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Krauthammer on the debate.
… By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.
Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.
Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.
Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.
That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least 2 to 1, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney.
And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”
Romney by two touchdowns.
… Barack Obama, perhaps the most self-confident person to occupy that office in our lifetime, was always skating along the edge of a cliff of self-destructive arrogance. No other president would have thought to berate the members of the Supreme Court as they sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech. The famous GeorgeWashingtonUniversity speech in which he ridiculed his Republican partners in the deficit-negotiation talks, who had come to the speech expecting to hear a policy response, was another sign of potential danger.
And finally there was the report a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama did not respect Gov. Romney and did not consider him competent to be president.
This is a president, dismissive and condescending to any opposition, who went into that debate in Denver and essentially got his head handed to him by a better-prepared opponent.
What was especially damaging to Mr. Obama is that when it became clear early in the initial discussion of tax policy that Mitt Romney was going to take his argument to a deeper level, the president’s response was essentially to start cutting and pasting stock lines from speeches he’s been giving for years. After awhile, he looked like a guy who was rummaging through a drawer for old audio cassettes. “The oil industry gets $4 billion a year in corporate welfare.” He even rolled out the corporate jets.
The president sounded like someone who had simply run out of ideas. His challenger was elaborating detail on his policies, and the president was the candidate living in the past. His references to what he would do with a second term were minimal. Instead, he had to spend most of the 90 minutes trying to defend his policies from Mr. Romney’s critique.
This was most notable on the biggest issue of all— the future of ObamaCare. Mr. Obama’s defense of the 15-member review board came down to citing some process reforms at the Cleveland Clinic. Gov. Romney immediately turned that around as an example of a private institution experimenting its way toward new ideas—a difference of policy and philosophy. …
… For a guy who supposedly gives wonderful speeches, he rarely persuades the un-persuaded or inspires those he didn’t already have at “hello.” That’s partly the fault of his speechwriters, who always did him the disservice of producing the kind of pedantic and clichéd boilerplate that Obama mistook for soaring oratory. He thought he smashed through the Democratic primaries like a battering ram through concrete when he mostly pushed on open doors.
As president, he’s convinced himself that he is a policy wonk with a deeper understanding of the machinery of government and the mysteries of the economy than even his advisors. And yet he had to learn on the job that “shovel-ready jobs” were magic beans sold to him by party hacks hungry for pork. He bought a stimulus that only stimulated political cronies. In the debate, he touted windmills and solar power as the energy sources of the future as if he still honestly believes that.
The media’s infatuation with Obama and/or their contempt for his critics only served to reinforce his delusions. When the press laughs at all of your jokes and takes your glib excuses as profound insights, the inevitable result is a kind of flabby narcissism. Kings can be forgiven for thinking they are the greatest poets when the court weeps at their clunky limericks.
The Obama who delivered a shockingly lackluster convention speech last month is the same man who walked into that Denver stadium in 2008 to rapturous approval. The man who lost the debate Wednesday night is the same man who never managed to make Obamacare popular after more than 50 speeches and pronouncements on it in his first year.
The key difference now is that the hunger for Obama has been replaced with the indigestion that follows after four unimpressive years in office. In sales, they say you sell the sizzle, not the steak. In 2008, the man was all sizzle, and the ravenous throng was sold. Now he must sell the steak itself, and it’s full of gristle, fat and bone. He may yet still close the deal, but only if people fall for his Puss in Boots eyes.
Keith Koffler at White House Dossier blog has more on the president that didn’t show up.
… Obama, who was barely present onstage last night, was the same president who has been failing to show up for years.
He’s the man who can’t be bothered to tackle entitlement reform, to keep his promises on immigration, to negotiate a Middle East peace deal, to remind Americans that we are at war, to meet regularly with members of Congress, to meet with any world leaders at the UN last week, and to put away his golf clubs.
Last night, he couldn’t be bothered to debate. And today, the Obama campaign is feeling very bothered indeed.
In light of the Obama debate failure, Fred Barnes has a, now ironic, piece on the bias in the media. Maybe they will be too embarrassed now to continue.
The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”
Neither of the stories, to put it mildly, was helpful to Romney’s presidential campaign. The piece in Time was fair, but the timing, long after Mormonism had faded as a factor in the election, was suspect. In Newsweek, Obama was lionized, while Romney and Republicans were treated like hyperpartisan right-wingers.
My point in citing the newsmagazines is not that they’re colluding to reelect Obama. They don’t have to. It comes quite naturally to these pillars of the mainstream media to elevate issues with a pro-Obama tilt. And they’re not even the biggest contributors to the liberal bias that has dominated media coverage of the presidential race.
The bias has been so massive, palpable, and unprecedented that the scales have begun to fall from the eyes of a few stalwarts of the media establishment. Obama, Mark Halperin of Time noted last week, “has been covered as a candidate, rather than as an incumbent whose record needs to be scrutinized.” As you might suspect, this coincides neatly with the president’s reelection strategy.
The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman has suggested the media have all but given the president a free ride. …
A perfect illustration of the rush to make amends is the New Yorker cover due out today. Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail notes the significance of the cover showing Romney debating an empty chair.
… For the liberal ‘New Yorker’ to carry such a cover is all the more remarkable because David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, is an admirer of Obama who wrote a positive and well-received book on the President entitled ‘The Bridge’.
The cover – and Obama’s debate performance – could be seen as a degree of vindication for the Romney advisers who gave Eastwood a prime-time slot on the final night of the Republican convention in Tampa and allowed him to ad-lib his speech.
At the time, senior Republicans were livid with some calling for top Romney aides to be fired. But although Eastwood’s improv show was panned by the media, he appears to have created an enduring motif representing Obama – and one that has now been embraced to a large extent by the liberal establishment.
Senator Blutarsky blogs on what we might see in the next debates.
It seems fair to say that most of us on the right were pleasantly surprised by the result of the first Presidential debate, Wednesday evening, if nothing like so shocked as the mainstream media or the Obama fluffers at MSNBC.
In 2008, Obama got to debate John McCain. The acclaim for his campaign has always struck me as over the top in light of that fact. And on Wednesday night we saw what Obama looks like in a debate where the dessicated and ineffectual old man in the room in not his opponent but merely the moderator.
From where I’m sitting, the best thing about the outcome of the first debate is how it sets Mitt Romney up for the second debate. Like a power pitcher behind in the count, Obama is under pressure to bring the heat, but he’s got to be exceedingly careful about how he does it.
Obama’s most fervent partisans want to see him become much more aggressive in attacking Romney, and after seeing the reviews of his performance in the first debate, Obama is probably happy to oblige. And therein lay the danger.
The upside, from Obama’s perspective, of his performance on Wednesday night, was that it kept his natural churlishness in check. He smirked, and offered other tells, but mostly you had to be looking for them in order to notice. In going after Mitt Romney aggressively, Obama risks showing Americans a side of his personality that he’d be better off hiding.
Simply put, Barack Obama is a smug prick. He is not used to being challenged, and is prone to react badly when it happens. The more effectively he conceals this, the better off he’ll be, but he is now under pressure to adopt a debate posture that risks highlighting it.
In this way, the town hall format of the second debate may work to his disadvantage. …
There are, of course, many other things happening in the country. We apologize for the singular focus on the campaign, but there is little more important than sending the fool packing. A good illustration of that, is the dire straights of black men in the country. If Obama had turned out to the president we all hoped for, he might have turned his attention to this problem. Bloomberg/Business Week calls it to our attention.
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.
That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.
On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Pettit said, “there was hope that perhaps the U.S. was becoming a post-racial society.” But it wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The gap between blacks and whites remains wide in employment, income, wealth, and health. And as Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch reported earlier this month: “The nation’s first African-American president hasn’t done much for African-Americans.”
The unemployment rate and the employment-to-population ratio reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on a survey of households—people “who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.” …