Now the first presidential debate is over, pundits and reporters are declaring Mitt Romney the undisputed winner! Did Mitt win the debate? Yes. But it was hardly the blowout that people on the left and the right are noisily claiming it was. Mitt Romney’s debate performance was adequate. Obama’s performance was calculatedly poor. And by my metric, Romney only squeaked out a victory. Romney looked strong when defending himself from Obama’s early attacks, but his attacks on Obama fell flat and were forgettable. While I am not the biggest fan of zingers in lieu of substance, zingers with substance should be used by presidential candidates. Romney had no one-liners that would keep people remembering both the line and the point the next morning. Additionally, I don’t think Romney’s insistence on getting the last word at every point during the debate looked presidential. He looked small and petty. The saddest thing about that is even when Romney would forcefully take the last word, his rebuttals weren’t ever hit out of the park. The only superb thing about Romney’s debate performance was his closing statement.
Watch the full debate below:
People are so used to expecting rubbish from Mitt Romney that they deem his satisfactory performances brilliant. This was not a brilliant debate performance from Romney. This was a satisfactory Romney narrowly besting a completely unprepared Obama. If this is the best that Romney can do when Obama barely shows up for the fight, I think he’s going to be in some big trouble in the next two debates.
With that said, I believe Obama’s plan was to lose the first debate. Obama wants to be seen as the underdog in this presidential race, as seen by his recent, relentless attempts to downplay his debating skills. At this point, Obama has successfully made himself the underdog, with the aid of the imprudent conservative media effusively praising Romney. What better way to be seen as the underdog than to lose the first presidential debate and have the entire media going crazy about how amazingly Romney performed? Now the high expectations are going to be on Romney, who, as seen throughout the Republican primaries, is a hit-and-miss debater. Whether Romney can debate a prepared Obama remains to be seen. If Romney and his cheerleaders think Obama is going to roll over like this in the next two debates, they’re absolutely delusional.
As readers of this blog are aware, I am not a slave to the Democratic-Republican paradigm. I am a Christian before I am a conservative, and I am a conservative before I am a Republican. Regardless of whoever wins this election, it’s going to be four disastrous years for America. Both Romney and Obama are unworthy of my vote. The quote from Dr. Alan Keyes under the heading of my blog summarizes my position on the two candidates:
The same forces that put Obama in place have now engineered a choice in the 2012 election intended to force voters to side either with a socialist Democrat who wants to impose socialism on the nation or a socialist Republican who has already imposed socialism on his home state of Massachusetts. To say that voters who refuse to support either are somehow responsible for electing one or the other is like saying that people who refuse to submit to the demands of terrorists are somehow responsible for killing the people the terrorists subsequently murder. The guarantee of successful terrorism that results from that perverse logic places everyone’s life in greater danger.
It’s staying there until after Election Day 2012.