DiscussMormonism.com

If you had been on an extended vacation for the past four years, you would have been forgiven for watching this debate and thinking you were viewing a President Mitt Romney being challenged by a pretender called Barack Obama.

It's not that Obama did not have command of foreign policy issues or did not make some telling points against an opponent who was vague at times and occasionally uncertain. But Obama clearly came into the debate believing he had to score points and change the dynamic of the race.

In short, Obama started the 90 minutes here in Boca Raton, Florida believing he was losing his bid for re-election.

Romney, by contrast, felt he could play things safe. He was a kinder, gentler presence than he was in the second debate in Hempstead, New York, when he fought back hard against a hyper Obama desperate to make up for his catastrophic performance in the first debate in Denver.

By and large, Romney succeeded in Boca. He came across as knowledgeable and reasonable and made no mistakes. In short, he passed the commander-in-chief test.

Having proved in the first debate he had the backbone, policy expertise and determination to try to tackle America's economic woes, tonight he showed that he was a plausibe commander-in-chief. It was not an especially high bar, but he cleared it.

http://harndenblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/10/obama-may-have-won-the-debate-battle-tonight-but-he-knows-he-is-losing-the-election-war-to-romney.html

After the debate, the demeanours of the two campaigns - just as those of the two candidates - were instructive. Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina was nervous and babbling, saying again and again that Romney has been "uncertain and unsteady" and insiting: "Romney did not look like a commander-in-chief. He did not pass the test and that's a very bad moment for the Romney campaign."

There were certainly criticisms that could be levelled at Romney's performance. At times, his repeated talk of peace and even the need for "gender equality" in the Middle East seemed like a humourous skit about a bellicose Republican pretending that he was a touchy feely guy after all.

But the Obama campaign spin, like the Obama lines in the debate, was obviously pre-cooked -what Messina was saying had been sketched out before the debate had even taken place.

By contrast, the Romney aides were relaxed, some of them almost serene. They felt that the race was going their way and the trajectory had not been changed by the night's proceedings.

Their man had stuck to the plan of coming across as reasonable, even-tempered, magnanimous - he agreed with Obama far more often that most conservatives would have liked - and competent. In short, as the kind of candidate who would be entirely acceptable to a late-deciding swing voter who might have voted Obama in 2008 but since soured.

Chief strategist Stuart Stevens was smiling and full of wisecracks. Eric Fehrnstrom, a Boston bruiser and enforcer within Romney's inner circle was roaring with laughter at the ideas of starting a #bayonetsandhorses Twitter campaign to rival the Obama campaign's much - and rightly - mocked "BigBird, #binders and #Romnesia.

"Mitt's on the march across the map," he said, intimating that Romney would be visiting Wisconsin - previously thought to be safely Democratic - and perhaps even Pennsylvania and Michigan in the final fortnight. "He's like General Sherman."

In an argument that was echoed and amplified around the liberal twittersphere yesterday, New York’s Jonathan Chait made the case that the Romney campaign has bluffed the press into covering the last two weeks of the campaign as though Obama’s losing. Like George W. Bush in 2000, who famously (and probably foolishly) campaigned in California to lend himself an air of inevitability in the closing days of the campaign, Team Romney’s current brash confidence is designed to persuade the media to overlook the underlying numbers that still point to an advantage for the incumbent. And it’s working, Chait argues: The “widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead,” he writes, “is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.”

I agree with Chait that the numbers still show Obama with a slightly clearer path than Romney to an (excruciatingly narrow) electoral college victory. But if you’re looking for a reason (besides, of course, the national polling showing an ever-so-slight Romney edge) why the media narrative has tilted toward the Republicans over the last week or so, I think the Romney campaign’s guarantee of victory has mattered much less than the Obama campaign’s recent aura of defeat.

Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his air of inevitability, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election. A winning presidential campaign would not normally be hyping non-issues like Big Bird and “binders full of women” in its quest for a closing argument, or rolling out a new spin on its second-term agenda with just two weeks left in the race, or pushing so many advertising chips into dishonest attacks on its rival’s position on abortion. A winning presidential campaign would typically be talking about the issues that voters cite as most important — jobs, the economy, the deficit — rather than trying to bring up Planned Parenthood and PBS at every opportunity. A winning presidential campaign would not typically have coined the term “Romnesia,” let alone worked it into their candidate’s speeches.

Now this is not a normal re-election campaign. When incumbent president win, they usually expand their original majorities, but barring a completely unexpected polling shift, Obama’s 2008 majority will shrink no matter what. He’s been running a heavily negative campaign from the beginning, and the late-game approach has only accentuated aspects of the White House’s strategy (the focus on social issues, the quest for “shiny objects” — hey, bayonets! — to change the subject from the economy, etc.) that have been present all along. What the press has read as signs of “Joe the Plumber”-esque desperation over the last few weeks may not be signs of an impending defeat; it may just be the way that Obama has to win, if win he does. But if so, it won’t look like the winning re-election campaigns we’ve seen in the recent past, and that reporters have grown accustomed to covering.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/obamas-aura-of-defeat/

By and large, Romney succeeded in Boca. He came across as knowledgeable and reasonable and made no mistakes. In short, he passed the commander-in-chief test.