Last Debate Shows President the Clear Winner as Romney Moves Toward Him on Key Issues

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ANALYSIS – For a lot of reasons, in the end it may not matter.  But in their third and final debate, Mitt Romney made a lot of the same mistakes that Barack Obama made in the first debate.

He attempted to play it safe, and present himself as a competent, level-headed and plausible alternative to President Obama as the Commander in Chief.  However, in the process he seemed to cede a number of positions to the President – positions that he seemed to change on the fly.

“I’m glad that Governor Romney agrees with the steps that we’re taking,” President Obama remarked. “There have been times, Governor, frankly, during the course of this campaign, where it sounded like you thought that you’d do the same things we did, but you’d say them louder and somehow that would make a difference.”

But that strategy clearly backfired.  Mitt Romney had the opportunity to show how a Romney administration would move the country in a new and different direction, but instead he seemed to punt.

On the other hand, President Obama had the opportunity to debunk some of what he saw as misleading attacks.

When Governor Romney attacked, “Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917…  We’re headed down to the – to the low 200s if we go through with sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy.”

The President would turn it on him.  He countered, “I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You – you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets – (laughter) – because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater…nuclear submarines.”

“And so the question is not a game of Battleships where we’re counting ships. It’s – it’s what are our capabilities.”

One of the big pieces of news is that Governor Romney now appears to favor a hard date for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Well, we’re going to be finished by 2014. And when I’m president, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014,” Governor Romney said. “The commanders and the generals there are on track to do so. We’ve seen progress over the past several years. The surge has been successful, and the training program is proceeding at pace.”

President Obama would point out that the Governor is all over the map on a whole host of issues: “Governor, the problem is, is that on a whole range of issues, whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s Afghanistan, whether it’s Iraq, whether it’s now Iran, you’ve been all over the map. I mean, I’m pleased that you now are endorsing our policy of applying diplomatic pressure and potentially having bilateral discussions with the Iranians to end their nuclear program.”

He added, “But just a few years ago you said that’s something you’d never do, in the same way that you initially opposed a time table in Afghanistan, now you’re for it, although it depends; in the same way that you say you would have ended the war in Iraq, but recently gave a speech saying that we should have 20,000 more folks in there; the same way that you said that it was mission creep to go after Gadhafi.”

On bin Laden, the President also attacked the previous position: “When it comes to going after Osama bin Laden, you said, well, any president would make that call. But when you were a candidate in 2008 – as I was – and I said, if I got bin Laden in our sights, I would take that shot, you said we shouldn’t move heaven and earth to get one man, and you said we should ask Pakistan for permission.”

The President would add, “And if we had asked Pakistan for permission, we would not have gotten him. And it was worth moving heaven and earth to get him.”

Somehow, a foreign policy debate turned to the question of the Detroit auto industry.

“Attacking me is not talking about an agenda for getting more trade and opening up more jobs in this country,” Mitt Romney would say, though it would appear the President could have said the same thing.  He then launched into a defense of his own policy on the auto industry.

He said: “But the president mentioned the auto industry and that somehow I would be in favor of jobs being elsewhere. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a son of Detroit. I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars. And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry. My plan to get the industry on its feet when it was in real trouble was not to start writing checks. It was President Bush that wrote the first checks. I disagree with that. I said they need – these companies need to go through a managed bankruptcy, and in that process they can get government help and government guarantees, but they need to go through bankruptcy to get rid of excess cost and the debt burden that they’d – they’d built up.”

“Governor, the people in Detroit don’t forget,” President Obama responded at one point.  “I think anybody out there can check the record. Governor Romney, you keep on trying to, you know, airbrush history here. You were very clear that you would not provide government assistance to the U.S. auto companies even if they went through bankruptcy. You said that they could get it in the private marketplace. That wasn’t true.”

In 2008 Governor Romney wrote, “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”

He had added, “Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course – the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.”

The question then turns to who won the debate and does it matter.

Nate Silver’s analysis is that, while President Obama is unlikely to get a big debate bounce, a small one could matter.

“There is, obviously, some disagreement on the magnitude of Mr. Obama’s advantage – the polls surveyed different types of voters and applied different methods to do so,” Nate Silver wrote.  “But averaging the results from the CBS News, CNN and Google polls, which conducted surveys after all three presidential debates along with the one between the vice-presidential candidates, puts Mr. Obama’s margin at 16 percentage points.”

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Writes Mr. Silver: “The first presidential debate produced roughly a 4-percentage-point bounce in head-to-head polls toward Mr. Romney, while the second presidential debate brought no appreciable bounce toward Mr. Obama.”

He adds, “It is tempting to split the difference, and assume that Mr. Obama might get a 1- or 2-point bounce in the polls, but there are some mitigating factors. The pace of the debate was slow, and it was competing against professional baseball and football games, which may have kept viewership down.”

Our view is that this debate is not going to produce a huge swing.  What it will do is arrest some of the momentum that Governor Romney had.  After a lackluster first debate, President Obama has had two solid debates.

I actually think that President Obama was better in the second debate than the third.  The difference is that Governor Romney was relatively good in the second debate, but much worse in the third debate.

The New York Times analysis: “For Mr. Romney, this final debate before the election in two weeks was clearly his weakest. While he seemed familiar with a range of topics, speaking about rebellions in Mali and ticking off the insurgent groups in Pakistan, he also took every opportunity he could to turn back to economic issues at home, his campaign theme.”

Where this might matter is that Governor Romeny has need to make two sells.  He has to convince a sufficient number of voters that not only was President Obama’s first term a failure, but that he would be the better alternative.

He actually undermined both cases on Monday night.  He essentially argued that he agrees with President Obama on most foreign policy areas and that any failures of Obama on the foreign policy front likely would have occurred under a Romney administration as well.

Now, is the Presidential election going to turn on foreign policy?  Not likely.  And Presidential Obama is probably not going to spend the resources to show that Romney’s position is a moving target here.

In the end, I see this as about a one-point lead for President Obama with two weeks to go.  I have had this pegged as 2004 all along, and I see no reason to change that view now.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

Author

  • David Greenwald

    Greenwald is the founder, editor, and executive director of the Davis Vanguard. He founded the Vanguard in 2006. David Greenwald moved to Davis in 1996 to attend Graduate School at UC Davis in Political Science. He lives in South Davis with his wife Cecilia Escamilla Greenwald and three children.

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125 comments

  1. Funny, the way I saw it was Romney looked much more presidential than Obama. Obama came off as rude, bullying and too overly aggressive. In the end it all depends on who you like, if you like Romney then you felt he did okay and the same goes for Obama supporters. Unlike the first debate, this debate will do little to move the needle.

    GO GIANTS!!!

  2. “the way I saw it was Romney looked much more presidential than Obama. “

    When you lose on the issues, you bring up the peripherals. The question is whether agreeing with everything Obama said constitutes looking Presidential – after all the Presidency is about leadership.

    ” In the end it all depends on who you like, if you like Romney then you felt he did okay and the same goes for Obama supporters.”

    Except that the polls all measured uncommitted voters.

    “Unlike the first debate, this debate will do little to move the needle.”

    That point was made in my analysis.

  3. That was amazing. Romney was literally babbling at times (“I want to see peace! I want to see growing peace in this country, it’s our objective!”). He made nonsensical comments (who knew Iran is landlocked?!). He specifically repeatedly contradicted previous positions he has taken. He looked uncomfortable and sounded robotic, and at times looked as though he didn’t even know what he was talking about.
    Let’s be charitable and say foreign policy isn’t his main selling point.

  4. “I keeps me laughing is how the left is criticizing Romney for not having enough experience to be precedent. “

    I haven’t heard that a lot. It seems to me that the main criticism is that Romney either is too extreme or that he has no real ideology and has moved around like jello during the course of his campaign.

  5. When a candidate doesn’t have experience, you should look at who his advisers are. In Romney’s case, they are mostly Bush-era foreign policy ideologues, including many neo-conservatives and some specific individuals who were involved in the worst decisions of that presidency.

  6. Well, when election day is over either I or Don and David will be revealed as self-delusional.

    To me Obama looks like a flailing loser.

    We’ll see soon enough who is right.

  7. J.R.

    To me Obama is in desparation mode. He has to go on the attack because he knows that Romney has all the momentum. Once again, Romney looked so much more presidential than the actual president.

    GIANTS ROCK!!!!

  8. I think this debate played out as expected. A sitting president has a distinct advantage with respect to foreign policy, and would be expected to win such a debate. That was the case last night, but it was far from the knockout that Romney delivered in Round 1.

    Altogether, however, Romney was the clear beneficiary of the debates. He has proven himself presidential to many people, and is clearly capable of standing toe to toe with Obama, who has been well recognized for his debating and oratory skills. That Obama was unable to punch out Romney is a win for Romney. The tightening of the race in key states and across the country is demonstrative of the impact of the debates.

  9. This post and some of the comments prove that my liberal blogging friends are blinded by their love of Obama. They want him to win so bad that they project good Obama performance that does not exist!

    The majority of viewers don’t even understand the nuanced technicalities that the politicos and brainy elite tend to tally to determine a winner or loser. I was pausing and explaining many things to my wife… and she is above average in understanding the issues. It is all the non-verbal and paralanguage stuff that gets the attention of the normal folk. Obama was snarky, tired and sick-looking, mean, sarcastic, disrespectful and frankly appeared much more desperate. Romney was calmer, brighter, healthier looking, more respectful and nicer and appeared much more presidential.

    Obama appealed to his base. That won’t help him. He also made weak attempts to try and endear the military voters. I talk to my son in the Army and he says that there is not much like of Obama and everyone knows he wants to gut the military to fund social programs and growing entitlements. Obama’s base will still love him and would vote from him even if he killed babies for a hobby, but Obama did not pull in any new voters with that performance.

    I think more women voters were left wondering where that old likeable Obama went, and finding a stronger attraction to the Mitt factor.

    Romney moved the needle again away from the lies perpetrated by the left and Obama campaign to paint him as all the things he is not.

    Did you get the Romney bit about extending our economic relationships to Latin America? Good move on his part… I am expecting Latino votes falling away from the Obama camp over newly energized expectations that Romney is their best bet economically.

    I also think Romney did some real damage to Obama with his very well done response to Obama’s technical argument that he did not go on a apology tour (Note: these type of moves… like Obama’s move to defend his terrible Bengahzi event performance), are typical Democrat “what the definition of ‘is’ is” type of moves):
    [quote] Obama said while abroad that the U.S. acted “contrary to our traditions and ideals” in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy,” that the U.S. “certainly shares blame” for international economic turmoil and has sometimes “shown arrogance and been dismissive, even divisive” toward Europe.[/quote]

    Sure Obama never uttered the exact words “we apologize”; but to say that the US “shares blame” is the essence of an apology. This really pisses off a lot of people… for a sitting US President to say that the US – the nation that does more good in the world than any other – shares blame for Muslim extremism and terrorism is worthy of plenty of scorn.

    And, Obama made a lot of mistakes with his facts (again though… the average voter would not understand or care about much of this):

    – The Marines still use bayonets.

    – Romney was responsible for education reform as governor even though Obama claimed it happened before he came to office.

    – Obama’s claims about Romney’s position on the GM bailouts was wrong or a lie.

    – Obama lied about keeping troops in Iraq. His administration tried for many months to win Iraqi agreement to keeping several thousand American troops there beyond 2011 to continue training and advising the Iraqi armed forces. The talks broke down over a disagreement on legal immunity for U.S. troops.

    – Obama accused Romney of saying during the 2008 campaign that “we should ask Pakistan for permission” before going into that country to kill or capture terrorists. What Romney said was that he’d “keep our options quiet.”

    – Obama said unemployment among military veterans is lower than for the general population. That’s true for veterans generally but not for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

    – Obama wrongly claimed Romney called Russia the “biggest geopolitical threat facing America.” Actually, Romney called Russia a “foe” and not a “threat.” He said “the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.”

  10. If Romney loses on Nov. 6–which is what I expect to happen*–he stands to have a good career, not that he needs money, playing the role of [i]the president[/i] in future TV movies. Mitt, more than anything, looks the part.

    *My prediction for the Electoral College:

    Obama 275
    Romney 263

    As Nate Silver wrote today, the key state will be Ohio. I expect Obama to win it. Of the other very hotly contested states, I think Romney takes Iowa, Virginia, Florida and Colorado. I expect Obama to also win New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

    One last thought: Maybe it is the very nature of being the No. 2 person on the ticket, but Paul Ryan seems to me to have shrunk in stature since he was chosen as Romney’s running mate. For reasons of shoring up his base, Ryan was as good a pick as Romney could have made, I suppose. However, I had thought that, if Romney ultimately lost to Obama, Ryan’s elevation would place him as the most likely Republican nominee in 2016. Having watched Ryan running in this campaign, I no longer think that. I don’t even think Paul Ryan will ever have enough political talent to make it into the U.S. Senate. He strikes me as one of those guys whose talent lends itself much more as a bill-writer in the House or, assuming he does not become V.P., a Cabinet secretary.

    All that said, if Romney wins on Nov. 6 and Ryan does become the V.P., all bets are off. Ryan will very likely become transformed in that office and that transformation, successful or not, will decide whether he can win his party’s nomination for President in future years. Certainly Ryan is, unlike a Joe Biden, young enough to be transformed.

  11. “This post and some of the comments prove that my liberal blogging friends are blinded by their love their love of Obama.”

    I think you’re more likely blinded by your hatred for him. I don’t like Obama.

    “The Marines still use bayonets.”

    Who cares? Obama didn’t say no one used bayonets, he quipped that fewer are used than 100 years ago…

    This is good analysis on the bayonet point… ([url]http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/23/opinion/graham-third-debate/index.html?hpt=hp_t2[/url])

    [quote]But Obama countered with the most memorable line of the night. “We also have fewer horses and bayonets.” Obama’s debating point was that the nature of our military has changed. [/quote]

    [quote]This was terrible for Romney for three reasons. First, it was the original area of real disagreement, and Romney couldn’t afford to be bested. Second, no matter what he may actually know, Romney looked like a neophyte when it comes to military spending, as though he were repeating old Republican talking points. Viewers could be left unsure whether he knew what century this is.

    And finally, it’s two freaking trillion dollars! They both talked about the budget deficit and the need to balance the budget, and over three debates, this — $2 trillion on military spending — was the biggest difference on offer. Axing Big Bird would net a President Romney next to nothing in savings, but adding $2 trillion to defense sounded excessive, especially if it’s true that the U.S. already spends more than the next 10 countries combined. Point Obama.[/quote]

  12. Here is my current Electoral College map guess:

    [img]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eYwBwoXGMWU/UIbZW_iS5-I/AAAAAAAAAr4/WhXTWBW93Tk/s1600/electoral+college.JPG[/img]

  13. The other problem with the argument Jeff – the Dems had a whole list of mistakes that romney made in the first debate, the problem is that even attacking him in adds didn’t save Obama, Romney needed to make the case and didn’t. You sound like the Dems trying to explain away Obama’s poor performance in the first debate.

  14. If you look at that map, even if it is slightly wrong in a few places, it becomes obvious that the overwhelming majority of the physical area of our country is Republican, the minority Democratic. The balancing factor, of course, is that the small Northeast section is densely populated and with California firmly blue, the West Coast outweighs much of everything in red to the Mississippi River.

    But there is a big change coming in 4 or 8 years: Texas. That state has been solidly in the Republican camp (in presidential elections) since 1972, save 1976 when Carter, perhaps because he was viewed as a Confederate state governor, won. The change in Texas is demographic: It has a huge Latino population which is getting larger. Non-Hispanic whites now make up only 44.8% of Texans. As old white voters die off, they are being replaced by Latino youth. The Republican Party, which has increasingly taken a rabidly anti-illegal immigration stance, has less and less appeal to Hispanic Texans. Unless the national Republican Party figures this out, they will soon lose Texas and likely won’t win it back for a long, long time. George W. Bush was reasonably well-liked by Latinos in his state, in part because his own position on immigration was moderate or liberal. But the National Republicans, especially led by the radio right and Fox News, rebuffed Bush. And that party has only become more extreme in the last decade in its hatred of the illegal immmigrants. The fact that the Dream Act, which is quite modest, cannot win a vote in Congress due to Republican action, says it all about where today’s GOP is. Giving citizenship to illegal aliens who are contributing to our society and who served in our armed forces was for more than 100 years American policy. The Republicans’ extremism on this issue is not serving themselves or our nation very well.

  15. “If you look at that map, even if it is slightly wrong in a few places, it becomes obvious that the overwhelming majority of the physical area of our country is Republican, the minority Democratic. The balancing factor, of course, is that the small Northeast section is densely populated and with California firmly blue, the West Coast outweighs much of everything in red to the Mississippi River.”

    It’s a rural – urban divide, which is also not a good trend for Republicans as the urban continues to grow and rural continues to shrink.

  16. Rifkin: [i]The Republican Party, which has increasingly taken a rabidly anti-illegal immigration stance, has less and less appeal to Hispanic Texans. Unless the national Republican Party figures this out, they will soon lose Texas and likely won’t win it back for a long, long time. George W. Bush was reasonably well-liked by Latinos in his state, in part because his own position on immigration was moderate or liberal.[/i]

    Texas Gov. Rick Perry was perceived as “soft” on immigration during the Republican primaries. Of course he imploded on the word, “oops.”

    Most of the Texas Republican party follows in the footsteps of G.W. Bush and Perry. If the Texas Republicans find a way to neutralize the issue of immigration, then the state will stay red for longer.

    But I understand from family who live there that major urban areas in Texas are starting to tilt more to the Democrats.

    If Obama wins, then I see Jeb Bush as being a strong candidate for the Republicans in 2016, and I think he would be much more attractive to Latino voters. He could likely keep Florida and Texas Republican, probably maintain the current red block of states. He would only have to figure out which blue states to peel away.

  17. [i]”If the Texas Republicans find a way to neutralize the issue of immigration, then the state will stay red for longer.”[/i]

    The problem for Texas Republicans is that the radio right defines the brand name for the entire party. Of course, if a moderate (on the issue of immigration) wins the GOP nomination and that nominee has other appeals to Hispanics, then Texas [i]could[/i] still be won by a Republican after Texas becomes half Hispanic. Outside of a Jeb Bush, that seems unlikely.

    What is likely is that to win the GOP primaries across the country, the future Republican nominees, like Romney did this year with his suggestion of sending 12 million people over the border, will have to suck up to the rabid radio right, the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Savages and Sean Hannitys. And as long as that happens, the GOP is dead in the water with Mexican-Americans.