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Toby Harnden posts on Monday’s debate.
If you had been on an extended vacation for the past four years, you would have been forgiven for watching this debate and thinking you were viewing a President Mitt Romney being challenged by a pretender called Barack Obama.
Obama, although clearly in command of foreign policy issues, clearly came into the debate believing he had to score points and change the dynamic of the race.
In short, Obama started the 90 minutes here in Boca Raton, Florida believing he was losing his bid for re-election.
Romney, by contrast, felt he could play things safe. He was a kinder, gentler presence than he was in the second debate in Hempstead, New York, when he fought back hard against a hyper Obama desperate to make up for his catastrophic performance in the first showdown in Denver.
By and large, Romney succeeded in Boca. He came across as knowledgeable and reasonable and made no mistakes. In short, he passed the commander-in-chief test.
Having proved in the first debate he had the backbone, policy expertise and determination to try to tackle America’s economic woes, tonight he showed that he was a plausible commander-in-chief. It was not an especially high bar, but he cleared it.
Obama entered the debate hall armed with a number of pre-cooked zingers and lines that he deployed adroitly. But at this stage if the campaign an incumbent President should be on a higher plane, looking down on a pipsqueak opponent daring to challenge the most powerful man in the world.
When he should have been going big, Obama went small. At one point, he said: ‘The fact is, while we were coordinating an international coalition to make sure these sanctions were effective, you were still invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the Iranian oil sector.’
This was the kind of ‘oppo’ point that a lowly apparatchik in Obama’s Chicago headquarters should have been firing out via Twitter. Instead, the leader of the free world was using it in answer to a question about the Iranian nuclear threat. …
Jennifer Rubin has ten debate follow ups.
In the aftermath of the last presidential debate, we can draw a number of conclusions from the candidates’ behavior and rhetoric.
1. President Obama is in some state of duress, realizing he lacks an agenda. His repackaged binder of ideas got a thumbs down from the skeptical media:
2. The president didn’t attempt in Monday’s debate to respond to Romney’s citations of Obama apologies or to his jab about telling Russian leaders that he’d have more “flexibility” after the election. Plainly, the Obama team doesn’t have a good argument for those points, neither of which it wants to spend much time debating.
3. Obama hit the campaign trail immediately and invoked the “Romnesia” taunt. After a test debate in which he repeatedly tried and failed to bait Romney, it is telling that he remains stuck on these juvenile barbs.
4. Republicans are capitalizing with statements (and ads sure to follow) on Obama’s slam against rebuilding our Navy. As a political matter, the Romney camp sees this as a significant gaffe for the president in places like Newport News.
5. As in the town-hall debate, the Romney camp thinks the moments when Romney looked straight into the camera to lay out his agenda are compelling for undecided voters. …
Mark Steyn comments on the binder BS.
So the other morning a reader emails me a picture of a handful of women demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party – in what we expert analysts round about this point in the quadrennial election cycle like to call the critical battleground of the BuckeyeState. The women each wore two giant pieces of cardboard, front and back. Ah, I thought, a timely protest. These activists understand that, with Obama’s flatline economy drifting inexorably to a $20 trillion federal debt, we’ll soon be living in cardboard shacks in shanty towns in the parking lot of the bankrupt Solyndra factory. Or it’s what they’ll be using for the X-ray plates at your local hospital once the Obamacare rationing kicks in. Or maybe it’s the perfect visual metaphor for the flimsiness of U.S. government security at its Middle Eastern embassies before the “Death to the Great Satan!” crowd punched through the compound like so much soggy cardboard.
But no. The women were chanting “Equal rights, not binders,” and they were protesting the following remarks by Mitt Romney at the presidential debate:
“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our Cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”
Yes!!!!!!! With one bound, Obama was unbound! Romney had just made the worst presidential-debate gaffe since Gerald Ford declared there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In the previous weeks, Obama had attempted to have a serious conversation with the citizenry, as befits the electoral process of a mature republic. He had raised the critical questions of our time – free contraceptives for middle-aged coeds, the outrageous right-wing Muppophobic assault on Big Bird – but the public had failed to bite. Now, in one fatal error, Romney had handed him the winning issue: binders!
On the stump, Obama is a man reborn. At a campaign stop outside Cedar Rapids – in what we expert analysts like to call the critical battleground of the HawkeyeState – the president declared: “I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women.” No, sir! In the Democratic Party, driven young women are dropping into your lap. At the Island Grove Regional Park Exhibition Hall in Greeley, Colo., Joe Biden told the crowd: “When Gov. Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.” The crowd roared its approval. “What I can’t understand,” continued the vice president, “is how he has gotten in this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women.”
Yes, indeed. Romney wants to return us to the 1950s, when a woman’s place was in the binder, when every predatory male had his little black binder, and condescending misogynists would interview applicants for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and smirk, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your binder…” …
Excellent City Journal article on the Walter Duranty Awards. The author also points out some of the outstanding journalists in action today.
I recently attended the Walter Duranty Awards for Journalistic Mendacity, a highly entertaining event aimed at calling attention to the past year’s most egregious instances of mainstream-media bias. Sponsored jointly by The New Criterion and PJ Media, the awards are named after the most notoriously corrupt journalist of all time: the New York Times Moscow correspondent, Soviet apologist, and 1932 Pulitzer winner who pushed the Stalinist line that reports of the great famine in the Ukraine—brought on by forced collectivization and causing an estimated 6 million deaths—were nothing more than “malignant propaganda.”
Needless to say, many contenders vied for the Duranty. …
… it strikes me that conservatives might also go out of their way to honor other journalists: the relative handful in the mainstream media who diverge from the pack to commit fair-minded journalism. Because these reach an audience not generally accessible to Fox News, talk radio, and other right-of-center media outlets, they often have a considerable impact on general perception. More to the point, in a business in which the overwhelming majority of their peers are committed liberals—and in which the aim is more to impress fellow journalists than to inform viewers or readers—it can take genuine courage to break ranks.
Who are some who have lately distinguished themselves in this regard? There’s Gretchen Morgensen, the Market Watch columnist for the New York Times and coauthor of Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, about the origins of the housing meltdown. Morgensen plays it straight down the middle, not hesitating to name names on either side. Indeed, the most villainous figure in her book is former Fannie Mae CEO James A. Johnson, a longtime Democratic operative.
Then there’s Jake Tapper of ABC News. Beginning his current tenure as the network’s senior White House correspondent by breaking the story on Tom Daschle’s non-payment of taxes that killed Daschle’s appointment as Health and Human Services secretary, Tapper has since distinguished himself by his tenacity in pursuing stories that others shy away from. Indeed, his pointed, discomforting questions to Press Secretary Jay Carney often seem a rebuke to reporters around him sitting on their hands in the White House briefing room. “Given the fact that so much was made out of the video that apparently had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on Benghazi, that there wasn’t even a protest outside the Benghazi post,” he recently asked Carney, “didn’t President Obama shoot first and aim later?”
No reporter has been more intrepid in reporting on the turmoil in the Middle East, from both the battlefield (and, horrifically, Cairo’s Tahrir Square) and the home front, than Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent of CBS News. …