by JASmius
Y'all will have to forgive me if I don't offer the same picosecond by picosecond analysis that my friend Doug did earlier today. The reason for this is simple and straightforward: presidential (and vice presidential) debates are not really debates at all; they're auditions. Either two candidates are auditioning for the role of president of the United States (as in an open race), or a challenger is auditioning to replace the incumbent. Who "wins" these contests isn't about technical debating points, or even the substance discussed, but about the tactical and strategic needs of the respective campaigns at the time they take place.
If you wanted to score last night's Battle of Boca Raton as a standalone technical debate contest, you'd have to give it to Barack Obama by a clear margin. He was the aggressor for most of the evening, whereas Mitt Romney was surprisingly passive. Indeed, to a significant degree the two men were the reverse of what they were three weeks ago in Denver. But to understand why this was, you have to look at where each candidate is in the race going in.
For Obama, he began this campaign over a year ago with only one strategic avenue open to him: "Kill Romney". With a disastrous record of failure, with no popular accomplishments, preemptively nuking his challenger was the only option he had, and that's what he did, to the tune over between $150 million and $200 million in smear ads over the spring and summer. The problem? That hypercane of negativity didn't move the needle one jot or tittle. He started the campaign more or less tied with Governor Romney and he was still more or less tied when he got to Charlotte the first week of September. Indeed, the only time this year that O actually got a legitimate lead was after Bill Clinton put over his "It was so bad, nobody could have turned the country around in only four years" excuse. The media took that handoff and tried to deploy the same "inevitability" gimmick they used to great success in Sick Willie's 1996 re-election romp. But it ended the moment Governor Romney walked onto the same stage with the Chicago Cherubim and calmly, expertly dissected him like a frog in high school biology class. For the first time ever, Red Barry was exposed before over seventy million people as the stuttering clusterbleep of a miserable failure he's always been. The media couldn't save him, and more to the point, he couldn't save himself. In that moment, Mitt Romney went from Snidely Whiplash to Ward Cleaver in the eyes of most of the voting public. Indeed, I think Mitt Romney's victory will be traceable back to that very evening. For all intents and purposes, the election was decided then and there.
And that's what explains The One's antics ever since, culminating in last night's exercise in sneering ignorance. His fringe, lunatic, Resident Evil/Walking Dead base freaked out after the Denver Debacle and he's been trying to reel them back in off the ledge ever since by being a trash-talking jerk. And in the process, he's combusted the one asset he had left: his supposed "likeability". Which is itself a bill of goods and always has been, but was sold dazzlingly to low-information independents in 2008 and has propped him up ever since. That's gone now, and explains what is becoming his freefall in the polls.
For Romney, you have to understand how he looked at the campaign from the start. Mitt is a planner; he doesn't focus on the tactical, but on the strategic. His focus isn't to win each daily or weekly news cycle, but to win the election. This is why he didn't engage in the TV ad war back in May and June and July when Team Messiah was outspending him three and four to one, but instead raising boatloads of dough and saving it for the home stretch when it would have maximum effect. And it explains how he's approached this "debate" series.
Romney's purpose for Debate #1 was to neutralize the "Kill Romney" gambit and present himself to the American people as the President the incumbent has never been and can never, ever be. Mission accomplished. Romney's purpose for Debate #2 was to not undo what he accomplished in Debate #1; mission accomplished. Romney's purpose for last night's finale was to close the deal by appealing to the one group he had left to lock down: low information moderates.
This is why he didn't directly engage all that much last night. Mushheads don't like conflict and confrontation and rough & tumble verbal fisticuffs; they like civility and kumbayah and "can't we all just get along?" That's what Mitt gave them last night: reassurance that he was "reasonable" and willing to "work across the aisle" and all that nausea-inducing rotgut. Did he miss numerous hanging curveballs last night? Sure. He gave King Hussein a total pass on Libyagate; he punted on Egypt and Syria, and his Iran proposal differs from Obama's only as a matter of degree. But this was his conscious choice. It rankled us, his base, but we weren't his target audience. He's got our votes; he needs the mushheads to clinch the big prize. And judging from focus group reaction afterwards, once again, it was mission accomplished.
But that's not to say that Governor Romney didn't have his moments; he smacked O on his sotto voce "flexibility" assurance to Dmitri Medvedev, his 2009 Middle East apology tour, his giving the finger to Israel, and the looming trillion dollar Defense sequestration cuts, which elicited The One's "bayonets" gaffe. And he successfully differentiated himself from George W. Bush by invoking the Reaganite "peace through strength" mantle. So I don't think we really have to worry that Mitt will be a foreign policy squish or patsy.
Besides, remember what Governor Romney is: a pragmatic problem-solver. Look at all the Obama overseas problems he'll be inheriting; I seriously doubt that a President Romney would have abandoned Iraq or stood by and let the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt or bombed Khaddafy out of Libya without having a pro-Western alternative to fill the resulting power vacuum. But what can he do about these things now? Given the damage Obama's done to U.S. military capabilities, we wouldn't be able to intervene in any of these places to affect regime changes, and even if we could, there'd be neither the resources ($16 trillion debt, remember?) nor the public support for doing so. All he'll be able to do is try to rebuild our forces (particularly the Navy) and revive our alliances (particularly Israel) as best he can. And, as President Reagan once did, revive the idea of America as a symbol, bastion, and defender of freedom.
Suffice it to say, last night, Barack Obama won the debate; but Mitt Romney has already long since won the election. And that's the victory that matters.
UPDATE: Sorry if it sounds like I cut the post short abruptly; that's because I did. Ran out of time to get out the door to a men's Bible study where I was bringing the bread (somebody else was bringing the soup - had meatballs in it, too. And as we all know, even a pile of dog crap tastes decent if it has meatballs in it.
Some additional thoughts:
(1) The limitations on our military capabilities created by Barack Obama's reckless cuts especially hamstrings any conceivable military options vis-a-vie taking out Iran's nuclear weapons program and/or arsenal. Which, of course, was most of why O has cut the Pentagon so recklessly.
(2) Dr. Chicago acted like a dick in the last two debates to try and fire up his wacko nutbag "Deliverance" base, but let's be candid, it really didn't require much "acting". That arrogant, preening, strutting, megalomaniacal narcissist 30% of the U.S. population saw last week and last night was pretty much the real Obama. The amazing thing is that it took that long for the media-hoisted mask to slip off his smug, sneering face.
(3) When BO responded to Governor Romney's taking him to task for his 2009 apology tour by saying, and I quote, "Everything Governor Romney just said is not true," the following scene from My Cousin Vinny came instantly to mind:
Let history know that as Barack Obama's "My Cousin Vinny moment."
4) It's difficult to pin down what really constitutes The One's shark-jumping moment, because there have been so many of them over the past five years, since he starting officially running for president. Suffice it to say, though, that whether or not the following clip is it, or simply the latest hideously redudant encore, it certainly qualifies as one of the most singularly stupid utterances in the history of televised debates at any level:
Yes, Li'l President, everybody knows that horses, bayonets, and multi-kiloton naval vessels are completely interchangable. But nobody knew that aircraft carriers and submarines are "ships" too until "Professor" Obama enlighted us. Or maybe we know that but he doesn't but thinks they're something else. It's really kind of difficult to tell. The only thing we can say for sure is that it's the kind of addle-minded, incoherent twaddle that we usually get from this guy when he's deprived of his prompter. The fact that the comment is so pathetically ignorant and yet delivered with such contemptuous arrogance is classic Obama, though. It's very thoughtful and considerate of him to vomit up such a choice brick of it for the entire country to enjoy a mere fortnight before the election.
5) Note to Barry: Ten million or so voters called; they want their 2008 votes for you back.
6) According to Michael Medved today, Governor Romney was sicker than a dog last night, and went ahead with the debate anyway. You could tell he was a little raspy, but otherwise you'd never have known it. Or at least I couldn't tell. Says a great deal about his toughness and commitment, though, as I can't imagine President Putting Green not begging off if he'd had so much as an ingrown halo.
[cross-posted @ Hard Starboard]
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