After the debate Thursday between President George Bush and Sen. John Kerry, it was difficult not to conclude that the preceding year of campaigning had been an enormous waste of time. If you wanted to understand the differences between these two men, on the specifics of foreign policy but in other ways as well, the answers were offered during the 90-minute confrontation. This is attributable, in part, to the performances of the candidates, who were forceful and clear on their positions.

For the horse-race aspect of the night, the outcome was clear. President Bush began ahead in the polls; Sen. Kerry had to show he was still strong enough to win, that he was presidential. He did.

The more interesting questions of policy, however, dominated the night, particularly what to do about Iraq. Just that day, the difficulty of the U.S. presence there could be seen in microcosm. Scores of people, many of them children, were killed or wounded after a car bomb exploded at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new sewage treatment plant, which was intended to be an example of progress. U.S. soldiers were reportedly passing out sweets to the children at the time. The terrorists looked at this small instance of friendliness as an opportunity for violence.

Meanwhile, only days after Iyad Allawi told Congress, “In Samarra, the Iraqi government has tackled the insurgents who once controlled the city,” U.S. military began a surprise offensive on the city because, apparently, it wasn’t tackled at all, leading to questions about how badly Congress had been misled. A tough spot, a heartless foe, murky information about conditions – what would the president do?

Whether you are President Bush or President Kerry, you turn to allies (do they turn back to you?), hold or attend summits and support the troops currently there. Both men have plans, but neither of them provides clarity because they cannot – Iraq seems not to be that kind of place. But the difference between the goals of the candidates was stark. President Bush was to achieve peace in Iraq because he sees it as the center of the war on terrorism; Sen. Kerry wants to achieve peace there because he believes it draws resources from that center, in the middle of which sits Osama bin Laden.

The president repeatedly jabbed at the senator’s two-layered view of Iraq: “I don’t see how you can lead this country to succeed in Iraq if you say wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. What message does that send to our troops?”

By the end of the evening, Sen. Kerry had distilled an effective response. Iraq “was a threat. That’s not the issue. The issue is what you do about it.”

On North Korea and its nuclear capability, the president said bilateral talks would harm the six-way talks already begun. Sen. Kerry said that as president he would hold both kinds of talks, which the president rejected as unworkable. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported “each of the other four countries in the talks has held direct talks with North Korea during the six-party process – and China has repeatedly asked the Bush administration to talk directly with North Korea.”

Sen. Kerry knocked the president about unilateral sanctions against Iran. Was he talking about the sanctions originally put in place by President Clinton? It wasn’t clear.

The president was constant in his choice of phrases to the point of being overly repetitive. Sen. Kerry was expansive, but unexpectedly helped by the light timers, which kept him from straying too far. The president could speak of world leaders easily and with authority as well as talk sympathetically about a family who lost a father in Iraq. Sen. Kerry could only point his way in both those directions, though he spoke clearly and well.

The public was given a good sense of the temperaments of the two men and their worldviews. Perhaps the most interesting point was how little they looked like the caricatures in the attack ads used against them.