country. Kerry explained that he had voted against the "partial birth" abortion ban because it didn't contain an exception for situations where the life of the mother might be in danger if she attempted to give birth. When Bush countered with basically "you're either for it or against it" he came across to many viewers as unreasonable, especially since Kerry's explanation seemed perfectly reasonable and simple to most people.

And finally, one of the things people are talking about is the president's non-answer to the question "what are three mistakes you've made." Bush has a reputation for never being able to admit it when he's been wrong, and he lived up to that reputation last night. The closest he got to an answer was, "well, some of the people I've appointed, but I'm not going to say who." He immediately went on the defensive about Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the question was just about 3 mistakes, which could have been any of the thousands of decisions the president had made. Who knows- maybe he has a guilty conscience about these things.

Kerry came across last night as the courtroom prosecutor making closing arguments to the jury. After looking perhaps a bit unfocused at first, he got it together and stayed calm and collected throughout the entire debate, never raising his voice, flapping his arms, or lecturing the person asking a question. Ironically, this may actually work against him; after all, we're the country that invented Jerry Springer. People like to see somebody get fired up, and if they wanted that from John Kerry, they would have been disappointed.

If you ask people who was the more polite of the two candidates, most of them will tell you it was Senator Kerry, especially in the light of Bush's fit. But it's questionable how much people really value politeness in this day and age. Whereas Bush interrupted Charles Gibson on several occasions, Kerry was excruciatingly polite, once even saying, "yes sir, please" when Gibson asked him if he wanted to respond. Bush wasn't "my opponent" but rather was always "the president" or "President Bush." Kerry made a point of telling two audience members that he respected their convictions and said the same of the President.

A couple of people pointed out to me that Kerry seems to be honing his resolve; he clearly wants to come across as firm and resolute, probably to compensate for all the times Bush has called him a "flip flopper." He got a great opportunity to exercise that when an audience member asked him to look right into the camera and pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. And he looked us all right in the eye and did it. Unfortunately just as he did, several people around me said, "ho-boy!" of course remembering what happened when Bush Sr uttered his infamous "read my lips" line.

Kerry did utter one complete groaner when he said of some figures the President came up with, "Those are the fuzzy math figures." Well of course, "fuzzy math" was something Bush kept talking about during the first presidential debate with Al Gore. The thing is, most of us were nauseated by that term then, and it isn't really any easier to swallow now.

Overall, this was a much more spirited and engaging exchange, and I'm looking forward to the next debate.

One other interesting piece of analysis from last night is our analysis of the most-often repeated phrases by the candidates. Kerry's most-often used 3-word phrases: "I have a" 18 times and "have a plan" 15 times. Bush's: "the united states" 11 times and "to make sure" 8 times. After the most common english words, Kerry's most common word was "president," 76 times. Considering this is how he addressed Bush, his next most frequently used (but again excluding very common words) words were "people" and "plan", both used 35 times. Bush's favorite word was "because" which he used 32 times.

---Nick