How decisively did Mitt Romney win Wednesday night’s debate? All
you had to do was watch the most pro-Obama network to see it. “I
personally do not know who won this debate,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow
said as soon as the debate ended. She was obviously the only one
who didn’t know.
When Maddow brought on her colleague Ed Schultz, he moaned that
President Obama “created a problem for himself tonight on Social
Security. He agreed with Mitt Romney.… I thought he was off his
game.” Nor did the president’s performance send a thrill up the leg
of Chris Matthews. “I don’t know what he was doing out there,”
Matthews complained. “He had his
head down. He was enduring the debate rather than fighting it.”
If ever there were a night when conservatives wanted to watch
MSNBC, this was it — an all-you-can-eat buffet of
schadenfreude, as one after another of the liberal
network’s personalities tried to come to grips with what was
perhaps the most one-sided presidential debate since JFK beat a
shifty-looking Richard Nixon in 1960. “In terms of debate tactics,
Romney was on the offense most of the night,” a glum Howard Fineman
acknowledged, while a shell-shocked Chuck Todd admitted that the
result “automatically elevates Romney as a credible alternative”
and later added, in reference to the Obama camp’s post-debate mood:
“They know they lost tonight.”
Everybody knew it. The “flash” polls after the debate by CBS and
CNN both showed that viewers scored it a win for Romney by better
than 2-to-1 margins. John
Hinderaker at the conservative Powerline blog said, “It wasn’t
a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the
beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak,
hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic.” A similar view was shared
by one of Obama’s most ardent fans in the blogosphere, Andrew
Sullivan, who
called the debate “a disaster for the president.” Sullivan
derided the president’s “effete, wonkish lectures,” and concluded:
“Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no
crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there.
He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it
was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment.”
The wrong moment for the Democratic incumbent perhaps, but
absolutely perfect for Romney, who came into the debate after
enduring a month-long media beatdown on his campaign. All the
criticisms of the Republican convention, all the furor over the
“secret video,” all the polls portending doom for Romney — all of
this negativity became suddenly irrelevant in the wake of the GOP
challenger’s decisive debate victory. Romney took charge from the
outset, reacting to Obama’s opening barrage of accusations about
taxes. “I’d like to clear up the record and go through it piece by
piece,” Romney said. “First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax
cut.”
After defending himself, Romney then pivoted to focus onto
Obama’s own economic record. “Under the president’s policies,
middle-income Americans have been buried. They’re just being
crushed. Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down
by $4,300. This is a tax in and of itself. I’ll call it the economy
tax. It’s been crushing. At the same time, gasoline prices have
doubled under the president. Electric rates are up. Food prices are
up. Health care costs have gone up by $2,500 a family.”
It was these facts which flummoxed Obama. He kept trying to talk
about his plans for the next four years, but Romney kept hammering
the president’s record during the past four years, which undermined
Obama’s credibility whenever he offered proposals for the future.
This reality — that the president’s policies have been an abject
failure — did not seem to register with Obama’s supporters on
MSNBC, who afterwards complained about their man’s listless
performance and also tried to blame moderator Jim Lehrer’s handling
of the debate.
Admittedly, Romney scored points for style. He was aggressive,
clear and specific and, in the superficial calculus by which
candidates are measured in the TV age, he certainly looked
presidential. Yet the style would have done Romney little good if
he had not also delivered substance. “You raise taxes and you kill
jobs,” he replied to Obama at one point. “That’s why the National
Federation of Independent Businesses said your plan will kill
700,000 jobs. I don’t want to kill jobs in this environment.”
Later, Romney accused the president of a “trickle-down government
approach, which has government thinking it can do a better job than
free people pursuing their dreams. And it’s not working. And the
proof of that is 23 million people out of work. The proof of that
is 1 out of 6 people in poverty. The proof of that is we’ve gone
from 32 million on food stamps to 47 million on food stamps. The
proof of that is that 50 percent of college graduates this year
can’t find work.”
These are simply facts and, in a setting where Romney could
point out the facts of Obama’s record directly to the people —
with no intervening media filter — the one-sided nature of the
debate perhaps shouldn’t have surprised anyone as much as it did.
But the surprise was entirely pleasant for Romney’s supporters,
including Reason
magazine’s
Matt Welch: “That wasn’t a debate so much as Mitt
Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the
roof of his car.”
It will not be easy for the president to bounce back quickly
from his debate debacle. The next scheduled debate is Oct. 11
between Vice President Joe Biden and Romney’s running mate,
Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, and Obama won’t meet Romney again until
Oct. 16. In the meantime, Romney can expect to be riding a sudden
surge of momentum, while the incumbent Democrat will just as
suddenly find himself plagued by the same kind of gloomy poll
numbers and naysaying criticisms that had hitherto been Romney’s
problem. Of all the turnarounds Romney accomplished in his career
at Bain Capital, perhaps none was so significant as the one he
pulled off in 90 minutes last night.
