President has been rehearsing in Las Vegas for showdown with Republican rival, who needs strong display after recent setbacks.
Barack Obama has arrived in Denver for his debate showdown with Mitt Romney, the 90-minute televised encounter that could decide the outcome of the White House race.
The Obama campaign, with polls showing the president ahead in most of the swing states, would be relatively happy to wake up tomorrow morning to reports of an uneventful draw.
But Romney, after week after week of setbacks, needs a strong performance. With a predicted television audience of more than 50 million, the debate offers him one of his last opportunites in sell both his policies and his personality. He has been in Denver since the start of the week, rehearsing.
This will be the 36th of the nationally televised presidential and vice-presidential debates since the first in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. It is the first time Obama and Romney will have come face-to-face in a debate.
With the Denver Post headline describing a ‘Duel In Denver’, a Republican strategist described the debate as Romney’s last opportunity. Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to George Bush, told the Post it is “Romney’s last, best chance to turn things around. He’ll have to exceed expectations by a lot. He needs to have a moment that gets people to view him differently. And he needs to articulate some ideas that people think are credible on the economy. He needs to appeal across the board.”
Romney has been lifted ahead of the debate by the first indications that after trailing badly over the last three weeks, the polls could be beginning to tighten. His campaign team also view vice-president Joe Biden’s remark that the working-class had been “buried” over the last four years of slow economic recovery as an eve-of-debate bonus.
There will be two further presidential debates and a vice-presidential one this month – but the first debates have historically attracted the biggest audience.
Most debates have little impact on the eventual outcome but there have been exceptions, in particular in 1960, and the tussle between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000.
The Denver debate is supposed to be exclusively about domestic issues such as the economy and healthcare, but Romney is expected to try to squeeze in at least some mention of Obama’s handling of the Middle East.
One of Romney’s campaign team, political veteran Ben Ginsberg, talking at a Politico breakfast meeting in Denver, gleefully greeted Biden’s “buried” remark as “a rare moment of truth-telling”.
He said that Obama, as the incumbent, had the advantages of the trappings of office and the luxury of time, in not having to focus earlier in the year on primaries and caucuses. But tonight they will be evenly matched, two very articulate individuals steeped in policy.
Ginsberg expected Romney to flesh out some of his policies. “I think it is fair for people in the last four weeks (of the campaign) to ask for specifics, and we are happy to oblige,” he said.
Romney, under pressure to provide details about his proposed tax policies, attempted to defuse the issue ahead of the debate by saying he planned to limit individual tax deductions to $17,000. A campaign staffer said he will provide more details about the tax plans over the next few weeks.
The president opted to spent his time preparing near Las Vegas. His campaign team, with a reputation as control freaks, did not anticipate any problem with altitude making him listless, flying in from Las Vegas, which is over 2,000 feet, to Denver at more than 5,000 ft.
One of Obama’s campaign team, former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, also at the Politico event, did not view the debate as a battle between the two candidates but an opportunity for both to set out their distinctive policies before such a large audience.
While there would inevitably be some interaction, Gibbs said, “I do not think the president approaches it like a boxing match.”
Gibbs anticipated the president would use the debate as a platform to set out his plans for a second term, including how to create more jobs, double exports, bring back manufacturing to America from overseas and creating a more skilled workforce. “I think this is what you will hear tonight,” Gibbs said.
He predicted the election would be close, noting that Obama, in what he described as “near-perfect conditions” in 2008, had received 53%. There were nine states in play, he said, including Wisconsin. On election night, he identified Ohio and Virginia as the two states to watch.
He dismissed a video of a 2007 Obama speech shown on the conservative website the Daily Caller and Fox on Tuesday night in which he praised his former pastor and criticised the Bush administration for largely ignoring the mainly black victims of Hurricane Katrina. He said it had not been a secret event but one that had been open to the press and had been widely covered at the time.
(The Guardian)
