The proof that the president had a bad first debate came in the immediate deterioration of his lead in the polls. I can’t dispute that he did a bad job in the first debate because the evidence in incontrovertible. But understanding what he did wrong is harder to pinpoint. My guess is that it was a combination of things that mostly came down to two. He didn’t have enough energy and he let Mitt Romney be the Alpha Dog. As a matter of substance, Obama did fine. He didn’t commit any gaffes or factual errors or even say anything he had cause to regret. He just didn’t stand up for himself and his record or take on his opponent with sufficient rigor.
Last night’s debate was different for a lot or reasons. The president let himself get pushed around a little bit early on, but not without some resistance. And he eventually found the perfect moment to rope-a-dope Romney into the threshing blades with his comments on terrorism in Benghazi. Thereafter, Obama was the undisputed Alpha Dog of the debate, which was capped by his good fortune in having the final say of the night. If it were a boxing match, Romney was knocked down at least two times and the fight ended with Mitt on the ropes taking a pummeling from the champion. The judges’ cards were not close.
Romney came into the debate with two purposes. First, he wanted to repeat his performance as the stronger male on the stage, which involved bullying the moderator and stealing extra time for himself to speak. This didn’t work as well the second time around for at least three reasons. The town hall format meant that he was stealing time from audience members. The moderator being a woman, his pushiness was more alienating. And the president wasn’t going to let him go unchallenged again.
Second, Romney was less concerned with creating ‘zingers’ than with repeating certain poll-tested themes. He wanted to let people know that he “knows what it takes to turn the economy around” and that he “knows what it takes to create good jobs again.” Through repetition, Romney wanted to burn an impression of economic competence into the viewers’ minds. And he probably was modestly successful in that task. In my personal opinion, his repetition began to have diminishing returns later in the debate because it started to seem non-repsonsive to some of the questions.
The bigger problem with his strategy is being seen this morning on the television. While he was occasionally effective during the debate, no one wants to show him repeating himself five times to demonstrate how he hammered home some theme. All of the debate highlights are either of Mitt Romney making mistakes or of the president blasting him with effective rejoinders. Last night, all the ‘zingers’ belonged to the president.
And, so, it is not hard to know why the president won the debate last night. It wasn’t anything subtle like a lack of energy or apparent desire. It was because Romney committed gaffes and the president delivered big body blows.
Winning the second debate is certainly preferable to losing it, but we shouldn’t expect the polls to snap back to the way they looked before the first debate. Some of the damage caused by the first debate is permanent, and we’ll pay a price for that for the next two years, at a minimum, with smaller margins in Congress. Romney reversed a trajectory that had us easily winning a second term for the White House, picking up seats in the Senate, and probably winning back the House. All of those things are still in doubt because the first debate did not go well.
The president did a fine job of righting the ship last night, but we all still have a lot of work to do to get us back to where things should have been. So, find your local folks and volunteer to help them out in whatever capacity you can. We need all hands on board.
