Brain Fertilizer

Kerry won the style points.
Bush seemed...tired. Defensive. He had amazingly long pauses at really bad times.

On the substance side, though, I think it was a toss-up, but that was totally from Bush. As in, Bush got in some great shots, but he weakened his case by (as you so aptly put it before) merely repeating the advertising point sound-bytes for most of the debate. But Kerry neither added anything of value to the substance, nor detracted.

To be honest, I'm really disappointed. This is the first debate I've ever watched, and Frank Martin and I have had better political discussions with deeper points.
Jo and I would have held people transfixed with the passion, verve, and great points. Each time someone spoke you'd probably say, "Hmmm...that's a good point."
I saw absolutely none of that here. Nothing new was introduced. Kerry keeps saying Bush had no plan to win the peace; I'd like to have seen Bush directly address that by discussing what the plan was from the beginning and showing, point-by-point, how a hostile counter force has affected those plans. Instead we got an indirect "We're fighting an enemy, and once the people of Iraq stand up for themselves, we can get out." Kerry said several times that Bush has no plan for Iraq other than stay the course. I would love to have seen Bush use 2 minutes to lay out, point-by-point (again!), just what we are trying to do. "125k by year's end" isn't specific enough or long-term enough. Doing so would also have revealed the obvious flaws, omissions, and ambiguities in Kerry's "plan".
Missed opportunity: Why didn't President Bush say even once what the point of the Global War on Terror is? He said several times that he understood it and Kerry didn't. But he never addressed it directly, as in, the point of fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is to literally shrink the geographic area in which terrorists have to operate, and reduce the number of regimes who facilitate, equip, fund, and provide safe locations to terrorists, and to demonstrate that terror is a dead-end and failed ideology.
I'm not that smart: I've seen that on several blogs, so why can't anyone in the Bush Adminstration articulate it that clearly? It's clear, defensible, and explains everything we've done to this point.

I also think Kerry thinks Americans are stupid. He didn't provide much evidence for anything. He repeated three times that the current levels of securing nuclear materials will take 13 years, and promised to do it four (and again didn't begin to explain how.)
But it's no surprise that Kerry thinks Americans are stupid, since he works with and talks to Democrats for the most part....

Okay, I'll have more thoughts tomorrow after I've mused for a while. That should hold you for this evening, eh?