Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Presidential Politics Debate Round 3: Sketchy Deals and Womanly Binders
Posted by Bruce Barry on Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 12:25 AM
Second sign that a debate didn’t go very well for your side: when your dominant post-debate spin theme is an obsessive attempt to read earth-shaking subterfuge into an unremarkable short phrase in a presidential statement on a narrow issue that very few people care about. The subject here, of course, is Libya, and it was one of the most heated exchanges of the evening. Taking umbrage at Romney’s suggestion that he wasn’t on the ball right after the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Obama pointed out that he stood in the Rose Garden the next day and said it was an act of terror. Romney, effectively calling the president a liar, insisted that “it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” Obama shot back, “Get the transcript.” What that transcript shows is Obama saying on 9/12: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.” The meaning here and its connection to the Benghazi raid is patently obvious, yet many Repubs were beside themselves after the debate denying this clear semantic reality (for instance, a Karl Rove tweet: “Obama didn’t directly call Lybia attack ‘act of terror’ in Rose Garden — broadly referred to acts of terror”). This is not to say that the Obama administration might not still have a bit of a Libya problem. It is to say that if you're building your post-debate spin on a dubious parsing of words in a month-old statement, it didn’t go very well for your side.
Romney wasn’t uniformly terrible by any means. He offered the usual, and as usual pretty effective, critiques of Obama’s record on domestic economic matters, overachieved on a question inviting him to distinguish himself on policy fronts from George W. Bush, and displayed at times his customary deftness at pivoting from issues raised to Obama jabs.
Certainly Obama benefited substantially from some of the territory covered. Given the corners into which Romney allowed himself to be painted by his party’s primary process on social issues, there is no imaginable debate context in which Romney is likely to come off well on subjects like pay equality, contraception, and immigration. Plus Obama made some adroit preemptive moves. For instance, instead of waiting for Romney to bring up something like Planned Parenthood and use it as a cudgel, Obama went there first, waving PP (appropriately) as a badge of honor in his defense of women’s health issues, then offering it up again later to make the point that Romney on social issues is to the right of George W. Bush. Although lots of spinners tweeted lots of platitudes afterward, I do think veteran Dem Donna Brazile aptly summed up the effectiveness of Obama’s attacks: he “knew Romney’s positions better than his opponent.”
Fourth sign the debate isn’t going well: when you find yourself telling the other guy he should spend more time with his mutual fund statements. Perhaps Romney will be kind enough to lend Obama some binders to store them in.
A version of this post also appears at BruceBarry.net.
Comments (21)
Showing 1-21 of 21
