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Charles Krauthammer has more on Romney’s first debate.
No mystery about the trajectory of this race. It was static for months as President Obama held a marginal lead. Then came the conventions. The Republicans squandered Tampa; the Democrats got a 3- to 4-point bounce out of Charlotte.
And kept it. Until the first debate. In 90 minutes, Mitt Romney wiped out the bump — and maybe more.
Democrats are shellshocked and left searching for excuses. Start with scapegoats: the hapless John Kerry, Obama’s sparring partner in the practice debates, for going too soft on the boss; then the debate moderator for not exerting enough control.
The Obama campaign’s plea that the commander in chief could find no shelter under Jim Lehrer’s desk did not exactly bolster Obama’s standing. Moreover, the moderator’s job is not to control the flow of argument, but to simply enforce an even time split.
Lehrer did. In fact, Obama took more time than Romney — 41 / 2 minutes more — while actually speaking 500 fewer words. Romney knew what he thought and said it. Obama kept looking around hoping for the words to come to him. They didn’t.
After the scapegoats came the excuses. …
Streetwise Professor explains Iraq and “sunk costs.”
Regardless of what you think about the prudence-or even sanity-of invading Iraq in 2003, if you are rational you have to understand that sunk costs are sunk. You can’t undo the past. You can’t bring back those who died in 2003-2008. You can’t retrieve the hundreds of billions spent.
So when becoming president in 2009, the arguments for or against invading Iraq and fighting the insurgency in the years following should have been beyond irrelevant in determining the correct policy going forward. By 2009, post-surge, Iraq was relatively stable. It was-is-the keystone of the Middle East. It borders Iran. It is vulnerable to Iranian influence, and has represents a threat to Iran. It has large oil production, but its reserves are immense, making its future potential even greater. So even if the cost of invasion and fighting 5+ years of civil war were not worthwhile in retrospect, those costs were sunk in 2009. The cost of maintaining a military presence going forward would have been relatively modest, and the potential geopolitical and strategic benefits would have been great. Perhaps not so great as to justify the expenditures in life and treasure 2003-2008, but those costs were sunk by 2009.
But Obama was so obsessed with Iraq that he made withdrawal-on any terms-a priority. So he bugged out, leaving a vacuum in Iraq. A vacuum that local radicals and Iran have filled. So now Iraq permits overflights of Iranian weapons to Syria, and supplies fuel to Syria. The country is being pulled into the Iranian orbit.
And Obama thinks this is a marvelous accomplishment. A major part of his legacy.”
The NY Times finally figures out Benghazi is going to be part of this campaign.
The Obama administration’s handling of the Libya attack has opened a new front in the presidential campaign just weeks before Election Day as Republicans seize on it to question the president’s performance as commander in chief.
The dispute over the episode escalated after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during the debate on Thursday night that “we weren’t told” that Americans in Libya wanted security bolstered, despite Congressional testimony that the administration had turned down requests. Mitt Romney’s campaign on Friday accused the vice president of trying “to mislead the American public.”
The conflicting statements over security came after the administration’s fluctuating assessments of the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. For President Obama, who had counted on foreign policy as a political strength, the issue has put him on the defensive, while Republicans who had focused on the economy now see a chance to undercut his credibility with the public on national security.
In a sense, the issue goes beyond foreign policy, which has not been a top priority for voters this year, polls show. Instead, Republicans are framing the matter as a larger indictment of Mr. Obama’s leadership and transparency, presenting him as unable to create enough jobs at home or protect American interests abroad, while trying to shift the blame to others. Democrats counter by accusing Republicans of politicizing a national tragedy.
Mr. Romney wasted little time in criticizing the vice president for contradicting testimony about security concerns in Libya. “He’s doubling down on denial,” Mr. Romney said during a rally in Richmond, Va. “And we need to understand exactly what happened, as opposed to just having people brush this aside. When the vice president of the United States directly contradicts the testimony, sworn testimony, of State Department officials, American citizens have a right to know just what’s going on, and we’re going to find out.”
Two officials in charge of security in Libya told a House committee this week that they asked for more security officers but were rebuffed by the State Department. Asked about that on Thursday night during his debate with Representative Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate, Mr. Biden said: “We weren’t told they wanted more security again. We did not know they wanted more security again.”
The White House tried to explain Mr. Biden’s comments by saying that diplomatic security requests were handled by the State Department, not the White House. …
Matthew Continetti on Ryan’s debate.
Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there—how could one miss him, with all the grinning, grunting, interrupting, and sneering. But where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.
What America saw instead was a young and likable and knowledgeable conservative worried about the current trajectory of fiscal, monetary, foreign, and social policy. Where Biden harrumphed, Ryan calmly litigated President Obama’s failed record. Twice in eight days, the caricatures against which President Barack Obama and Biden are purporting to run have been exposed as grotesque exaggerations. The liberal attempt to frighten America with the illusory specter of an extremist Republican ticket dissolved on first contact with, well, the actual ticket. The reality principle asserted itself once again. We have an open race.
Perceptions matter. Why did 67 million people watch the first debate? One reason may have been that Americans, open to an alternative to the incumbent, wanted to know who the Republican nominee actually was. They only had vague knowledge of Mitt Romney going into the Denver bout—and their impression was not favorable.
What they knew was largely limited to the messages of $217 million in negative advertising from Obama and his allies: Romney was rich, secretive, out of touch, paying little in taxes, hiding his tax returns, stashing money in the Cayman Islands, singing out of tune, shipping jobs overseas with little thought of the lives he affected, dismissing out of hand 47 percent of the country, in favor of raising middle-class taxes and health-care costs for seniors, and waging a “war on women” with Todd Akin to “turn back the clock” on women’s rights. …
Here’s Howie Carr’s latest on Scott Brown and the harpy.
… One candidate has $14.7 million worth of investments, but when asked on MSNBC which equities she owned, insisted that she didn’t have any stocks, only “mutual funds.”
One candidate couldn’t name the two years the Red Sox won the World Series in this century, and predicted that the team would win 90 games this year. (They won 69.)
One candidate has a daughter who’s trying to make it as a singer. The other candidate has a daughter who runs a George Soros-backed organization that sued the state to send out prepaid voter registration forms to every welfare recipient in Massachusetts, including illegal aliens.
One candidate has supporters who in Dorchester made Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops like Jane Fonda used to do at Braves’ games, after which he was denounced for allowing “hate speech.” Another candidate’s supporters made anti-gay slurs at a supporter of the other candidate. The Globe pooh-poohed that incident as “inappropriate.”
One candidate has season tickets to the ballet, is a “longtime” member of the Museum of Fine Arts, and once described growing African violets as one of her “favorite pastimes.”
Ask yourself this: Does Mass-achusetts really need a senator who’s even phonier than John Kerry?