Debater in Chief
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When I was in law school, I participated in numerous “moot court” competitions. In such competitions, law students are taught the lawyer’s classic stock-in-trade: how to argue both sides of an issue and how to make the best presentation possible – even when you have a losing case.
When the competition is over, awards are given, not to the students who made the argument that would actually carry the case on the merits, not to the presenters who – however pedestrian their verbal skills might be – had the facts and the law on their side. Rather, the prizes go, quite simply, to whoever demonstrated superior forensic skill.
The presidential debate last week was like that. Clearly, Senator Kerry, the famed Yale rhetorician, would have won if this had been a moot court or pure debate competition. And we should award him his “best presentation” prize: We should elect him debater-in-chief of America.
Tonight, those who tune in to the vice presidential debate are likely to see more of the same. The silver-tongued medical-malpractice-jury-persuading Senator Edwards, with all of four years in elected office, will surely smile and charm and argue his way past the blunt and mature Vice President Cheney.
This should come as no surprise, though. What Messrs. Edwards and Kerry do for a living is argue, debate, and talk. That is one reason only two sitting senators have ever been elected president directly from the world’s largest and most prestigious debating society. Let’s face it, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards are a better debating team than President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Good debaters readily shift the terms of the debate, they win on points and style, not the merits of what they said. And the goal of a good debater is quite often to obscure reality.
Mr. Kerry attempted to take 20 years of inaction in the Senate and make it sound as though he had stood astride the world stage all that time.
He tried to take his incredible record of inconsistency and inconstancy on Iraq and make it go away by calling the war in Iraq a “colossal” mistake. Somehow, he seemed to think that his deft assertion that “I have a plan” for Iraq would vault past the reality that his plan is mostly a reassertion of the things the Bush administration is already doing.
Mr. Kerry did an excellent job of taking his mishmash of votes for and against the 1991 Gulf War and votes for and against the funds needed to carry this war out, and making them all go away with a sophisticated wave of the hand and a pithy remark about how he made a mistake in “how I talk” about the war.
Finally, good debaters do not have to deal with the consequences of what is said during the debate. A sharp riposte with a graceful rhetorical flourish are valued, not the workmanlike leadership and consistency required to deal with the reality of the real and dangerous world we live in. And thank goodness that is so, because that means nobody will follow through on Mr. Kerry’s well crafted and elegantly expressed plan to give Iran nuclear materials to induce them to stop their proliferation – a proliferation that requires…nuclear materials.
Ultimately, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards treat reality – and voters – with the disdain that common sense people see in double-talking lawyers. When that happens, juries and judges grudgingly note the tremendous skills of the lawyers but bring in a verdict that squares with the reality the lawyers have tried to obscure – exposing the ultimate weakness of their case.
Mr. Millard is a former member of the Giuliani administration and is currently a real estate executive in New York.