Monotony the Third Time Around

Here’s what you knew, 20 ponderous minutes into this: Both candidates had developed themselves into such commanding reciters of their own favorite figures and factoids that the final debate, as a TV experience, was going to be about as exciting as catching an Office of Management and Budget hearing on C-SPAN.

President Bush: “He’s been a senator for 20 years. He voted to increase taxes 98 times. When they tried to reduce taxes, he voted against that 127 times.”

Sen. John F. Kerry: “Healthcare costs for the average American have gone up 64%. Tuitions have gone up 35%. Gasoline prices, up 30%.”

These may be important points, but the candidates’ singsong rhythm of charge and countercharge, statistic and counter-statistic, made this third matchup the least watchable.

Out of this morass, there was one subtle surprise: The TV cameras, finally, were kind to Bush.

In the first two debates, he had come off as petulant and moody, a shouting or scowling figure who bristled at dissent. Some 110 million viewers had seen the first two debates and witnessed a president wobbling under Kerry’s persistent pressure, until Bush began to seem like an uncooperative CEO under stiff questioning on a rerun of “The Practice.”

But the third debate found Bush in better command of his TV personality -- as if he had finally discovered, five hours into this monthlong exercise of rhetoric and image, how best to alter the timbre of his voice, what kind of smile to flash, when to use that folksy anecdote.

There was that painting in the White House, “a painting -- of a mountain scene,” he said, beginning his closing statement in his warmest tones. That painting, he said, depicts the mountain’s “sunrise side,” because it’s “the side to see the day that is coming, not to see the day that is gone.”

Kerry, the third time around, once again hit all his marks, but he looked less energized.

As theater, the first debate worked not only because the topic that night was Iraq, but also because viewers were for the first time seeing Kerry and Bush on the same stage, standing in opposition to each other.

Back then, there was some unpredictability in their onstage chemistry -- spontaneity that both the candidates and their campaigns no doubt studied into extinction while staying in some of this nation’s finest hotel suites.

By debate No. 3, everything had gone rote, even visually. And so there was something terribly appropriate about the way the debate ended: With two former Yalies in red ties and dark suits, backslapping each other for having strong-willed wives.