The Final Call

Romney Vs. Obama

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WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - With barely one month remaining before Election Day, President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney faced off in their first presidential debate October 3 in Denver, Colorado.

Going into the debate, President Obama enjoyed across-the-board leads both in national public opinion polls, and in polls in key Electoral College battleground states and former Massachusetts Governor Romney needed a proverbial “knock-out” of the incumbent in order to revive his failing chances for victory on Nov. 6.

The president’s appearance—before a huge live audience of 70 million television viewers—was universally panned, even by his supporters as “lackluster” at best, while Gov. Romney was spirited, even aggressive, giving his supporters such a psychological boost that he might now overcome a months-long slide in his approval ratings caused by his own series of highly publicized gaffes. Mr. Romney’s appearance of victory in the “theatrics” of the debate prevailed, despite numerous charges by fact-checkers and even Mr. Romney’s own admission that much of what he said during the debate was untrue.

President Barack Obama campaigns at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the day after his fi rst debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Romney questioned Obama’s veracity face to face during the debate, and said at one point “you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts” in offi ce. The next day in Wisconsin Obama told the crowd, “You owe the American people the truth,” as if he were addressing Romney. Photo: AP Wide World Photos/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File

For 90 minutes the candidates faced off over taxes, unemployment, economic regulations, Social Security, health care, education, partisan gridlock and other domestic issues. Mr. Romney repeatedly attacked the president’s record, often putting him on the defensive. Many of Mr. Obama’s supporters expressed surprise, even disappointment that he never mentioned several of the Republican’s glaring weaknesses, including his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital, his vast personal wealth and offshore investments, and most especially his recently disclosed remark that 47 percent of Americans are government dependents who support the president’s welfare-state-like policies, and who are unwilling to even attempt to take “personal responsibility” for their own lives, and who therefore are unworthy of Mr. Romney’s attention should he be elected.

The Rasmussen poll found an approval “bounce” for Gov. Romney after the debate. Their tracking poll of the national race, released Oct. 6, showed Mr. Romney with 49 percent to Mr. Obama’s 47 percent, a reverse from just one day earlier which found Mr. Obama with 49 percent to Mr. Romney’s 47 percent. The Rasmussen finding was the “first time Romney has been ahead by even a single point since mid-September.”

“The president missed an incredible opportunity to ‘close the deal’ as far as the American voters are concerned,” Dr. Wilmer Leon, assistant professor of political science at Howard University told The Final Call. “This was, by many accounts, gonna be Romney’s last stand, his opportunity to re-re-re-start his campaign, and unfortunately the president allowed him to do it.

“Romney did bring his ‘A-game,’ for as good as Romney’s game could be. The president allowed Romney to lie repeatedly, (and) did not forcefully challenge a lot of the assertions that Romney was making that have repeatedly been proven to be false,” Dr. Leon continued.

“The president made very little eye-contact with Romney. He kept looking down at his papers, and that gave the appearance of concession or defeat. The president just really seemed to be disinterested, disconnected, flat, and I couldn’t figure out why he did not understand that this was his opportunity to close the deal, and he just didn’t put the guy away. He didn’t mention anything. It just almost really seems to go back to the president trying to be conciliatory,” said Dr. Leon.

A variety of explanations have been offered for Mr. Obama’s appearing distracted. The president opened the debate explaining that it was held on his and his wife Michelle’s 20th wedding anniversary. Many observers noted that he appeared tired, which allowed that Oval Office responsibilities, including working to prevent armed border hostilities between NATO-ally Turkey and Syria from mushrooming into an all-out war may have been weighing on him, even as he was on stage.

Others suggested that Mr. Obama was intentionally deferential to Mr. Romney out of concern that he might otherwise come off as an “angry Black man.” Appearing on MSNBC’s “NOW,” Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson said as much. Apparently, there was a tape released by “The Daily Caller” which was broadcast on Fox News Channel the night before the debate negatively characterizing him, which may have been on the president’s mind, Dr. Dyson said.

Filmmaker Michael Moore apparently agreed, tweeting: “For the past 2 days the Right has been pounding their ‘Obama is an angry black man video,’ did this affect O that he had to appear timid?” Mr. Moore asked rhetorically via Twitter.

On the other hand, many Obama supporters suggested that the debate performance was part of a so-called “rope-a-dope” strategy, similar to the successful boxing technique employed by heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, when he knocked out his bigger and stronger opponent George Foreman to regain his title during their 1974 match. In that fight Mr. Ali was literally whipped for the first four rounds, before rallying, taking charge and then knocking out his opponent in the eighth round.

“These U.S. presidential elections are in part an exercise in psychological warfare,” Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history at the University of Houston told The Final Call. “It’s recognized that there are quite a few of what political scientists call ‘low information voters.’ There are countless voters in this country who have not (made up their minds as to who they’re going to vote for or vote against), in part because they look at elections like sports. They want to be on the winning team.

“Political operatives see it as their mission to create this psychological atmosphere that makes it seem as if their candidate has momentum. I think that the Romney team and the Republican Party operatives did a masterful job in terms of creating this impression that Romney has triumphed in this debate, although if you look at a lot of what he said with a close eye, there are a number of misstatements, there are a number of evasions, some might even say outright prevarications,” said Dr. Horne.

Pundits lauded Gov. Romney’s debate stage-performance, praising his preparedness and ability to challenge President Obama’s policies and accomplishments. But Mr. Romney “only accomplished this goal by repeatedly misleading viewers,” according to Think Progress.org. “He spoke for 38 minutes of the 90 minute debate and told at least 27 myths.”

In one instance Mr. Romney and his campaign acknowledged the very next day after the debate that he had misspoken. Mr. Romney claimed that “half” of the environmentally-friendly green firms in which the Obama administration invested federal funds “have gone out of business” and noted that “a number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.”

Fact checkers quickly pointed out that only a tiny percentage—one percent—of firms that received grants or loans from the Recovery Act have actually filed for bankruptcy. And even the Romney campaign itself stepped back from the candidate’s claim, according to Michael Grunwald, author of “The New New Deal: The Hidden History of Change in the Obama Era.”

“Romney camp told me (after my tweet-rants) Mitt didn’t mean to say half the #stimulus-funded green firms failed. Probably <1% so far,” Mr. Grunwald said in a Twitter message, prompting one Democratic Party analyst to observe that Mr. Romney had been “fact checked by his own campaign.”

The most glaring public retreat by Gov. Romney came during an appearance with Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, also one day after the debate. He was asked what he might have said during the debate had President Obama challenged his infamous, secretly recorded statement: “There are 47 percent of the people … who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims … who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing … My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility.”

Mr. Romney’s Oct. 4 response defied his own earlier insistence that he stood by the “47 percent” remarks. “It’s not elegantly stated, let me put it that way,” Mr. Romney said at a hastily called late-night press conference on Sept. 17 when the recording was released by Mother Jones magazine. “But it’s a message which I’m going to carry and continue to carry.”

Consistent with what a Romney adviser predicted early on would be the campaign’s “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy of erasing past ultra-conservative images during the primary campaign, and redrawing them as a new, more moderate image in order to attract independent voters, Gov. Romney told Mr. Hannity, “Now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right. In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.”

But the Obama campaign made it clear that they’re not dropping their “47 percent” attack just because Mr. Romney is now ready to disavow it. David Axelrod, senior adviser to the Obama campaign, called Gov. Romney’s fresh attempt to wash his hands of the comments “unconvincing.”

“That was astonishing for a whole number of reasons,” Mr. Axelrod said of the Romney response on the CBS News program “Face The Nation” Oct. 7. “The first was, three weeks ago, he was asked this same question and he stood by the essence of what he said.” Secondly, Mr. Axelrod insisted, the “47 percent” remarks were a thought-out argument, not a stray word.

“But when you look at that tape that was behind closed doors, it wasn’t just a comment. It wasn’t just a word. It was a whole exposition. It was an essay on how 47 percent of the country were shiftless people who wouldn’t take personal responsibility for themselves and so on. I mean, he slandered half the country. To say, ‘whoops, I misspoke,’ is a little unconvincing,” Mr. Axelrod said, declaring that most of what Gov. Romney said at the debate was “completely unrooted in fact.”

Mr. Axelrod also promised that his candidate—the president—would review recordings of the first debate in preparation for his next joint appearance with Gov. Romney, Oct. 16 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Mr. Obama’s “timidity” is one element that is likely to be absent from the next debate.

“Within a certain segment of the U.S. population, there were those who were willing, and were hungry, for this idea that Mr. Obama would be put in his place, and of course I’m choosing my words carefully, because I do think there was a kind of antebellum overtone to that kind of notion,” Dr. Horne said of the debate’s tone.

“Obama always has to walk a tightrope. If you look at recent history, you may recall that one of his calling cards as he was being catapulted into prominence as a national figure, was that he was a Black man who was slow to anger, who was not aggressive in the way that Black men are perceived to be aggressive, and that he has created this persona of likeability which in the end I think, will serve him well. Apparently, that kind of likeability quotient also plays well with a segment of women voters as well.

“So, I would imagine that Mr. Obama’s handlers are quite sensitive to this perception of being overly aggressive against Mr. Romney’s charges, but I would imagine that in this second and third debate that Mr. Obama is going to re-calibrate because the publicity has been so negative with regard to his performance…that it’s going to force a change in how he approaches these upcoming debates, and he’s going to probably risk his likeability quotient in order to challenge Mr. Romney’s evasions and misstatements and prevarications,” Dr. Horne continued.

“I still think that Mr. Romney has some real challenges. He has an uphill climb. No matter what he does in this debate, the fact of the matter is that he has a problem with Latino voters, and changing his position in the last few weeks before the election on some provisions of the Dream Act, and some provisions on immigration, I don’t think is going to change that particular reality.

“At the same time, I think that Mr. Romney’s most profound challenge is that he’s not really able to attack Mr. Obama’s weaknesses,” Dr. Horne explained. “For example, if Jill Stein of the Green Party were in the debates, she would be able to make rather telling points about how the U.S. administration has bailed out bankers and not necessarily home owners, for example.

“If Jill Stein were in the debates, I’m sure—or at least I would hope—that she could make telling points about this disaster that’s unfolding in Libya, which is becoming the new Afghanistan in Africa. It is a war that did not have to be fought and is turning into a first class catastrophe, and Mr. Romney is not in a position to make those points, because a central part of his coalition is represented by the military hawks who lust after war—particularly wars of aggression that are fought in places like Libya, and so therefore Mr. Romney cannot attack that particular stumble by Mr. Obama from the left.

“So, I think that the media might be sort of trying to create this idea that Mr. Romney is making a comeback, and given the fact that we’re talking about psychological warfare, they may even have an impact on voters, convincing the voters that there is a comeback by Mr. Romney. But at the end of the day he’s going to have a very steep and uphill climb, because of the stumbles that he’s made before today, particularly with regard to Latino voters,” Dr. Horne concluded.