AS MUCH a verbal brawl as a discussion of policy, the second presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney ended in a draw—at least if points were being awarded to candidates for appealing to their respective bases.
Mr Obama’s supporters longed to see their man improve on his lacklustre performance at the first debate and come out swinging, as he has for months at rallies and on the campaign trail. The president gave Democratic partisans much to enjoy—indeed, if they are the sort to attend his campaign rallies, his finest zingers would have been well-known to them, as he drew heavily on his stump speeches for well-honed attack lines. That alone will feel to many Democrats like a win, or at least a disaster averted. Their man was back in contention, after bafflingly declining to play the debate game on his first try.
The familiar criticisms included attacks on Mr Romney for paying a lower tax rate than many middle-class Americans, for having opposed a government bail-out of big carmakers in Detroit and for his record on women’s pay, contraception and abortion. Mr Obama repeated a low blow levelled by his campaign when he went after Mr Romney for holding investments in Chinese companies, hinting that this was unpatriotic. The Republican attempted to counter the charge, suggesting (probably correctly) that Mr Obama’s pension fund would have made investments overseas and possibly in China. Mr Obama aimed still lower, offering the cheap but effective shot that he did not check his pension fund that often, because it was so much smaller than Mr Romney’s.
Mr Obama was nimble, too, seizing on a mistake by Mr Romney—who over-reached during a discussion of Libya and the murder of America’s ambassador there, (wrongly) accusing the president of failing to call the killing an act of terror for days, then loudly challenging Mr Obama’s rejoinder that he had called it an act of terror almost immediately. “Get the transcript,” snapped Mr Obama, his eyes blazing with contempt.
Mr Romney had presumably intended to make a different point: that the administration had spent days talking up its belief that the ambassador was killed by a mob incensed by an anti-Muslim film made in America, only later conceding that there had been an attack by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda. The Romney campaign has been pounding at the question for days, suggesting that Mr Obama was covering up security blunders at best, and at worst trying to conceal chaos in Libya that exposed American policy there and elsewhere in the Arab world as a shambles.
Mr Obama pounced on the chance to turn icily presidential. “The suggestion that anybody in my team, the secretary of state, our UN ambassador, anybody on my team, would play politics or mislead when we lost four of our own, governor, is offensive,” he declared. “That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.”
In an astute move, Mr Obama waited for his last answer to raise his opponents’ secretly-recorded comments to donors in May conflating the 47% of the country that pays no federal income tax with Mr Obama’s core vote. In those comments, Mr Romney had suggested that such non-taxpayers thought of themselves as victims owed a living by the government. Mr Obama accused his rival of insulting everyone from pensioners to students or soldiers fighting overseas (who enjoy special tax allowances). With time up, Mr Romney had no chance to respond.
Yet Mr Romney will have cheered Republicans too, as he pulled off another forceful, clear, aggressive display, and lashed the president for a long list of broken promises on the economy, concluding with a repeated refrain: “We don’t have to settle for this”.
“If you elect President Obama, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a repeat of the last four years,” Mr Romney said. “We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47m people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50% of kids coming out of college not able to get work. We don’t have to settle for 23m people struggling to find a good job.”
The Republican shored up his party’s advantage in coal-mining and oil-drilling regions, trying to paint Mr Obama as a hand-wringing environmentalist willing to put the lives of a handful of birds ahead of jobs and lower energy prices.
He also aggressively rebutted some of Mr Obama’s attacks on him, once again striding firmly towards the political centre. He boasted about how he pursued affirmative-action policies to fill his cabinet in Massachusetts with women, recalled the universal health coverage he had offered his state’s residents as governor and portrayed himself as a moderate on everything from women’s contraception to immigration.
“I’m not in favour of rounding up people and taking them out of the country,” Mr Romney said, in a nuanced response to a question about the correct approach to undocumented immigrants. Back during the Republican primaries, Lexington marvelled, almost any of the above declarations of moderacy could have seen him rounded up and taken out of the party race.
Instant opinion polls largely confirmed the impression of a draw, with one poll by CNN showing that 46% of respondents thought Mr Obama won, compared to 39% for Mr Romney, a result within the survey’s margin of error. I would not be astonished if conservatives called the moderator of the debate, Candy Crowley of CNN, biased towards Mr Obama, after she fact-checked his Libya blunder live on air, slapping the Republican down, to (unauthorised) applause from the studio audience, who were supposed to stay silent throughout.
Yet the debate was a draw only if the election on November 6th is mostly about who can turn out their base. Both men did enough to fire up their own supporters and enrage their opponent’s.
But if the election is to be decided by independent and undecided voters, especially those women voters who decide late, then it is probably fairer to say that both candidates lost tonight. Their turkey-cocking and stiff necked strutting around the stage, constant interruptions and open disdain for each other could have been calculated to offend those already unimpressed by politicians.
One final group scored a win: undecided voters. In recent weeks, with news reports filled with attempts to find the elusive 10% or less of the electorate not yet corralled into polarised camps on left and right, it has become fashionable to suggest, in an eye-rolling sort of way, that any voter who cannot decide between such different candidates is dim, lazy, unserious or all three.
However, the undecided voters selected by Gallup, the pollsters, to form the audience at tonight’s town-hall style debate put such sneering to shame. Time and again they asked sharp and tricky questions, and made it clear that their indecision was born out of understandable disappointment with Mr Obama’s record, and the vagueness of Mr Romney’s plans on such key fronts as taxation, spending and fixing the budget deficit.
They are right to be disappointed. As the president said, in his best scripted gag: “Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, governor, with a plan that said, ‘Here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion and we’re going to pay for it but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it.’ You wouldn’t have taken such a sketchy deal and neither would you, the American people.”
Yet Mr Romney was also right that Mr Obama over-promised when running for office four years ago and has under-delivered.
A debate on foreign policy is due next Monday. There are weighty questions to discuss but serious arguments about foreign policy are a poor fit with a general-election campaign. Judging by tonight, expect lots of China-bashing and opportunistic sparring over the Middle East.
After that third encounter next week, presidential debate season will be over. Judging by the looks of mutual loathing both men flashed tonight, they will not miss each other’s company.
(The Economist)
