by John Cassidy from The New Yorker
The skinny bookworm who sits in the front row can duke it out after all.
All you have to do is call him a wuss, get the class bully—the Barber
of Cranbrook—to taunt him and threaten to take away his personal plane,
the one with its own conference room and O.R. Then, he comes out like
Jake LaMotta, eyes flashing, gloves up, his malicious intent plain for
all to see. Nobody could accuse him of having failed to do his prep for
this one. Like Muhammad Ali, after being embarrassed in his first bout
with Leon Spinks, he had put in the hours skipping rope, and rehearsed
his combinations until he could unleash them at will, from all angles.
Enough of the boxing metaphors. Truly, though, it’s hard to avoid them.
With the opinion polls turning against him and many of his supporters on
the verge nervous breakdown, Obama desperately needed to put in a
strong performance, and he did. An instant poll of uncommitted voters
from CBS News, thirty-seven per cent said he won; thirty per cent said
Romney won; and thirty-three per cent called it a tie. A poll of
registered voters from CNN showed Obama winning by forty-six per cent to
thirty-nine per cent. Coming out on top by seven per cent—the margin in
both polls—is hardly an overwhelming victory, but, as they say in
sports, a win is a win, and the Obama campaign will take it.
Just as important as the results in the instant polls was the fact that
the overwhelming majority of the pundits proclaimed the President the
victor. Even Charles Krauthammer and Laura Ingraham said that he won on
points. With this type of unanimity, the media narrative for the next
few days, which is at least as important as the debate itself, will run
in favor of Obama and against Romney. The G.O.P. candidate, rather than
being praised for having delivered a strong indictment of Obama’s
economic record—the CBS News poll showed that sixty-five per cent of
viewers thought he won the economic exchanges, against just thirty-seven
per cent who thought Obama did—will be criticized for his blunders on
Libya, guns, and women. (Amy Davidson has more on those.)
Whether this will be enough to halt Romney’s momentum in the polls
remains to be seen: it certainly won’t help him. Next week’s final
debate will be devoted entirely to foreign policy, which, as we saw last
night, is hardly Romney’s strong point. For what it’s worth, and it’s
not very much, the online-prediction markets, such as Intrade, suggested that Obama’s chances of winning increased by a couple of per cent during the debate. (At the British bookmakers, he remains a firm favorite.)
Still, this is a close race, and one in which Obama could ill afford
another slipup. From the very first question, which was about how to
create jobs for college graduates, he went on the attack, not even
bothering to follow his opponent’s lead and thank Hofstra University,
the Commission on Debates, or anybody else. This was a President on a
mission, with no time for diplomatic niceties. After briefly laying out
his own plan to boost manufacturing, invest in education, and reduce
dependence on foreign sources of energy, he went for the jugular,
accusing Romney of having wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt; saying he
had a “one-point” economic plan—“to make sure that the folks at the top
play by a different set of rules”—and lambasting the manner in which
Romney made his fortune at Bain Capital, noting, “You can invest in a
company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions,
and you still make money.”
That was all before the second question, which was about energy policy. I
swear I could hear liberals and Democrats all across the city—make that
all across the country—leaping to their feet and shouting, “You go,
Barack!” This was the Obama they had been looking for in Denver a couple
of weeks ago, only to find some listless fellow who was evidently still
sulking about having to miss an anniversary dinner with his wife. And
he kept it up all night, taunting Romney about his low tax rate and the
size of his pension; pointing out how he had changed his policies on
issues like energy, immigration, and gun control; and zeroing in his
biggest policy vulnerability: the fuzzy math underpinning his plan to
cut income taxes across the board by twenty per cent while somehow
balancing the budget:
Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend seven or eight trillion dollars, and then 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 take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.
The debate organizers’ plan was to have thirteen questions and
follow-ups. As usual, things got a bit backed up, and they got through
eleven. On my scorecard, I had six rounds for Obama, two for Romney, and
three tied. Romney’s wins came early, and they were both in answers to
questions about economics. He vigorously attacked Obama’s record on
energy, as he always does, and he calmly but effectively dissected the
President’s economic record, repeatedly pointing out how he had failed
to live up to the pledges that he made in 2008.
Half an hour in, I noted down that Obama was ahead, but not by very
much. Then Romney, in answering a question about the disparity in wages
between men and women who do the same jobs, pointed to his record of
employing women in senior posts when he was the governor of
Massachusetts. Except he put it like this: “I went to a number of
women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought
us whole binders full of women.” I knew that one would cause an uproar
on Twitter, and it did. By the end of the debate, there was already a Facebook page and a Tumblr with the name “bindersfullofwomen.”
If that was embarrassing for Romney, his misstatement about Obama’s
reaction to the deaths at the American consulate in Benghazi was even
more serious, if only because it is the sort of thing that journalists
seize upon. The question itself, from an audience member named Kerry
Ladka, was potentially a very damaging one to the President: “Who was it
that denied enhanced security and why?” After Obama patently failed to
answer the question, Romney should have shoved it right back at him.
Instead, he accused the President of failing to call the killings a
terrorist attack for fourteen days, when Obama, in his appearance in the
Rose Garden a day after the killings, had clearly said: “No acts of
terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that
character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
Was this just a silly error on Romney’s part? Was he badly briefed? We
may never know. But after Candy Crowley, the moderator, politely but
firmly corrected him, he seemed shaken. In answering the next question,
about assault weapons, he went even further off track, appearing to
suggest that the real cause of violent crime was single parenthood. And
in answer to the final question of the night, which gave him a chance to
correct any misperceptions about his character, he invoked his
notorious remarks about “the forty-seven per cent” by saying, “I care
about one hundred per cent of the American people.” Just a few minutes
earlier, Mia Farrow had tweeted:
“Mr President please squeeze in the 47%.” Now Obama had his
opportunity, and it didn’t even seem staged. (I am pretty sure he would
have brought it up at the end anyway, so Romney wouldn’t have a chance
to respond.)
By then, Obama supporters were already celebrating. “The President came
out and was the President of the United States tonight,” said Van Jones,
the environmental advocate and former Administration official. “Game,
set and match Obama,” tweeted Andrew Sullivan,
the Thatcherite conservative turned online liberal conscience, who had
pilloried the President after his performance in Denver. “He got it; he
fought back; he gave us all more than ample reason to carry on the
fight.”
On Twitter, somebody pointed out that it won’t be Sullivan who decides
the election: it will be the voters, and the precinct workers on both
sides who shepherd them to the polls. That is true, of course. After
last night, though, the Obama campaign will be quietly confident that
the internal dynamics of the campaign once again favor the incumbent. It
will be a few days before we can tell for sure whether they are right.
Photograph by Anthony Behar/AP.