If you’ve been following news coverage over the past few
weeks of the Presidential election, there are a couple of things that you
certainly would have noticed. The first of those is that President Barack Obama
is pulling ahead in the polls in several key swing states, including Ohio and
Florida. In fact, Nate Silver’s blog has given him about an 85% chance of
winning the election according to a summation of all the polling data
available, so things were starting to look bleak for the president’s Republican
challenger Mitt Romney.
Just as emphasized as the widening gap between the two
candidates was the narrative spun by both sides in attempting to paint
themselves as the underdogs in the Presidential Debates, which began on
Wednesday night in Colorado. The Romney campaign released a memo asserting that
the president would focus on undermining his challenger rather than presenting
a clear set of objectives for his second term in office, while Obama and crew
said that he didn’t consider himself the front runner and that he expected
Romney to win. This posturing definitely resembled that of any major sporting
event, where both teams are trying to grab the underdog mantel and run with it
so that they have that motivating factor behind them as they attempt to get
psyched up for a game.
With those two storylines being the dominant ones in the
papers and on cable news, the two candidates faced off with the nation
watching, and as soon as the words started being exchanged, pundits from around
the political world started to speculate on who was winning, and ultimately who
won the contest. There is a significant temptation to pick winners in these
things, but the fact is that who wins is simply a matter of taste. There is no
real way to quantify who actually won a debate, but rather we rely on
completely superficial means to do so.
The one example that you constantly see commentators bring
up was the trouncing that John F. Kennedy laid on Richard Nixon in the 1960
debate. The commonly referenced adage is that radio listeners thought Nixon had
won, while television viewers thought overwhelmingly that Kennedy was
victorious. The reasons for this varied, with radio listeners liking the
substance of what Nixon was saying, while television viewers enjoyed Kennedy’s
youthful appearance and were appalled at the feverish Nixon (he had a temperature
of 102 at the debates, and declined make-up before the discussion began). It was
a perfect example of how appearances can dictate the “outcomes” of these dog
and pony shows, and that’s why the discerning voter will look at the recaps of
these debates and show some hesitancy in accepting their verdict of who won or
lost.
In addition, the notion of there being a clear winner or
loser is undermined by how well-rehearsed any political candidate is in their
talking points. They may not have the exact wording of the questions that they
will be asked (as they did not tonight), but even still, the odds that they
will detour from their scripts and say something unexpected are miniscule, and
therefore, the debates have really lost a bit of their luster, as well as their
stature in adequately determining who the more qualified candidate for the
position is. Instead, they have become just another blip on the timeline as
days tick down to election day on November 6th.
Following this first debate, the conventional wisdom seems
to be that Romney was the winner. People blasted the president for his seeming
disinterest in the proceedings, and they lauded Romney for going for the
jugular more often. What they failed to realize was that Obama performed in
nearly identical fashion to the way he did in 2008 against Arizona Senator John
McCain. He stuck to the professorial tone that he has used for many years,
allowing his challenger to take all of the serious verbal swings. This is a
tactic that usually works very well for a front-runner, as they are more likely
to be hurt by a hubris-infused mistake than a challenger who is desperately
trying to draw distinctions between himself and his opponent, while reining in
the distance between the two in the race.
McCain did that quite a bit in 2008, really trying to hammer
Obama from all angles. Whereas his act was viewed with consternation as the
deluded ramblings of an angry old man in that election, Romney struck a much
more authentic tone in this exchange. His more youthful appearance certainly
helped, and it didn’t appear that he was grasping at straws in quite the
fashion that McCain was. For his “victory”, the content wasn’t necessarily
important, but the delivery was nailed.
What really stood out in this debate was the lengths to which
both candidates went to prove correct the accusation that Romney leveled early
on, which is a take-off on a popular line that liberals have used against the
current generation of conservative candidates. That phrase is that if a person
repeats a lie often enough, it eventually is accepted as fact. Democrats have
used that accusation quite a bit as Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan have
hammered Obama on his $716 billion in cuts from Medicare, and now Republicans
have finally turned the tables on them.
Romney’s accusation hit home, in part because they were
true, but also in part because he ended up doing the exact same thing, thereby
validating a point of contention that I have made quite often that Republicans
lack a sense of irony. The biggest example of this was his repeated insistence
that the $716 billion that Obama cut from Medicare was actually to the
detriment of seniors, when repeated analysis has shown that it actually is
going to lengthen the life of the program by about eight years. The president
attempted to rebut this frequently, but Romney kept bringing it up.
Obama, in turn, did the exact same thing about the $5
trillion in tax cuts that he has accused Romney of setting up to help his rich
buddies. Romney repeatedly asserted that he was not intending on cutting down the
share of the tax burden that the wealthy will carry, and also said that he will
not cut their taxes on top of middle class families, but Obama kept bringing it
back up anyway. Whether the president’s claims are factually accurate can be
spun in a multitude of ways, but the point is that the point is definitely
under contention, and Obama acted as though it has already been adjudicated.
Each candidate also had one particularly strong moment in
the debate that impressed me. Romney’s was when he was discussing how his
government would handle reducing the deficit, and he described reducing the
deficit as a moral imperative. In very convincing language, he described how he
would apply a litmus test to every government program, which would basically be
“is it worth it to borrow money from China to finance this program?” It may be
an over-simplification, but it was just about as concise and true to platform
as he has been in recent months, and it was a riveting bit of rhetoric from the
Republican nominee.
As for Obama, he was at his best when he was dismissing
Romney’s notion that he could work in a bipartisan way to end the gridlock in
Washington. He brought up the damaging fact that Romney had disagreed with a
proposal to allow $1 in revenue generation for every $10 in budget cuts when
asked about it in a Republican primary debate, and hammered home the
Simpson-Bowles recommendation that any deficit reduction would have to come
with a mix of revenue and cuts. Obama spelled out how he wanted to increase
taxes on the wealthiest Americans to achieve a mix of $2.50 in cuts for every
$1 in new revenue generated, and it was definitely his most well-made point of
the evening.
Ultimately, I did not see why the pundits seemed so
universally in agreement that Romney had won the debate. If I had to pick a
winner between the two of them, I would go Romney, if for no other reason than
the domestic side of things is where he has to make his hay, and he performed
in a way that delivered on that necessity. In foreign policy, he is going to
try to be the blustering strong guy, and Obama is likely going to wipe the
floor with him by bringing up Osama bin Laden and the fact that he has helped
extricate us from both of our current foreign engagements in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In this debate, however, Romney scored some points on how bad the
economy is, and really did draw some significant distinctions between himself
and the president.
As for the notion of conceding that this was somehow a
turning point moment in the way that Kennedy’s victory over Nixon in the first
1960 debate is a ludicrous concept. This debate isn’t going to do a lot in
terms of getting undecided voters off the fence, but instead will likely fire
up the supporters on both sides. Romney may have been given the victory on the
scorecards of America’s political media, but that certainly does not mean that
this will catapult him to greater things. He is going to have to be the
beneficiary of some seriously bad political calculating by the president, as
well as a serious gaffe or two by Joe Biden, and although one of those things
could happen, the odds that both will are slim to none.
We’ll see whether Obama fights with more passion in the
second debate, or if he will allow Romney to continue throwing punches like he’s
Ivan Drago to the president’s Rocky.
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