I CALLED KERRY’S ABORTION ANSWER IN THE DEBATE “very good” — which got me flak from pro-life readers.

But they’re not the only ones who think I was wrong. William Saletan writes:

I know something about abortion politics, so I can tell you how effective Kerry’s answer was. It was awful. He defended public funding of abortion, which most Americans oppose, while at the same time he managed to convey ambivalence about the legal right to abortion, which most Americans support.

Hey, I call these things as I see ’em, not necessarily how you see ’em. But I don’t think that Kerry’s answer was bad at all, for the reasons I mentioned below. (But Hugh Hewitt agrees with Saletan, and disagrees with me.)

I also don’t agree with Saletan’s overall assessment: “Kerry blows the second debate.” I think that Bush won, but I don’t think that Kerry blew it. But, as I say, my opinions on this stuff are notoriously unreliable — or, at least, not necessarily shared by large numbers of other people.