Latest update April 23rd, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 07, 2012 Editorial
The first debate between President Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney is now over. Debates are now de rigueur in US presidential elections. Maybe it has to do with their idealised ‘town hall’ meetings of yore and might have been kicked off by the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. But it was not until the televised debate between JFK and Richard Nixon in the 1961 elections that they took root.
Maybe it also has to do with the American love for a contest, because the question on everyone’s lips before the debate was even over was, “Who won?” The judgment even from democratic partisans was that Romney “won” and Obama “lost”. The verdict is out on whether this result will have any effect on the elections in November, but everybody points to the fact that most who won the debates subsequently won the elections.
In the run-up to the debate, with Obama holding a firm lead especially in key states, many had concluded that Romney was not in his league. But now that they have stood on the same stage with Romney presenting his programme in a much more fluent and coherent manner than the president, he cannot be dismissed so easily. A leader, after all, must be very clear in his mind on the issues confronting his nation. If he has to pause during a debate to think about the answer to a question, it creates doubts in the mind of voters whether he possesses the requisite clarity of thought to make quick decisions. Obama had many pauses: they might have been intended to show a ‘thoughtful’ president, but if so, the ploy backfired.
But the observation exposes the intense preparation that has preceded the debate: the contest was more between the two teams behind the candidates than the candidates themselves. Most of the answers were carefully crafted to address what each candidate considers to be their key constituents. It has been suggested that both Obama and Romney had their eye on the sliver of voters dubbed ‘undecideds’, who could swing either way. Evidently, Obama’s studied refusal to go aggressively against Romney’s gaffes – such as the tape that showed him describing 47% of Americans as spongers – came out of surveys that suggested those undecideds were turned off by negative campaigning.
Romney cast the election as a referendum on Obama’s first term in office, while Obama cast it as a choice between his plans and those of his opponent. Romney had a wider target to hit against a president who had spent four years in the White House. He held Obama accountable for massive investments in green energy, the growing national debt and weak economic recovery. Obama never asked Romney to defend the Bain Capital record on how he accumulated his immense wealth or his decision to release only two years of tax returns.
While there were a slew of statistics thrown around, most of then flew over the average American voter’s head: they are conditioned to react to soundbites. The image becomes the message. Romney stuck more to this script and refused to get bogged down in details. His task was made easier by Obama’s refusal to aggressively seek clarifications, as for instance from where exactly would savings come from ‘closing loopholes’.
Romney managed to aggressively highlight his top campaign themes, while largely fending off Obama’s demands for details on how to pay for his proposals or safeguard Americans’ health and well-being. It already appears clear that Obama’s cautious strategy was a mistake. In a CBS News instant poll of 523 uncommitted voters conducted shortly after the debate, 46 percent chose Romney as the winner – compared to 22 percent for the president. (The rest thought it was a tie.) And 56 percent now think better of Romney than they did before the debate.
With help from Obama, Romney did the most important thing he had to do: he looked and sounded like a president. He is now a contender.
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