Mitt Romney won the first presidential debate against an Obama who barely showed up for the fight. Barack Obama showed up for the second debate and intellectually dipped Romney’s head in bleach before mopping all the floors of Hofstra University with him. In the third and final debate, Obama showed up for the fight again and soundly defeated Mitt Romney. Interestingly, the CBS poll, which Republicans so approvingly cited when it favored Mitt Romney in the first debate, shows that Obama won the last presidential debate by a larger margin than Romney won the first debate. (After the first debate, 46% said Romney won; 22% said Obama won. After the third debate, 53% said Obama won; 23% said Romney won.)
As I have repeatedly said on this blog, Romney has very mediocre debating skills. He has shown after three debates that his best is only good enough to marginally defeat Obama when Obama happens to be visibly melancholic about having to debate on his 20th wedding anniversary evening. The other two times that Obama and Romney met after that night, Obama took Mitt Romney to pieces. At the third debate, Obama exposed Romney as a flip-flopping fraud, and made him look silly at several points during the debate. Romney got in some decent points, but, overall, he paled in comparison to Obama.
Republicans seem so dedicated to mindlessly chanting “ANYBODY BUT OBAMA!” that they fail to listen to anything that Romney actually says. The debate looked, in many ways, like two progressives tussling with each other. Well…the “tussling” word doesn’t quite apply inasmuch as Romney’s “debating” strategy was essentially to agree with Obama. Obviously Romney’s fan base appreciated that strategy, since they’re behaving as if he actually won the debate and accomplished something.
Perhaps the most alarming point of the debate was when Romney told the moderator, Bob Schieffer, that he agreed with Obama on uprooting Mubarak from Egypt. There is no universe on which this is a conservative position. It is foolhardy to support the deposition of a largely pro-US dictator in a country like Egypt where the established political body ready to take over leadership is the terrorist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s not even as though this debate were happening before Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood took control of Egypt. The fact that Morsi is the president of Egypt right now and Romney still supported taking out Mubarak is a sign of how shockingly bad he’ll be on foreign policy. The sad fact is that you will not hear a word of rebuke from allegedly conservative Republican analysts and commentators on this issue. At this point, any slight critique of Romney is quickly suppressed. If Romney wins the election, get ready for even more of this kind of pathetic GOP sycophancy.
Arguably the most shocking example of water-carrying came from a man whose brilliant analysis I praised after the last debate, Charles Krauthammer. He preposterously gave the “unequivocal” debate win to Mitt Romney, pretty much for not going after Obama aggressively, which he interpreted as “going large.” Watch the illogical hilarity below.
I wish I wrote about this earlier this week, but I was 100% positive that Charles Krauthammer would refuse to call the final debate for Obama after the onslaught he received from Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin for telling the truth after the second debate. I’m sure his inbox was filled with hate mail from Romney-worshiping cretins after his analysis of the second debate. Let’s face it: conservatives are not rewarded for speaking the unpopular truth. Conservatives are rewarded for going with the flow and repeating moronic Republican talking points that happen to be popular. The same is true for the Democrats. Free thought is not rewarded in either party. Considering that political analysis is Krauthammer’s job, he needs to be in the good graces of conservative talk radio hosts. Frankly, being attacked by Rush Limbaugh for calling a debate for Obama is a good way to be blacklisted by conservatives. It’s bad for business, so from a business perspective, I can understand why Krauthammer offered this analysis. George Will, who was also attacked after the second debate, refrained from calling a winner, and he essentially said that there is no difference between the two men.
Will’s analysis is more intellectually respectable than the nonsensical analysis offered by Krauthammer.
Krauthammer is a foreign policy expert, and he refused to take Romney to task for not attacking Obama on Libya. He simply brushed it aside with a statement to the effect of, “I would have done it, but I’m not a politician.” Also, Krauthammer laughably categorized Obama’s objectively brilliant rebuttals as being “very small.” Obama smashed Romney on the topic of sanctions by pointing out that while he was president of the United States imposing sanctions on Iran, Romney was doing business with Chinese oil companies who were doing business with Iran. (See the 53:00 mark.) To call this “very small” without recognizing the fact that it powerfully exposes Romney’s clear hypocrisy on the issue is just daft. If it were the other way around, I’m sure the people calling it “small” would have been calling it a “knockout blow” that instantly gave Romney the victory.
Something interesting I observed: Obama borrowed the structure for that zinger from a debate line that Hillary used on him back in 2008. (I remember everything!) See the video below.
In any event, after four years with a record of absolute failure, we are done with the 2012 presidential debates, and Obama emerged victorious with a 2-1 victory. You’d think Obama has been a brilliant president with the way he managed to crush Romney during the last two debates. The debates were supposed to be a public display of Obama’s undeniable record of failure, and they ended up being an exposure of Romney’s stunning hypocrisy and flip-flops. I warned that this would happen!
The last debate barely showed a difference in visions. All we saw was Obama making his points and hammering Mitt Romney, while Mitt Romney gave weak rebuttals and essentially agreed with lots of Obama’s points. And this is what some are calling a Romney victory? Please…
Now the debates are over, it’s time to get ready for the October surprises. I believe that this is the time the Obama campaign and/or its affiliates will drop the Mormon bomb. Romney will have no chance to answer this in a debate format. Also, we have Gloria Allred possibly preparing an October surprise about Mitt Romney, and we have Donald Trump promising a bombshell about Obama this week (which probably won’t even have the potency of the weakest firework).
This election season is going to get very interesting after this point. I’m just watching it all go down with the unfortunate realization that irrespective of whatever happens on November 6, America is going to be in trouble over the next four years. It’s a sad reality.