Superb piece by Charles Krauthammer:

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.

For what it's worth, my view of the debates is that it really doesn't matter who 'won' them. Whether or not Bush or Kerry outpointed the other is irrelevant. All that matters is that Kerry emerged from them looking like a credible candidate for President. And since the received wisdom has been that he has looked anything but that in recent weeks, the debates have clearly done him a power of good.

That has nothing to do with whether he is right or wrong in his policy stances.