By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, October 04, 2012
It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. If you insist,
since the Carter–Reagan debate. With a remarkable display of confidence,
knowledge, and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.
Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a
myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on
frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled
against him — with a three-point rebuttal.
And he pulled off a tactical coup by coming right out of
the box to undo millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads that painted him,
personally, as Gordon Gekko — a rapacious vulture capitalist who doesn’t just
lay off steelworkers but kills their wives — and, politically, as intent on
raising taxes on the middle class while lowering them for the rich.
The Romney campaign had let these ads go largely
unanswered. But a “kill Romney” strategy can work only until people get to see
Romney themselves. On Wednesday night, they did. Regarding the character assassination,
all Romney really had to do was walk out with no horns on his head. Confident,
smiling, and nonthreatening, he didn’t look like a man who enjoys killing the
wives of laid-off steelworkers.
Not a very high bar, I admit. But remember: It’s President
Obama who set the bar. And succeeded. Romney suffers from unprecedentedly high
negatives (50 percent), the highest unfavorability rating at this late date for
any challenger in the last three decades.
As to the policy, Romney finally got to explain to the 60
million Americans watching that he intends to lower taxes across the board,
particularly for the middle class. As for the rich, he got to explain the
difference between lowering tax rates and reducing tax payments. He repeated at
least twice that the rich would continue to pay the same percentage of the tax
burden, while lower rates would spur economic growth.
His success in doing this against a flummoxed Obama does
more than rally the conservative base. It may affect waverers — disappointed
2008 Obama supporters waiting for a reason to jump. They watch Romney in this
debate and ask: Is this the clueless, selfish, out-of-touch guy we’ve been
hearing about from the ads and from the mainstream media?
And then they see Obama — detached, meandering, unsure.
Can this be the hip, cool, in-control guy his acolytes and the media have been
telling us about?
Obama was undone on Wednesday in part by his dismissive
arrogance. You could see him thinking annoyedly: “Why do I have to be onstage
with this clod, when I’ve gone toe-to-toe with Putin?” (And lost every round,
I’d say. But that’s not how Obama sees it.)
Obama never even pulled out his best weapon, the 47
percent. Not once. That’s called sitting on a lead, lazily and smugly. I wager
he mentions it in the next debate, more than once — and likely in his kickoff.
On the other hand, Obama just isn’t that good. Not
without a teleprompter. He’s not even that good at news conferences — a venue
in which he’s still in charge, choosing among questioners and controlling the
timing of his own answers.
By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain.
It was Romney who had the presidential look.
Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term —
so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame
everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger
can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday
night.
Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the
time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering
cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular, and reasonable.
That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was
over.
Romney had to show something a little different: That he
is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the
unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.
That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show
that, by a margin of at least two-to-one, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate
to Romney.
And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only
presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and
ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern
Europe.”
Romney by two touchdowns.
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