I’m going to take the 2nd paragraph of Jason Zengerle’s post last month about Barack Obama out of context, because I think it applies to Mitt Romney’s actions in the context of yesterday’s attacks on US embassies in Libya and Egypt.
“Three years ago, John McCain reacted to the collapse of Lehman Brothers by suspending his campaign, standing up David Letterman, and calling to postpone the first presidential debate. Obama, meanwhile, kept his head. Even as he engaged in furious negotiations with Hank Paulson and congressional Democrats to hammer out the TARP plan–at one point, according to Jonathan Alter’s The Promise, stepping in between the Treasury secretary and an enraged Barney Frank–Obama publicly exuded calm, staying out on the stump and pledging to show up at the debate even if his opponent didn’t. “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once,” he explained. His steady performance cemented the decisive contrast of the campaign: No Drama Obama versus the Erratic McCain. As Obama’s campaign communications director Anita Dunn later told Alter, “In the ten days between the Lehman collapse and the first debate, everyone suddenly saw him as the next president.””
Based on the evidence of the past 18 hours, I think it’s safe to say nobody is going to write a paragraph like that about Mitt Romney.
Those of us who followed the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign remember lots of talk about the “3 am phone call”, and whether Barack Obama could handle it. McCain’s reaction to the Lehman Brothers collapse demonstrated that, despite decades of military and foreign policy experience, he wasn’t ready for the 3 am phone call. In similar fashion, as James Fallows (among others) points out, Mitt Romney hasn’t handled this 3 am phone call well at all.
For over a year now, the Romney campaign has been defined by its tactical approach—doing whatever was necessary to deal with the challenge of the moment. As a result, despite winning the GOP nomination, Gov. Romney finds himself fighting a campaign being waged on the strategic grounds preferred by Pres. Obama.
By contrast, the Obama campaign has spent over a year preparing to face Mitt Romney. It was Barack Obama who raised Paul Ryan’s profile in Washington, making him the face of the Congressional wing of the Republican Party. More importantly, Obama made Ryan’s budgets the policy agenda of the Republican Party. Obama won’t win this election (if he wins it at all) by the margin Dick Nixon won in 1972, but no incumbent president in the intervening 40 years has done more to pick and define his opponent than Barack Obama has done for 2012.
In reacting (and overreacting) to the events in Libya and Egypt, Romney has tried to gain a tactical advantage. It’s too early to say how this will all play out, but right now it looks like Romney will benefit from his actions today about as much as John McCain did by “suspending” his campaign after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
