By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Usually after a presidential debate, both sides spin the
results. But after the first face-off between President Obama and challenger
Mitt Romney, Obama's exasperated handlers made no such effort. How could they
when most opinion polls revealed that two-thirds of viewers thought Obama
clearly lost?
Within minutes of the parting handshake, the liberal base
went ballistic. Bill Maher, Chris Matthews and Michael Moore all but accused
Obama of embarrassing the progressive cause. The post-debate spin focused not
on whether the president had been creamed by challenger Mitt Romney, but rather
on how that had been possible.
For a while, there were excuses galore. Was the meltdown
due to Denver's high altitude? Perhaps the president was distracted over
national security issues. Had Obama taken a pre-debate sedative for tension?
Surely the rapid-recall Romney must have sneaked in written talking points on
his Kleenex.
A few days later, there were accusations from the Obama
camp that Romney had been "untruthful" in the back-and-forth -- a
post-facto charge not leveled by the president in the middle of the debate, but
only afterwards in his prepared campaign speeches.
Yet Obama was not that out of character in the debate --
at least not in comparison to his past performances. Obama's professorial
detachment, his condescension, his long meandering answers, his avoidance of
direct questions, his occasional petulance and his frequent verbal tics, stalls
and stutters were all pretty normal for him.
Why, then, the hysteria over a typical Obama performance?
Again, roll the tape of any prior debate, press conference or question-and-answer
session, and what you see is about the same as we saw the other night.
What was radically different was not Obama's normal
workmanlike performance, but two novel twists.
This was the first debate in which Obama has had a record
to defend. In 2000, he ran for Congress in a primary race against Bobby Rush
and attacked the incumbent. In 2004, he ran successfully for the U.S. Senate,
offering all sorts of promises -- but never ran for re-election on their
fulfillment.
In 2008, a blank-slate Obama ran for president and won by
lumping in challenger John McCain with unpopular incumbent president George W.
Bush -- while offering banalities like "hope and change" and
"yes, we can!"
The debate with Romney, however, marked the first time in
his national political life that Obama has had the harder task of defending a
record of governance. That he could not make the case onstage for a successful
four years suggests either that his record is nearly indefensible -- 42 months
of unemployment above 8 percent, more than $5 trillion in new debt, record
numbers of Americans on food stamps, anemic economic growth -- or that Obama
believes voters don't care that much. Perhaps they will again be mesmerized by
his promises of millions of new green jobs, more government entitlements and
more attacks on the better-off who haven't paid "their fair share."
Barack Obama has always felt that it was enough to show
up rather than to achieve. We all know that he got into Occidental College and
Columbia University, was Law Review editor at Harvard, was offered a
professorship at the University of Chicago Law School, and was elected senator
and president. But we rarely heard of a significant record of actual
achievement as a student, academic or legislator -- until his first term as
president.
This was also the first time that Obama has faced a
skilled debater. In Obama's 2000 debate with the plodding Rush, the latter
coasted -- rightly assuming that his long incumbency would be enough to defeat
the so-so challenger Obama.
In the 2004 senatorial race, Obama's main rivals in the
primary and general elections imploded due to mysteriously leaked divorce
records. The last-minute fill-in candidate in the general election, Alan Keyes,
was deemed wacky and not a serious opponent.
Obama ended up mostly achieving draws when jousting with
Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. He won two of the three
debates with nondescript presidential rival McCain by consistently attacking
Bush and blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on Republicans.
In previous debates, Obama sounded not much different
than he did last week against Romney. Obama customarily looked down, gave
disjointed off-topic sermons, and stuttered uncertainly. That did not matter
all that much, given that his youth and professorial air contrasted well with
the inept Bobby Rush and Alan Keyes, and he appeared on camera as a fresh face
in contrast to old, familiar, retread politicos like Clinton and McCain.
Obama's handlers know all this. No wonder what worries
them is not that Obama was off his game against Romney, but that the game
itself -- not Obama -- has suddenly changed.
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