An interesting contrast comes to light by jumping around the blogosphere (kind of like playing your CD’s on “shuffle”).
- From Anomalous Data, via Pandagon and Pharyngula: If you strip the candidates of personality and presentation, leaving only issues, you get overwhelming support for Kerry.
- From Stanley Fish (writing in the New York Times) via Karl Fornes: If you completely ignore substance and look only at the clarity with which ideas are being articulated, you get overwhelming support for Bush.
The target audiences were upper-class 11-year-old schoolchildren in the first case, and University of Illinois at Chicago undergraduates in the second case, but that hardly seems to matter.
The good news is: Kerry’s problem would seem to be more easily correctible than Bush’s (we hope).