Howard v Rudd Round 1
Just to break up the foodie posts a bit, last night's outing ended fairly late (we walked all the way from downtown to Cap Hill trying to find a decent coffee+cake place that wasn't either shut or full -- Seattle ain't no 24-hour city that's for sure). The caffeine was still circulating in my system when I got home at 1.30 in the morning, so when I saw that the leaders' debate was going to be streamed live on the Net at 2.30am (7.30pm AEST), I decided to stay up and watch it.
I called it for Rudd with maybe a 60:40 margin in his favour, but the worm on Channel Nine and a bevy of commentators on The Age seemed to concur that Rudd was the decisive winner.
Howard definitely got testy a few times, and it was a rather strange way to end the debate talking about an education revolution involving going back to basics, bringing back technical colleges and historical re-revisionism.
Rudd, on the other hand, was very good at hammering home his policy initiatives on education and climate change. It's just unfortunate that, to my ears, he sounded far too rehearsed and tightly scripted -- it reeked of high school debating team, with affected hand gestures, prepared counter-points and one-liners which he flubbed with a nervous Spoonerism here and there that just emphasised his robotism.
In the end, we just got More Of The Same: Howard talked about his wonderful economic track record, played the anti-union card, and claimed the Coalition would always keep interest rates lower, while Rudd talked about new leadership, and repeated his policy mantras on education, health, IR and climate change.
The only thing of note was Rudd (finally) countering Howard's attack on Labor's economic track record -- at last, someone brings up publicly Howard's own track record as treasurer, and subsequently defends the Hawke/Keating years for opening up the economy and laying the ground work for the prosperity we have today -- something not even Howard could plausibly deny (17% interest rates not withstanding of course!).
