"The presidential debate - What Happened?" by WW at the Economist

The presidential debate

What happened?

by WW at the Economist

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/10/presidential-debate-1?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/whathappened

"SNIP....................................................

MITT ROMNEY ran hard to the centre, and the president wasn't ready for it. Mr Romney deftly eluded many of Mr Obama's criticisms by disowning the position criticised, planting his flag to the left of Mr Obama's target, and then crisply elucidating his stance with a specious but persuasive specificity that Mr Obama seemed helpless to counter. Mr Obama's lackadaisical, presumably defensive stance badly backfired. Though entirely free of heat-of-the-moment blunders, Mr Obama's pathetic overall performance added up to one all-encompassing blunder, causing more embarrassment to his campaign than a few stumbles likely would have done.

As Jonathan Chait of New York magazine put it:

Tonight’s debate saw the return of the Mitt Romney who ran for office in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002. He was obsessive about portraying himself as a moderate, using every possible opening or ambiguity — and, when necessary, making them up — to shove his way to the center. Why he did not attempt to restore this pose earlier, I cannot say. Maybe he can only do it in debates. Or maybe conservatives had to reach a point of absolute desperation over his prospects before they would give him the ideological space. In any case, he dodged almost every point in the right wing canon in a way that seemed to catch Obama off guard.

But how did this happen? Was Mr Obama's camp lulled into complacency by Mr Romney's half decade of right-wing pantomime? Did John Kerry, Mr Obama's debate-prep stand-in for Mr Romney, pepper the president with Paul Ryan-esque talking points, leaving him unready for a slick Massachusetts centrist? Were they preparing for "zingers" instead of a confident torrent of detailed-sounding vagueness? Given Mr Obama's difficulty pinning Mr Romney down, this does not seem entirely implausible. However, given that Mr Romney's only plausible path to victory was always a dash toward the centre, one would think that the incumbent would have been ready for it.

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