The truth on Tuesdays second debate that you won't from the liberal, mainstream media:
We’ve reached a watershed here, where
we either live in our own heads affirming reality, regardless of
spurious inputs from demagoguery or sentiment, or we give up on reality
and let demagoguery and sentiment take over at the decision table. Did
the president pull off a performance last night, in terms of
sounding passionate and full of conviction? To some extent, yes. Does
that mean he won the debate, or even achieved a draw with Romney? No.
The mainstream media immediately
launched a volley of positive soundbites about the president’s
performance, but frankly, they were going to do that anyway. As long as
Obama didn’t collapse on the stage, they were going to say he had his
mojo back.
The problem is that in order to sound
passionate and full of conviction, Obama had to belt out a remarkable
string of untruths. Besides repeating the same tired lies about
Romney’s policies that his campaign has been flogging for the last two
months, the president simply lied – there’s nothing else to call it –
about the trend of drilling permits under his administration (Romney is
right;
permits have been slashed).
Obama insisted to Romney that he had called the Benghazi attack terrorism on day one, when in fact, he had not. He lied about the Arizona immigration-enforcement law
repeating a lie the Democrats have persisted in since the law was being
debated in the Arizona statehouse. The law is carefully and explicitly
written to prohibit ethnic profiling stops by law-enforcement
officers. Immigration-status checks can only be done in connection with
a stop on another, unrelated basis, such as a traffic stop.
Obama did try to assume the moral high
ground on Libya with a riff on Americans’ safety and his responsibility,
but it was a cringe-worthy performance from the man who waited until after the
Benghazi attack to bring diplomatic-mission security up to a normal
standard, and who professes, 36 days after the attack, to still be
waiting to find out what happened. If he really doesn’t know, he’s the
only one who doesn’t. His position that we’re still waiting to assess
the attack isn’t judicious; it’s absurd. Mentally substitute George W.
Bush for Obama in this scenario, and try to imagine the MSM giving Bush
the benefit of the doubt for 36 days and counting.
I had my concerns about Romney’s
performance last night, if only a couple. Probably the biggest was that
he tended to put his most powerful material at the end of each
statement, and got cut off just as he was articulating it. The
response to the woman who asked about keeping jobs in the US was a case
in point: Romney made a rather convoluted case about China as a currency
manipulator, and only after dealing with that arcane topic mentioned
that if we want to keep America job-friendly, we have to stop regulating
ourselves into an economic coma. He got cut off saying it; that should
have been his opening point. The American people can do
something about that. And whether or not the point about regulation
resonated with that particular questioner, it would resonate far and
wide among other Americans.
Romney is typically succinct and direct
on the economy, and he should apply that style to everything he says in
a debate. He would have made the point about Obama’s own passive
investment in China much better by simply stating it outright, rather
than repeating the same question to the president – “Have you looked at
your pension lately?” – until it began sounding like a second-grader’s
taunt. Just make the assertion, already. “Mr. President, your pension is invested in China.” That simple – and, without the weird build-up, slyly devastating.
But rhetorical glitches aside, Romney
had substance last night. He whaled it out of the park on energy and
immigration, and came off as genial and presidential. Interestingly,
the
Frank Luntz panel
saw the same thing. The MSM’s assessment this morning that the
president staged a comeback in this debate is information about the MSM,
not about the candidates or the debate. It’s like they’re narrating
some invisible drama that no one else can see.
I don’t think Romney dominated last
night’s debate as he did the first one. But neither did I see the
debate as a draw. Only if it counts as successful communication to use
demagoguery to create itch-scratching images for your own base did
Obama’s performance equal Romney’s. Obama’s statements would have had
little appeal outside his own base. And indeed, so many of them were
simply false that, to my mind, it requires assuming that your fellow
Americans are fools, to think that his communications were probably more
effective with them than they were with you.
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