By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The president of the United States in the last debate
chose to go on the attack against his challenger, Mitt Romney -- and once again
largely failed to convince the American people that he was the more
presidential alternative.
But how did the once-messianic incumbent find himself in
this fix of playing the catch-up role of a bar-room-brawling challenger rather
than a calm and confident president? Despite running ahead in the polls for
most of the year, Barack Obama has rarely achieved a 50 percent favorability
rating, largely because of four years of dismal economic news. Obama himself
had warned us four years ago that if he didn't restore prosperity, he would be
a one-term president -- and the debates taught us that he was probably right.
Promises about halving the annual deficit, getting
unemployment below 6 percent and increasing middle-class incomes were never
met. The recent unrest in the Middle East and the killing of an American
ambassador and three other Americans in Libya did not help convince anyone that
Obama's foreign policy was so successful that they could afford to overlook an
anemic economy.
Yet the American people always wanted a viable
alternative before they admitted their mistake and dumped a president whom they
had voted in with such adulation in 2008. Obama sensed that hesitancy, and so
he spent nearly $1 billion in a largely negative campaign to convince voters
that Romney was insensitive to women, callous to the poor and, in general, a
heartless, out-of-touch capitalist. The implicit message was that even if
Obama's first term had not worked out as promised, Romney would nevertheless be
even worse. The lesser of two evils, not a successful four years, had replaced
hope and change this time around.
But after three debates, voters at last got to know
Romney. What they saw and heard was quite different from the villain of the
attack ads. In the first encounter, even the pro-Obama media came away shocked
that the supposedly aristocratic Romney proved more personable -- and more
knowledgeable -- than the listless Obama. The president showed up as if the
entire debate were a tedious chore -- as if Romney could not possibly win the
debate, and even if he did, it would have no effect on the media or on Obama's
steady lead in the polls.
Instead, Obama's terrible 90 minutes set off a chain
reaction, eroding the president's lead in the critical swing states. In the
fireworks of the second debate, with its town-hall format, Obama came out fiery
and accusatory, and pulled off a tie or narrow victory based on his sheer
aggression -- or on the fact that he at least had improved upon his first
losing debate performance.
The trick for Obama in the second outing was to show
Americans that the first debate had been a freakish anomaly -- and Romney
really was the caricature that had been depicted during months of negative ads.
Yet if Obama won tactically, he lost strategically through his combative
demeanor and the very fact that Romney was not only still standing after three
cumulative hours of head-to-head jousting, but gaining even more ground in the
polls.
This week, the third and final debate offered Obama a
last opportunity to convince the American people that at least on matters of
foreign policy, Romney was either dangerous or ill-informed. That challenge
also ensured that Obama would have to crowd into the final 90 minutes
near-constant attacks to crack the calm Romney facade. Even or ahead in the
polls, all Romney had to do in response was for a third time keep acting
presidential and prove that his earlier displays of composure and competence
were no flukes -- a no-brainer strategy clear to anyone who had followed the
first two debates.
That is precisely what Romney pulled off. As in the
second debate, Obama might have done well enough to come away with a tie or
even a narrow win on points, but he probably didn't fare well enough to reverse
his slide in the polls. If Obama sought to shatter Romney's image as a
compassionate and competent captain of industry, he more likely damaged his own
once carefully crafted image as a nice guy.
So what did we learn from nearly five hours of verbal
gymnastics?
The image of competency and composure that Romney
projected in the first debate was not altered by the second and has been
confirmed by the third.
Presidential debates really do matter, and a few hours of
engagement with Romney may have cost Obama what he had tried to ensure through
six months of attack-dog campaigning. And so in the last 10 days of the
campaign, Obama will have to return to negative advertising -- a last hope to
achieve through personal attacks what he couldn't accomplish through public
persuasion.
If voters conclude that Obama is desperate to demonize
Romney in a way he could not in the fair match of the public debates, then
Obama will probably lose the election.
No comments:
Post a Comment