As I ponder the last debate, and the next one, I feel, as I have always felt, that Bush is of two minds, not only two faces. Part of him is extremely cocky, confident, self-serving, and spoiled. The other part of him is the Yale man who must put extra swing in his swagger to fit in with the big boys. Little W wants soooo much to be a big boy. He wants to play with them. He wast to be a Texan, a Bidnessman, a Man, a Man's Man. Yet, in spite of it all, he is childish and often child-like (only without the playfulness and imagination). When Bush said "The enemy attacked us," he showed not only the conflation of highly divergent intelligence reports (Al Qaeda attacked us---not Saddam), he was confusing his personalities. How do we know this about his confused sense of self? All one had to do was look. Bush didn't know how to act, how to react, what role to play. For the first time in 4 years, Truth was more powerful than Fiction--even within the president's own body. And I mean that in every sense possible. Bush's own body language is an extension of his thought processess, ones which were obviously malfunctioning on Thursday night.
Pschologists say EVERYTHING eventually gets expressed either through words or through actions. For Bush, all the wincing and writhing was "wrong time, wrong place." It could not have come at a better time or a better place for America, however.
The question about this Friday's debate is not who will win the policy question, but will Kerry be able to shake the president to the core, to bring out those twitches. The answer to that is: unlikely. The president will be more exposed and thus more aware of his exposure to a public, and will thus ACT more of one body and one mind. Of course, it is still possible his physical discomfort/discomfiture will appear as well, I just beleive it to be unlikely, which is, in turn, unfortunate, because America will again be blind to this President's ways.
Read this: Bush's costly gaffe: "pseudo-confident"