Liberal Talking Points (New Yorker): The Ungreat Debate

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/15/121015taco_talk_hertzberg

The Ungreat Debate

by Hendrik Hertzberg

 

During the run-up to last week’s Presidential debate, the congeries of journalists, columnists, bloggers, television commentators, politicians, and “strategists” who collectively craft the conventional wisdom reached a cautious consensus: Mitt Romney would probably do better than expected. Since it is precisely these pundits whose predictions determine expectations, Romney had to do a lot “better than expected” in order to do better than expected. What only a few members of what might be called the expectorate (not to be confused with the electorate) expected was that Romney would do so much better than expected—and Barack Obama so much worse.

 

One who got the forecast right was Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey. On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Christie acknowledged that his party’s nominee had had a rough few weeks. “But here’s the great news for Republicans: we have a candidate who is going to do extraordinarily well on Wednesday night,” he said. “And this whole race is going to be turned upside down come Thursday morning.” Another was Jennifer Granholm, a former Democratic governor of Michigan, now a talker on the cable network Current, Al Gore’s understudy to MSNBC. “The President is going to lose the first debate next week. He will lose it. Mark my words,” she warned, adding this plea: “Mr. President, for the good of the nation, get thee to the debate camp immediately. No more cancellations!”

Romney won; and even more, Obama lost, as surely as if he had cancelled the whole damn thing. The debate drew seventy million viewers, double the audience for the President’s acceptance speech, the previously most watched event of the campaign. Those extra tens of millions necessarily include a great many voters deemed “low-information”—voters whose interest in and knowledge of politics and public policy are, for whatever reasons, small. For these voters, emotional impressions count for more than specific “specifics” (as opposed to a general air of specificity, which they like). Romney was lively; he was relaxed; he was confident. His answers were crisp and well organized. He was plainly enjoying himself. He casually dominated the moderator, the PBS veteran Jim Lehrer, and controlled the pace and emphasis of the discussion. He appointed himself the Commander-in-Chief of the debate, or, at least, its C.E.O. Obama, for his part, looked tired and drawn. He seemed distracted, as if suppressing anxiety. When not speaking, he looked down at the lectern, apparently taking notes, as if afraid he’d forget what he wanted to say. His famous grin, when he flashed it, was mirthless—a rictus, not a sunbeam. He was, plainly, not enjoying himself.

To be sure, impressions are subjective. Anyhow, an incumbent President, if he’s doing his day job, has a right to be tired. What truly dismayed so many Obama supporters, though, was how abjectly their man ceded the battle on the verbal front as well as the nonverbal, the conceptual as well as the emotional. Perhaps he was stunned by the audacity of the challenger’s heroic, and obviously unanticipated, ideological self-reinvention. By the end of the ninety minutes, Romney had retrofitted himself as the defender of Medicare, the advocate of Wall Street regulation, the scourge of the big banks, the enemy of tax cuts for the rich, and the champion of tax relief for the middle class. All these claims are spectacularly false; all went entirely, or mostly, unrefuted. A small example. After Obama noted that “Obamacare” (he has embraced the shorthand, just as the L.D.S. church eventually embraced “Mormon”) saves Medicare seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars in overpayments to insurance companies and providers, Romney accused him of cutting that amount in benefits “for current recipients.” Obama let it go, and Romney taunted him by repeating the charge—not once but five more times. In reply, Obama said little. He did not stress that there are no cuts in benefits to patients, current or future. He failed to point out that these identical savings, to the dollar, are included in the House-passed Republican budget, endorsed by Romney and authored by his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan—and that, while Obama uses the money to expand health-care services for seniors, Romney and Ryan would divert it to high-end tax cuts.

 

Among the other items the President deemed unmentionable were Romney’s dismissal, in a closed talk to wealthy backers, of forty-seven per cent of the population as whiny shirkers incapable of personal responsibility; his refusal to make his tax returns public beyond those for two selected years, both of which put his over-all federal tax rate at fourteen per cent, three percentage points lower than the average rate for someone on a nurse practitioner’s salary; and the rescue of the auto industry, which Romney opposed.

Between Bill Clinton’s Convention speech a month ago and Wednesday’s Obama-Romney debate, “the narrative” of the campaign was about the giddy rise of Democratic morale from depressed and listless to optimistic and energetic, plus the corresponding decline of Republican spirits, abetted by the nominee’s missteps. With his triumph in Denver, Romney has single-handedly reset the dial to neutral. His accomplishment, like Obama’s economic stimulus, is notable less for the gains it promises than for the catastrophes it forestalls. If Obama’s debate performance had been half as strong as Romney’s or Romney’s half as weak as Obama’s, the result might have been a complete collapse not just of the Romney campaign but of the whole Republican project: the House, the Senate, the state legislatures, the fund-raising—everything. That now seems unlikely.

All the evidence indicates that Romney has no “core beliefs” beyond a gauzy assumption that the business of America is business and an unshakable, utterly sincere conviction that he, Mitt Romney, ought to be President, deserves to be President, and, for the sake of the country, must be President. His ideological rootlessness, which excites the mistrust of the Republican hard right, is what makes him the most dangerous opponent Obama could have drawn.

If the rhetorical return of “Moderate Mitt,” as the Times’ David Brooks (or his headline writer) now hopefully calls the Republican nominee, had come at the Republican Convention, conservatives would have raised a ruckus. But by last week the Party’s prospects had grown sufficiently dire that, for the moment, its cadres are grateful for, and energized by, the discovery that their nominee may not be a sure loser after all.

Democrats can no longer credibly portray Romney simply as an extremist, tout court. They now must run against an unknowable, incurable flip-flopper in thrall to an extremist Party—a more complicated thought, but one that has the advantage of being closer to the probable truth. By Thursday, Obama’s mood seemed to have lifted. At a Denver rally, he lampooned his debate opponent as “this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney.” No doubt the President was further cheered by the news that the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.1 per cent to 7.8 per cent. The new statistic derives its power less from its economic import than from whole-number fetishism, but at least Romney can no longer say, as he did on Wednesday, “We’ve had forty-three straight months with unemployment above eight per cent.” Whether or not the debate was a “game changer,” the game has changed. And now, in deadly earnest, the game is on. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell

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