President Obama and Mitt Romney had their first presidential debate October 3rd in Denver. The consensus was that Romney had a great performance and the president was not at his best.
Prior to the debate, it had looked as though President Obama was running away with the election and the debate was Romney’s last ditch effort to turn things around.
Now it would seem that Romney’s campaign is re-energized and Obama is on the defensive. However, things are not quite what they seem. My reading is that the October 3 debate will prove to be a perversely auspicious moment for the progressive movement and the attempt of the Democrats to keep the White House, maintain a majority in the Senate, and win back House seats from the Republicans.
Americans tend to look at their presidential debates on the model of a spectator blood sport. From this point of view, to win the debate you have to try to establish some kind of dominance in body language, tone, and memorable one-liners. You lose if you show any evidence of discomfort or disgust or don’t match your rival’s jabs with comebacks which show an equal facility in verbal judo. Style matters much more than substance.
From the stylistic perspective, Romney’s performance was clearly better than Obama’s and so he was judged to have won the debate. However, looking at it from a substance point of view, Obama was, at the very least, on a par with the points Romney made.
The president at times seems alternatively confident, bemused, disgusted, and fatigued. He kept the focus on the issues rather than going after Romney’s character. The debate could have degenerated into an exchange of personal attacks but Obama maintained the dignity of his office and didn’t go down that road. He side-stepped the provocations that Romney provided in that respect. He didn’t go after Romney for his 47% comments. That was a smart move because Romney had a mea culpa rehearsed piece he wanted to plug in there.
So how does this debate “setback” actually advance the cause of the Democrats? Republicans are now fully enrolled in a belief that Romney is heading for victory in November. Had he done poorly in the debate, money, effort, and enthusiasm that was designated for his campaign would have been redirected into Senate and House races.
The reality is that Romney is going to lose badly anyway. To win he would need to sweep almost all of the swing states and he’s currently behind in nearly every one of them. Most of the electorate has already made up their mind and he will not have won over enough of the remaining undecided people from a single debate performance. The vast majority of the people who watch these things are partisans there to cheer on their guy, not undecided persons trying to make an informed choice.
Romney may have won the debate on style points but on substance he created problems for his campaign that will in time significantly erode whatever benefit the perception of his performance in the debate gave him.
The Denver debate exposed the sociopathic culture of the entire Romney campaign. Sociopaths are often charming individuals who are skilled in manipulating people by telling them whatever they think people want to hear irrespective of truthfulness. They are very accomplished liars with the ability to tweak an outrageous untruth or a half-truth so that it seems fully credible.
Some of the ads that the Romney campaign has put out contain blatant misrepresentations of this sort. One is about a statement Obama seems to be making about the economy. However, this is not something Obama said himself but where he’s quoting McCain’s campaign from 2008 (“If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose”).
When three of these egregiously misleading ads were pointed out to the campaign by Rachel Maddow on MSNBS, a spokesperson for the campaign replied, “We are not going to let our campaign be dictated to by fact checkers.”
There were plenty of lies and distortions in Romney’s first debate and fact checkers have been busy documenting them since then. However, it takes a while for the truth to filter out into the general voting population and people expect politicians to twist the truth so they are often given much more latitude than we would ever given anyone else in this respect.
But the bigger problem Romney has is that what he was saying in Denver is not logically consistent with positions he’s maintained before and even with other things he said in the evening. The debate was Romney’s etch-a-sketch moment where he reconfigured himself as a moderate in order to appeal to independent voters.
This is not the same man we’ve been listening to for all these months, especially in the Republican primaries. This is a man who seems to be reborn with a new progressive attitude. This new Romney doesn’t want to simply repeal Obamacare. He wants to save some popular parts of it such as the new rules about people seeking insurance who have pre-existing conditions. He now sees the value of federal regulations. There are even parts of Dodd-Frank he wants to keep. “And there are some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world.” He said, “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income individuals.” He also said, “… I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plans to cut education funding and –and grants that go to people going to college.”
Before Romney had proposed a 20% tax cut for everyone. Nonpartisan budget analysts have said that would generate a 5 trillion dollar hole in the budget over a 10 year period of time. Yet now he says, “My number one principle is, there will be no tax cut that will add to the deficit,” and also, “I will not under any circumstances raise taxes on the middle-income families.”
A major feature of his economic plan is to balance the budget. However, since no new taxes are in the offing, the new revenues will have to come from closing tax loopholes and from growth. “Look, the revenue I get is more people working, getting higher pay, paying more taxes. That’s how we get growth, and how we balance the budget.”
If you closed enough tax loopholes to make up a 5 trillion dollar hole, this is going to have to be something that adversely affects the middle class. There just aren’t enough wealthy people to make up the difference through ending deductions for the well off. It would end up being a major back door tax increase for the middle class.
Counting on growth to make up the difference is like saying, “Trust me, this is going to work. You don’t have to worry.”
Romney’s inconsistent positions and promises were highlighted in the Denver debate. After a while the luster will begin to fade from the snake oil he’s selling. Even if you want to believe Romney, the suspicion grows that he can’t deliver on what he said because it’s inconsistent with itself and can’t be effectively applied in the actual world in which we live.
The down ballot Republican candidates will have to decide which Romney they support and which version they want to disavow.
Interdimensional Times 