Romney Rising: Now It’s a Race

Up until now, the election season narrative has largely been written by everyone except Mitt Romney: a mainstream media wagering their credibility to cheerlead the president’s campaign, Obama and his operatives caricaturing him as an out of touch robber baron, even a disillusioned conservative base unsure he truly is one of their own, and if so, if he has what it takes to win.

Tonight was the night Romney proactively authored his own story, confidently speaking directly to the American people, sounding like a president.

Romney was driven with a singular intensity for the entirety of the exhausting debate, remaining on topic, driving home with rhetorical force a clear account of the principles and policies that distinguish him from his competitor. He forwarded a candid and easily digestible account of his intentions and plainly diagnosed the failings of Obama’s approach. He sounded like a man with a plan, worried about the country’s future prospects but without histrionically affecting overwrought despair. He was often grave, appropriately so given the nation’s daunting challenges, but also optimistic, projecting future success.

He was warm enough but not cloyingly nice, expressing a professional collegiality but also adamantly defending the details of his record and the minutiae of his proposed policies. When Obama repeatedly mischaracterized Romney’s tax plan as including a $5 trillion cut that largely benefits the wealthy, Romney repeatedly called him on the obfuscation, knocking down the straw man every time he climbed back to his feet, refusing to concede the point no matter how tenaciously Obama stuck with it. In this exchange and others like it, Romney came across as full of steely fortitude and Obama as needling and dishonest.

Obama seemed distant and confused, often losing his place in speech, like he was a rehearsing a catalogue of sound bites poorly memorized. More importantly, he looked dour and annoyed, refusing to look at Romney when either of them spoke. It was as if Obama was piqued that he had to be there at all, put upon by the tedious obligation to account for his leadership before the people he represents, a duty to be perfunctorily discharged rather than an honor to be embraced. Several days ago, while campaigning in Las Vegas, he referred to the demands of debate preparation as a “drag” and tonight it looked like a drag for him.

This is a point worth dwelling on for a moment. One weighty advantage the President has in a one on one debate is the powerful dignity that attaches to his station, the magnitude of the office he gets to enjoy. Obama’s impatience with Romney, almost bordering on restrained petulance, made him look small, diminished the grandeur he showed up at the podium with, an air of gravity he has just by dint of being the incumbent. Romney not only got several opportunities to shine a light on his history of bipartisan cooperation, but he looked undogmatic, presented himself as a man animated by conviction but not overly encumbered by perspective-narrowing ideological baggage. He seemed neither unprincipled nor gratuitously elastic-to use an old fashioned term, he seemed prudent.

Obama’s great disadvantage is not merely that he was lost without a teleprompter, more an actor than a classically talented orator. The twin pillars of his campaign have been the polarizing rhetoric of class cleavage and unrelentingly negative ad hominem attacks against his challenger. Obama was apparently unsure these would work when the American people actually got to watch and hear Romney speak directly to them, his obvious dignity a stark repudiation of Obama’s personal attacks. This left him to his record, hardly an ace in the hole. The mathematics of economic hardship make any narrative of accomplishment impossible to forward and if he tries to downplay the nation’s fiscal languor, he appears detached and lacking in compassion. He was actually left with little choice but to openly run on Bill Clinton’s record. It was a palsied attempt at self-promotion, and seemed so contrived it actually lacked conviction, as if Obama barely believed it himself. He looked like the challenger in these moments. He looked bored by the event, and by extension, bored of being the president.

This is likely one of the most decisive debate wins for a Republican in modern presidential history. Romney’s victory is simply too overwhelming to spin and so Obama’s camp, and the media that conspires with them, is left with no choice but to downplay the import of the debate itself. Prepare for a fews days of what will quickly become familiar talking points: Romney won but never scored a resounding death blow, no one watches the debates, the outcome won’t affect the electoral math of the crucial battleground states, there are still two more debates, etc. All these are disputable arguments, and only the stubbornly unpredictable future, when it finally arrives in November, will confirm or disconfirm their reasonableness. However, one thing is now incontestably clear:

We have ourselves a race.

Category: Election 2012, Featured