GAME
ON, MR. PRESIDENT
As a strong Obama supporter, I was stunned by last
night’s debacle in Denver. Governor Romney brought his A Game to this
crucial debate, and President left his game… well, in the locker room, in the
words of my good friend Jim Burns. The
President looked passive, quietly dismissive of Romney, and, as Democratic
pundit James Carville said afterward: He
looked like he didn’t want to be there. Governor
Romney, on the other hand, was crisp, looked like he was enjoying himself, and
clearly won the debate.
To continue the sports imagery we
started last time, the President came into last night’s game with strong lead
and could have essentially closed it out with a strong performance, considering
the advantages he has in key swing states, like Ohio. Instead, he gave Governor Romney and the GOP
a huge boost and now we’re into extra innings.
Game on, Mr. President.
To be fair to President Obama, he has
a few other things on his mind besides getting ready for the debate whereas for
Governor Romney last night’s debate was do-or-die and he obviously prepared
well for it, at least in terms of the optics.
As for the substance, that’s another matter. His facts were riddled with distortions and
the President didn’t call him on those -- at least not forcefully enough. Instead, he just looked down, set his jaw, and
shook his head. As a result, he looked
petulant and peevish. And resigned. And, non-Presidential.
One of the advantages Governor Romney
has is that he is flexible. A chameleon,
if you will, not fettered by the facts or consistent positions. He is “all things to all men,” and not in the
sense of 1 Corinthians, but in the sense of “tell me what you want to hear and
I’m your guy.” As the late Senator
Kennedy so aptly said of Romney in their 1994 Massachusetts Senatorial debate:
“I am pro-choice, but Mitt Romney is multiple choice.”
So, when Governor Romney denied that
he had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut, that’s not true. As the President said, it’s a matter of
arithmetic. Romney’s denial was based on
the vague promise that to offset the lost revenue, he would eliminate some of
the deductions and loopholes in the tax code.
Which ones? Well, that’s
something he would talk about later. Why
didn’t the President press the advantage on this?
When
Governor Romney charged that the President had doubled the deficit since taking
office, that simply is not true either.
As Michael Cooper reports in today’s New
York Times: “When Mr. Obama took
office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office had already projected
that the deficit for fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30 of that year, would
be $1.2 trillion. (It ended up as $1.4 trillion.) For fiscal year 2012, which ended last week,
the deficit is expected to be $1.1 trillion – just under the level in the year
he was inaugurated.”
Why
didn’t the President press Romney on this point? Does he think that people already understand
this and he doesn’t have to explain it? Some
of the “people,” I must remind the President, still believe he was not born in
the United States, that he is a Muslim, that men really didn’t land on the moon
(the landing was shot in a Hollywood studio), and that the world is flat. Check it out; I am not exaggerating. Oh, yes, and millions of these people follow
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck religiously.
To
be fair and to his credit, the President is not your typical politician – and
certainly not a good politician like President Clinton. He doesn’t like to
schmooze; he doesn’t like to explain what he thinks is “perfectly obvious;” and
that if he gets the policies right, the polls will take care of themselves. He
is at heart a college professor, but so was Woodrow Wilson, and we saw how that
worked out. Obama’s qualities are admirable
in a President in his roles as head of the Executive Branch and Commander-in-Chief,
to be sure, but not good qualities when it comes to leading a major political
party. Case in point, as Jody Kantor
reported in her book, THE OBAMAS, the President invited politicians from the
Hill to a Super Bowl party at the White House. Then, instead of working the
room and schmoozing with his guests, he sits in the front row and watches the
game.
“Come
on, man,” as Chris Berman might say, to continue the sports imagery. Seriously, with all due respect, the
President has to regard last night’s performance, first as a debacle, and secondly
as a wake-up call. And he must up his
game in the remaining weeks of the campaign, and certainly in the next two
Presidential debates. There’s more at
stake than just four more years for him and his family.
Otherwise,
we’ll have the scary prospect of President Romney, and we have no idea of which
Mitt Romney will show up for that job.
Gerald
E. Lavey
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