Those Little Lights...

The New Republic agrees that Bush struggled to fill his time. I didn't realize that he insisted on those little lights though, this is very funny:

Bush demanded that those little warning lights be prominently displayed on the podium to embarrass Kerry when he delivered long-winded answers. The opposite happened. The tight time limits helped Kerry--always at his best when on deadline--control his message. Instead the lights served to emphasize that Bush didn't always have enough to say to fill out his time. In previous debates Bush would sometimes answer a question with a short declarative sentence and a sharp nod of the head. The lights would have made this embarrassing, and at times Bush started repeating stock lines and seemed as though he were filibustering. The Kerry campaign used the lights brilliantly. Before the debate they even mischievously demanded that the lights be removed when in fact they knew they would help Kerry. 'We protested too much on the lights and you all fell for it,' Joe Lockhart told me.