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Neal Boortz has some advice.
It’s been a full day since the debate, and I have just one piece of advice for those of you who love freedom: Don’t get cocky.
Spengler on the character test in this election.
The Romney the world saw at last night’s debate — confident, enthusiastic about his ideas, hopeful and articulate — is no stranger to those fortunate enough to have heard him speak in person during the past year. I reported in this space on a primary campaign breakfast in November 2011 where Romney won me over. What changed last night emphatically was not Mitt Romney. What changed is that we finally got to see the real Mitt Romney. The Republican candidate, that is, defined himself against Barack Obama, rather than allowing an overwhelmingly hostile media to define him. And Barack Obama, alone on the stage with his opponent, stripped of teleprompter and fawning media, revealed himself to be a fearful, petulant, petty man. Not only did Romney win; Obama lost.
There has never been a presidential candidates’ debate on national television where the instant polls declared such a lopsided victory (3 to 1 in Romney’s favor according to CNN) — not Kennedy-Nixon, nor Reagan-Carter. Response to televised debates in the past split neatly down partisan lines, so much so that conventional wisdom states that presidential debates simply weren’t a factor in the election. The voters watched the debate and assigned a better performance to the candidate they liked beforehand. Al Gore’s sighs or Richard Nixon’s sweats influenced the electoral outcome in legend more than in fact.
Just because debates weren’t decisive in the past doesn’t mean that this one won’t be decisive now. The most lopsided factor in this election is the character of the candidates. What we saw last night is a unique and unprecedented event in American political history. We have never had a president like Barack Obama, and the American public got its first peek at the man behind the curtain.
Barack Obama is a narcissist and a sociopath, with the skills of persuasion that children abandoned by their parents learn as a survival mechanism. In the adoring light of the liberal media, Obama reflected power and self-confidence — so long as he was in control, and stood in front of the teleprompter. The real Barack Obama is the one who cowered in the Oval Office protected by his Praetorian guard, who declined to hold cabinet meetings or meet with Republican leaders: McBama surrounded by the weird sisters, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice and Michelle. Obama’s greatest strength always has been his greatest weakness, potentially a catastrophic one: he manipulates so effectively because he has a compulsion to be in control. When he knows that he is not in control, Obama is paralyzed. Absent last night were the easy rhetorical flourishes and rock star pose of 2008.
Andrew Malcolm posts on the debate.
… Even though it was night-time in Denver, Gov. Romney handed the ex-state senator his lunch — and it wasn’t one of Michelle’s nutritious school meals either. (Scroll down here for the full debate video. The full transcript is here.)
The president was disappointing. Maybe Obama needs to fire his debate-prep partner, John Kerry, who was such a good debater in 2004 that he blew his own bid for the White House. Obama was awful. He looked and sounded unprepared, listless, in deep water way over his head. What was he doing at that Vegas resort since Sunday, besides visiting the Hoover Dam?
Without a teleprompter feeding him lines, Obama lacked specifics, dissembled, at one point pleading with a deferential moderator Jim Lehrer to change the topic, as if Obama owned the debate. The president, who got four more minutes of speaking time from Lehrer than did Romney, spent much of the debate looking down at the podium, not addressing his challenger.
Devout Democrat James Carville observed, “The president didn’t bring his A-game.” A-game? He didn’t bring his M-game. It wasn’t quite an empty chair, but….
When Obama, who doesn’t bother with many full Cabinet meetings, began touting generalized training for jobs of the future, it was Romney the well-briefed, no-nonsense, rational business executive who pointed out:
“But our training programs right now, we got 47 of them housed in the federal government, reporting to eight different agencies. Overhead is overwhelming.”
At the start Obama looked shocked that Romney spoke to him so directly. Commentator David Gergen, who’s worked in White Houses under both parties, noted that first-term staffs are packed with sycophants. He speculated that no one inside the presidential bubble has talked to Obama that way in years. …
Roger Simon was watching too.
It was a bad twentieth wedding anniversary night for Barack and Michelle Obama. Twenty-five should be better. No irritating debates to deal with. It won’t even be an election year. Maybe they can celebrate with a Mai Tai or two in their new beachfront home on Oahu.
All the networks agreed last night, even the court eunuchs on MSNBC, as did the polls and the focus groups, that Romney won the debate. Obama looked like a warmed-over version of Richard Nixon, shifty and evasive in his answers. But Nixon was always infinitely more prepared than our current president and considerably more informed.
The fuddy-duddy liberal choir of the mainstream media looked shell-shocked. But secretly some of them may actually be relieved. Anyone with an IQ in triple digits knows that Romney would be a better president than Obama with the country and the world in the situation they are. And that probably includes Obama himself, considering the level at which he debated.
If Romney is elected, dad would be back and they (the media) would get to be kids again, living la vida loca while protesting until blue in their collective faces everything Romney does in the coming years. They get to be “against the man” once more. They don’t have to defend the man, such as he is.
A few of these media folks may even subtly throw Obama under the bus – a just deserts since he has done that favor to so many others. We’ll have to see. It did seem to me while watching the debate that even moderator Jim Lehrer, try as he might to help the president, was starting to realize Romney was the better man. Even Ed Schultz and Bill Maher apparently tweeted that Romney had won …
Robert Costa gives us a peek at Romney’s debate prep.
The elements of Mitt Romney’s RockyMountain rout were hatched weeks ago in Vermont’s Green Mountains. In early September, Romney slowed down his campaign schedule and retreated with a small group of advisers to the home of Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor. Ohio senator Rob Portman, a trusted ally, joined Stuart Stevens, Eric Fehrnstrom, Bob White, and a handful of other Romney confidants. They spent days holding mock debates, and nights reviewing President Obama’s stylistic tics. When they needed a break, they roamed around Healey’s secluded estate, which is 100 miles south of Burlington, Vt. But mostly they talked, over hot chocolate and coffee, about how best to communicate Romney’s message.
Portman says Romney’s willingness to fully commit to the prep was striking. Day after day, he’d get up early, exercise, and then join the team for hours of work. Advisers certainly played a role, but according to Portman, it was the candidate who drove his advisers. Even when he had a busy week of campaigning, Romney would always find time to study or hold a brief mock debate. “It was all him,” Portman tells me. “Honestly, I’ve spent a lot of time with Mitt Romney for the past month or so, and what I saw on stage is who he is. He’s smart, he’s articulate, and he’s got a big heart.”
During the opening prep sessions, the group quickly came to a consensus: At the podium, Romney would be forceful, nearly as assertive as he was in Healey’s living room. His advisers have always admired Romney’s ability to peel apart arguments in private, and they encouraged him to do the same at the debate, with a little polish. The goal was to overwhelm the president with liveliness and information, to force him to confront the messy details of his economic and fiscal record. The strategy, sources say, clicked with Romney for two reasons: He did not want to spend hours tinkering with his mannerisms, and he wanted to focus on internalizing data. He’d take advice on his voice, his posture, and the rest, but he wanted his prep time to be a policy workshop.
“This whole thing about ‘zingers,’ I never even heard that word discussed in debate prep,” Stevens says. “If you go back to the history and look at Governor Romney’s 20 debates, he likes policy, he likes substance, and he likes strong arguments that are based on merits and on differences. He’s never been one for debate tricks and sleight of hand.” …
Jonathan Tobin wonders if the Dems are going to draw the wrong conclusions from their debate debacle.
… Democrats know that personal attacks on Romney have taken a huge toll on the Republican in recent months. They have had some success depicting him as a heartless plutocrat who cares nothing about ordinary people and who stashes money abroad while not paying taxes at home. Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe hurt him in large measure because it fit right into the portrait Democrats have been painting of him. But the assumption that the president would have done better had he echoed these nasty and quite personal barbs is faulty. Presidents are supposed to be presidential while leaving the business of carving up their opponents to lesser beings like vice presidents. If Obama’s cheering section in the media thinks getting down into the gutter on stage during a presidential debate is what Obama needs to do, they may soon be proved wrong.
The problem with the president last night wasn’t that he wasn’t nasty enough but the arrogance with which he seemed to regard the proceedings. His body language and long-winded lectures betrayed not just a man who didn’t adequately prepare for the format, but also a man who has no respect for his opponent or the ideas he put forward.
Yet the ultimate problem for the president is not so much what he did or didn’t say; it’s that he gave us a glimpse of the man that Republicans have always claimed him to be: the arrogant liberal poseur who looks down his nose at the rest of us. More than all the videos in which Obama uses racial incitement or talks down individual initiative, the real danger is that on the big stage of the first debate, he came across as less likeable. The stuffy, long-winded bore we saw in Denver is not the historic figure that inspired millions with his messianic promises of hope and change. …
John Hinderaker posts on the debate in Power Line.
… The Daily Mail headlines: “The new Jimmy Carter? Obama slammed by media as even his own supporters trash debate performance after Romney’s crushing win.” Per Drudge, Michael Moore comments, “This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Dennis Miller: “Obama better hope a kicked a** is covered under Obamacare.”
So where do we go from here? My guess is that we will see a slight uptick in the polls for Romney, but don’t expect anything dramatic. It takes time and reinforcement for people’s perceptions to change. Last night was the beginning of a process, not the end.
The remaining debates will be important; more important, I think, than if the first one had not been such a blowout. The pressure will be on Obama to do better next time, and liberal moderators will do all they can to help him. (One reason last night’s debate was so one-sided was that, with the exception of one or two rather feeble efforts to lend Obama a hand, Jim Lehrer stayed out of the way.) …
VodkaPundit liked one of the pictures of the debate aftermath.
Any further comment would just be rubbing salt in the wound — so let’s do that.
We’ve discussed before one of the most difficult things about unseating an incumbent president: He just looks so darned presidential. He has Air Force One, he has a custom Cadillac limo, he even has a marching band at his disposal. This johnny-come-lately trying to unseat him has none of that.
But look at that photo again. Does that man look presidential to you? Does he look like the most powerful man in the world? He’s not even the most powerful man on that little stage, even though the johnny-come-lately came without the jumbo jet or the phalanx of Marines.
But Mitt Romney did show up ready to be President. Obama showed up with — as — the Empty Chair. He stared at his feet. He grimaced. Occasionally a smile would flash on his face, with all the spontaneity of Bush 41′s “Message: I Care.” He was whiny, he was defensive. Worst of all? Empty Chair’s body language didn’t just show contempt for Romney. He displayed contempt for the setting, for the requirement that he be there, and I think it even showed contempt for the office he (still) holds.
Barack Obama is tired of being President. I’m not sure he ever enjoyed it. That is what he brought to the debate last night, and that is why he lost.
Bill Kristol finds a good quote from Jimmy Carter, another debate loser.
A friend notes Jimmy Carter’s diary entry from the day after the 1980 Reagan debate—the last time a Democratic president lost a debate to a Republican challenger:
“He apparently made a better impression on the TV audience than I did, but I made all our points to the constituency groups—which we believe will become preeminent in the public’s mind as they approach the point a week from now of actually going to the polls,” writes Carter.
Leaving aside Carter’s wishful thinking, it’s striking how explicitly Carter confirms Jay Cost’s thesis that the modern Democratic party is a collection of “constituency groups” to be appealed to, and that the leaders of that party think of their job as appealing to those groups rather than speaking to and on behalf of the nation. The experience of Reagan and Romney both suggest that a forceful appeal to the common good can trump constituency group politics.